Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and Matthew Spalding, vice president of Hillsdale’s Washington operations, will produce a report on “patriotic education” as members of a new presidential panel.
President Trump announced the appointment of Arnn as chairman of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission and Spalding as its executive director on Dec. 18.
Spalding said he was “very honored” to help lead the project, noting that it is the first time he has been involved with a project of such magnitude for the White House.
“I have studied, written about, and thought about the founding and American history all my adult life,” he said. “For the president to create this commission is both itself monumentally important and significant. This is something that any president should support.”
President Trump established the commission on Nov. 2 to promote “patriotic education.”
“I have seen from afar the president take interest in that subject from the beginning of his term,” Arnn said in an email. “Of course, he is the most controversial man in the world, but I think it is plain that he loves his country and has a strong sense that the qualities he loves in it — opportunity, independence, a chance for everybody — are traceable to the origins of the country.”
In addition to Arnn and Spalding, the commission consists of 16 other members, including Hillsdale’s visiting history fellow Victor Davis Hanson, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Alliance Defending Freedom CEO Michael Farris, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson.
The commission is a response to the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a curriculum that dates America’s founding to the arrival of the first slave ship in North America and reframes American history by focusing on slavery and racism.
Trump announced his intention to create the 1776 Commission at the White House’s Constitution Day celebration last September, when Arnn moderated a panel on American history featuring incoming Hillsdale history professor Wilfred McClay and Jordan Adams of the Barney Charter School Initiative, among others.
In his executive order establishing the commission, Trump noted the “series of polemics grounded in poor scholarship” which has “vilified” America’s founding and Founders.
“Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains,” Trump said. “This radicalized view of American history lacks perspective, obscures virtues, twists motives, ignores or distorts facts, and magnifies flaws, resulting in the truth being concealed and history disfigured. Failing to identify, challenge, and correct this distorted perspective could fray and ultimately erase the bonds that knit our country and culture together.”
According to Arnn, the commission’s purpose is to compose, produce, and publish a report and use every possible means to disseminate it.
“It will have special attention for teaching American history; for the reality that is found in history, without which there is no reality,” Arnn said. “In summary, for Lincoln’s beautiful statements that the Declaration of Independence is a ‘standard maxim for a free society, always to be striven for, never to be perfectly attained; for the essential meaning of that document.’”
Spalding has taken a temporary leave of absence from his role at the Kirby Center to focus on coordinating the commission. Spalding said he has met with Trump several times and worked closely with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Brooke Rollins of the Domestic Policy Council, and other West Wing staff.
“Patriotic education is the heart of it,” Spalding said. “To enable future generations to understand the principles of the founding. I would emphasize the commission’s understanding that the path to national unity is a rediscovering of an identity rooted in those principles. You need to know something in order to love it, so it’s important that we discover these principles. Doing so is the path to national unity.”
The commission began its work as the Trump Administration was drawing to a close, but Arnn expressed hope that the commission will leave a legacy.
“The fact of the commission and whatever work it accomplishes here in the beginning cannot be rescinded, because ‘This alone is denied even to God, to make what has been not to have been,’” he said.
