Free Republic

The following is adapted from a talk delivered at a Hillsdale College luncheon in Anchorage, Alaska, on January 22, 2025. Just hours after his inauguration on January 20, President Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people convicted of offenses related to the events of January 6, 2021. He commuted the sentences of fourteen additional people whose cases for a full pardon are still under review.Earlier that morning, to less fanfare, President Biden had issued “preemptive pardons”—a type of presidential pardon with no historical precedent­—to all the members and staff of the House Select Committee on January 6 and to all the...

While some schools across the nation hosted meagerly-attended “Transgivings” around Thanksgiving time, students at Hillsdale College wrote over 4,000 thank-you cards on the school’s annual “Day of Thanks.” Throughout the day on Nov. 21, participating Hillsdale students wrote the thousands of grateful notes to “donors, family members, professors, friends, and others who have supported them throughout their lives and in their college careers,” a school news release stated. Located in Michigan, Hillsdale has an undergraduate enrollment of a little over 1,500 students. The idea for Day of Thanks came from Hillsdale’s students, who “came up with it as part of...

The heyday of the American musical began in the late 1920s and lasted into the 1960s. The music that came out of Broadway and Hollywood during that period represents one of the pinnacles of American popular culture. This fourth and final CCA of the 2023-2024 academic year will consider the history and character of the American musical.

The writers of our Constitution placed their faith not in specific guarantees of rights—those came later—but in a system of checks on government power. Foremost is the separation of powers among the three branches of the federal government, as well as between the federal government and the states. For this system to work as designed, people in each branch of the federal government and in the state governments must do their jobs and stay in their respective lanes. But what happens when district attorneys—members of their states’ executive branches—refuse to execute the laws of the land? We are witnessing the...

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on January 22, 2024, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. In 1960, the Eisenhower administration began counting the number of foreign nationals “apprehended” or “encountered” by what was then called the U.S. Border Control when crossing into the U.S. over its southern border with Mexico. These figures have been published and closely monitored through the years, and there has never been anything like the numbers we are seeing now. A human tsunami...

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on May 13, 2023, at Hillsdale College’s 171st Commencement Ceremony. Congratulations to the Hillsdale College Class of 2023. It is a thrill to be here at Hillsdale, which I have heard about for a long time. Last night I had a wonderful tour of campus, and the evening culminated in a concert in your beautiful chapel. The concert included Mahler’s First Symphony played by the student orchestra and was just marvelous. When I was a theology professor, I taught a course on the Reformation for many years, taking seriously the works of...

Plan to restore pre-woke classical education at a state-run college is going to provke outrage. So what? I am thrilled that Ron DeSantis is putting in place people who want to reverse the woke academic coup d'état at one state-run institution of higher education. New College of Florida is a rarity: a public liberal arts small college (675 students) that is part of the State University System of Florida, where in-state tuition is under $7000 a year. Zac Anderson of the Sarasota Herald Tribune writes: Gov. Ron DeSantis began the process Friday of transforming Sarasota's New College of Florida into...

If you want to see the problem with American education, look at a chart illustrating the comparative growth in the number of students, teachers, and district administrators in our public schools in the period between 2000 and 2019. (See the chart below.) The number of district administrators grew by a whopping 87.6 percent during these years, far outstripping the growth in the number of students (7.6 percent) and teachers (8.7 percent).In illustrating the difference in these rates of growth, the chart also illustrates a fundamental change that has come over our nation as a whole during this period—a change in...

Three Tennessee school boards denied the application of the American Classical Academy, a K-12 charter school system affiliated with Hillsdale College that provides students with a classic liberal arts education. The American Classical Academy alleges that these decisions are politically motivated and based on its ties to Hillsdale, which is Christian and conservative, as well as comments made by Hillsdale’s president, Larry Arnn.The American Classical Academy filed appeals with the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission, a group appointed by the governor. In two statements of intent, the American Classical Academy said that the Rutherford and Madison school boards did not...

Aguest at a private reception last week with Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee secretly recorded the event and then sent the recording to a local media outlet. News Channel 5 then ran a hit story about Arnn’s accurate remark that “teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.” Selected 30-second clips from the two-hour recording that betrayed event-goers’ confidence were next quickly amplified in state media, including the state’s biggest leftist outlet, The Tennesseean. This pressure campaign on Thursday caused a Tennessee public school to drop its use of...

