New Yorker article did not represent Hillsdale. Courtesy | Flickr.

Journalist Emma Green’s article on Hillsdale College in last week’s New Yorker placed our school “at the center of the culture war.” Save one line about the “relatively little appetite for partisanship” on campus, she failed to pin down Hillsdale’s political philosophy. And she failed to quote at least one of our fellow students accurately. 

Discovering Hillsdale’s political alignment is easy. We’re not shy thinkers; ask our president. Professors quoted in the piece labeled Hillsdale as staunchly conservative—as long as conservative means “conserving things.” It’s an “uncooperative” label, Green said. 

Green could have explained why Hillsdale is at the center of the culture war by including what we conserve. If Hillsdale is conservative, it is so because of its rootedness in the Western tradition. It is so because its students are truth-seekers who pursue education as students of the Almighty.

The danger of joining such a lovely venture is the tendency to sound pretentious. Green picked up on that when she misquoted senior Olivia Ols’s convocation speech: “A curly-haired senior kicked off the ceremony. ‘We’re always one graduating class away from losing the student culture here,’ she said from the lectern. ‘Hold yourself to a higher standard, because it’s what you need. It’s what Hillsdale needs. It’s what our country needs. It’s what God needs.’”

Maybe Green heard what her piece needed: A damning line that shows Hillsdale believes itself righteously ordained by God as the only institution that can change the world. 

Green didn’t hear what Ols actually said: “[A high standard] is what Hillsdale needs, what our country needs, and what God demands.” Ols followed that with a verse from Colossians 3:23: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.”

Anybody who listens to the audio recording of her remarks can hear what she said, rather than what Green claims in her article.

Emily Stack Davis, the college’s executive director of media relations and communications, confirmed that Ols was misquoted by the New Yorker reporter. Davis has contacted Green about the misquote. 

We don’t run this college because God needs us to. We dedicate ourselves to virtue for the misquoted reason Ols mentioned: God demands it.

Perhaps a better article would be why so many people flock to Hillsdale as the place to learn that virtue—and why our students have such impressive professional and personal track records. Analyzing the politics of Hillsdale is worthless without first considering why the school exists.

We welcome Green to join us again soon, hoping she quotes the next convocation with listening ears.