Author: Josiah Lippincott (Josiah Lippincott)

The events in Ferguson during the past week regarding the killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson are a perfect example of the best and worst manifestations of government by the people. On the one hand there was the grand jury, made up of 12 citizens appointed by law, considering nearly 4,500 pages of...

Clichés make for bad writing, but in politics they can be downright dangerous. That was the thesis of Bronte Wigen’s recent Collegian op-ed, “The Jeopardy of Political Jargon.” Her identification of several phrases common to the national political discourse that lend themselves to ambiguity and misdirection was interesting, but even more so was the question...

Discourse with others only works if you both share basic assumptions. That point seems to have escaped Garrett West as he wrote last week’s op-ed “Discourse: better than debate.” In the piece, West chided me for portraying, in a previous editorial, the majority of American political science students as progressives, cultivated to become cogs in...

“Our student body, as a whole, avoids asking the hard questions about what justice requires of our society.” When I read that gem of a line from last week’s Collegian op-ed —  “The liberal arts must include opposing thinkers” —  I was incredulous. Garrett West’s argument that all Hillsdale students live in an ideological echo...