As I walked into the Jackson medical cannabis dispensary last weekend, I noticed behind me an old, frail woman. Her hands were shaking, and her voice was filled with tears. “The OxyContin doesn’t take away the pain,” I heard her say to the attendant. She asked the cashier for a few grams of cannabis and...
Over the last four years, I have often been forced to contend with two comments concerning my college majors. After I reveal that I study French and English, people inevitably make some dismissive comment about how I will go into teaching and then they ask if I am fluent in French. Although the first supposition...
Two achievements mark excellence in a commencement speaker: connection to audience and timeliness of message. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan enjoys both. She should be Hillsdale’s 2018 commencement speaker. Noonan wrote speeches for a man revered — and immortalized in statue — on Hillsdale’s campus: Ronald Reagan. She wrote his Challenger explosion speech —...
Location matters. Where we live informs our decisions — like throwing on a sweatshirt to avert that Midwestern autumn chill — but it also does something more. It instills us with a responsibility to that place. The college you attend dwells within another place, a city of the same name. This connection is no accident....
“I’ll make a prediction: I think he’s going to be just fine,” President Trump announced to a room of his supporters in Phoenix, indicating his intention to pardon former sheriff Joe Arpaio of a recently acquired criminal contempt conviction. Arpaio, an 85-year old resident of Maricopa County, was found guilty of violating a 2011 court...