You know you’re hitting the target when your opponent starts fighting back. In this case, the target is good education, namely charter schools, and the opponent is Biden’s Department of Education. In the same week the New York Times was digging for any kind of dirt it could toss at Hillsdale College’s charter-school initiative, a new DOE rule went into effect. The rule, proposed in the unplumbed depths of the federal register a month prior on March 14, added some 14 pages of federal regulations on the traditionally local process of charter-school application, approval, and administration. Among other things, the...

Tennessee GOP Gov. Bill Lee has invited the private conservative Hillsdale college to open 50 charter schools in his state that will teach so-called "anti-woke" curriculums. The offer for Hillsdale, a liberal arts college with about 1,500 students in Michigan, to use public funds includes $32 million for charter facilities. Hillsdale developed the "1776 Curriculum," a direct response to the New York Times' "1619 Project" about so-called Critical Race Theory, which in suggests American is inherently racist. Hillsdale's version teaches students that America is "an exceptionally good country." Critics of the 1776 Curriculum say it has an overly positive take...

With only 1,500 students on a small-town campus in southern Michigan, Hillsdale College is far from the power corridors of government and top-ranked universities. But it has outsize influence in the conservative world, with strong ties to the Washington elite. Republican leaders frequently visit, and Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the 2016 commencement address, calling Hillsdale a “shining city on a hill” for its devotion to “liberty as an antecedent of government, not a benefit from government.” Now the college is making new efforts to reach beyond its campus, this time with an even younger audience. The college is fighting what...

Placer County’s Board of Supervisors are thrilled that Hillsdale College, a small, ultra-conservative Christian university, plans to build a campus on farmland west of Roseville. The problem is that Hillsdale is an extremist institution, perpetuating alternative facts and harmful conspiracy theories. Placer County’s agreement with Hillsdale signals a deeper conflict in our county – that of local elected officials not only entertaining fringe beliefs but creating a space where young people can be radicalized against democracy. Instead of promoting knowledge and understanding in the best traditions of higher education, Hillsdale’s plans for Placer threatens more political and cultural conflict in...

The government’s pandemic response, while telling people to “follow the science” of its experts, has adopted a model of tyranny by the experts who have twisted the true spirit of science, according to Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College. “It’s just foolish to say, ‘That scientist can rule,'” Arnn told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program when speaking of Hillsdale’s decision to stay open for in-person instruction amid the pandemic, noting Winston Churchill’s view that “expert knowledge is limited knowledge.” The full American Thought Leaders interview with Larry Arnn will premiere on EpochTV in the near future. “If it were true...

Here are two questions pertinent to our times: (1) How would you reduce the greatest free republic in history to despotism in a short time? and (2) How would you stop that from happening? The answer to the first question has been provided in these last two disastrous years. The answer to the second has begun to emerge in recent months. Both are worthy of study. Reducing a Great Republic to Despotism To establish despotism in a nation like ours, you might begin, if you were smart, by building a bureaucracy of great complexity that commands a large percentage of...

Matthew Spalding, vice president of Washington Operations at Hillsdale College, invited parents and educators to combat left-wing revisionist history with his school’s K-12 “1776 curriculum.” “It’s a full curriculum, 2000 pages,” Spalding said on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow. “It’s 85 lessons. It’s a full set. It’s free to anybody who wants to use it: homeschoolers, private schools, public schools … states if they want to use it. It’s absolutely free to anybody who wants it.” Spalding described Hillsdale College’s 1776 history program as a corrective against neo-Marxist “identity politics” and “critical race theory”...

Dame Athene Donald, the Master of Churchill College Cambridge, is probably breathing a little easier today. Last week, a commission she appointed in reaction to the George Floyd killing was disbanded, or disbanded itself, depending upon whom one believes. That commission had arranged a panel at Churchill College about the racism of Winston Churchill. The panel featured several rants on this theme that are entirely typical of our day. The charges were virtually undisputed by any of the panelists. This caused a reaction from Churchill’s descendants and from some historians, notably Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts, who knows the real story....

A Better Kind of Glory is a new documentary about the 1955 Hillsdale College football team, which was invited to the Tangerine Bowl, but turned it down because the team's four black players were not allowed to play.

In a speech at Hillsdale College, Sec. DeVos conveyed that in American education, the fight has just begun to restore choice and freedom to every family. As most of the nation is transfixed on the looming presidential election, Sec. of Education Betsy DeVos remains laser-focused on the job at hand. “Education is the means by which we secure the God-given blessings of liberty,” DeVos told a gathering of more than 250 at Hillsdale College, in her home state of Michigan. Whether she has three months at her post, or the possibility of another four years, will be determined in the...