Hillsdale College announced the release of its newest online course, “Classical Logic and Rhetoric,” to teach Hillsdale’s worldwide online audience how to reason and speak.
Hillsdale Online has released a new episode every day since Monday, March 9, with the final episode scheduled for release March 20. Chairman and Associate Professor of Education Benjamin Beier is teaching the course.
“Human beings are unique among the animals in our ability to think and speak, and whenever we do those things, we engage in logic and rhetoric,” said Jeremiah Regan, executive director of online learning. “This course will help students think clearly and communicate effectively so they can better learn the truth for themselves and persuade others of it.”
The course takes a comprehensive view of history’s great orators, from Abraham Lincoln, to Cicero, to Socrates, to Churchill, according to Associate Vice President of Media Outreach Emily Davis.
“In the logic portion of the course, students learn how to form definitions and statements to articulate what they observe and what it means to make arguments that are both valid in their structure and true in their content,” Davis said. “The rhetoric portion of the course covers the process of persuasion, from coming up with arguments, to arrangement and style, to memory and delivery.”
Senior Director of Content Johnathon Case is in charge of reviewing the content from Hillsdale online recordings, developing the study guides, and helping with other research and advertising.
“My favorite part about my job is that we are producing beautiful videos about the most important things,” Case said.
The logic and rhetoric course was filmed in January 2025, and Case estimates it will reach an audience of 60,000 to 70,000 viewers. Case said Hillsdale aims to record lecture series eight months to a year in advance to ensure there is enough time for polishing.
“This gives ample time for advertising and post-production, where a team focuses on adding supplemental imagery, editing sound, and lining up the videos,” Case said.
Logic and rhetoric is the final major core class to be featured as an online course, Case said.
“With this course, we can finally say that we have a representation of the whole undergraduate core,” Case said. “We will be making something called the ‘Path to the Liberal Arts.’ This will guide students on what courses to take and what order we should take them in. We already have a ‘Learn like Charlie’ path that shows what courses Hillsdale online user Charlie Kirk took, and this new liberal arts path will complement that.”
Beier was one of the first professors to teach Hillsdale’s COR-150 class and has been teaching at the college since 2016.
“My knowledge of rhetoric has informed a lot of my scholarly output, which has often been about Shakespeare or Thomas More,” Beier said. “But I also have something forthcoming soon that’s just on rhetoric as a liberal art. And then I have my name on the logic book that most students use, and a shortened version of that book is going to be published in a couple of years.”
Beier said it is difficult to lecture to a camera instead of a class of students, and he also found it challenging to adapt a course to connect with an international audience.
“It’s humbling to know that people across the world will watch the course,” Beier said. “Rhetoric is an interpersonal art, so it’s one thing to address a small audience as a lecturer. It’s a very different thing to have to imagine an audience that’s very diverse and very physically distant.”
Beier agreed logic and rhetoric is complex and focuses on tiny details, but he challenged students both online and at Hillsdale to not lose hope.
“There’s moments of difficulty, moments of drudgery, yes, but there’s also moments of beauty and wonder,” Beier said. “In these studies, they are the condition of possibility to become really thoughtful users of words who can use our words to discover and articulate the true and to share the beautiful and persuade to the good.”
