why dave bergman is neat

sam brings to our attention a little write-up about hillsdale college by don herzog at the liberal philosophy blog left2right. i reproduce it here, and you can click on the link and scroll down to see comments left (no pun intended) by left2right's readers.

2½ cheers for Hillsdale

Don Herzog: April 26, 2005

I'm a big fan of Hillsdale College.  I've never been there, even though it's an easy drive from Ann Arbor.  No matter:  I'm a big fan.

Hillsdale is the plucky little liberal arts college that became famous — or infamous, depending on who you travel with — for defying the federal government.  HEW demanded that colleges receiving federal funding file an Assurance of Compliance and then track and report all kinds of data to assure they're in compliance with Title IX.  For the record, Title IX does lots more than demand gender equity in sports.  The agency then decided the requirement would extend to campuses on which any student was receiving federal funding.  Hillsdale balked.  Eventually, the Supreme Court upheld the agency's action as clearly authorized by the statute.  And over Reagan's veto, Congress passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act to further broaden the statute's coverage.

Meanwhile, Hillsdale had had enough.  The college proudly boasts of being the country's first to ban discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and sex.  But they didn't like the idea of the feds snooping around in their internal decisions.  So they decided that they and their students would accept no federal funding.  Instead, they turned to conservative donors and raised hundreds of millions, enabling them to replace government funding with private financial aid.

Ever since, the place has been the darling of the right.  William F. Buckley, Jr., he of the waggling eyebrows, darting tongue, sardonic wit, and otiosely filigreed vocabulary, has long had a close relationship with the school.  And — fabulous research opportunity here — now you can search his published work at the school's website.  This year, at the Founders Campaign Gala, Buckley, Ann Coulter, and Dan Quayle will appear as guests.  The curriculum focuses on the traditional liberal arts, clearly with a strong conservative and libertarian bent.

Oh, the school has had its problems.  There was a huge scandal in '99.  The college president's daughter-in-law, who worked on campus, alleged that she and he had had a long-running affair.  She promptly committed suicide.  He promptly retired with a splendid golden parachute.  (He was already very highly paid.)  No, sorry, none of this bears on the worth of what Hillsdale does.  And I disdain cheap shots at right-wing moralists as hypocrites.  (Oh, okay, I snicker at Tribulation Wholesome in Ben Jonson's Alchemist.)  Indeed, I'm happy that the president and his son have reconciled.  Meanwhile, disgruntled community members formed the amusingly named Hillsdale Liberation Organization.  Their website looks like it's not been updated in some years, but it alleges imperious government by the old president and ruthless ideological intolerance and censorship on campus.  (Here are some other critical comments.)

Then too, I think Hillsdale, like other campuses, would be far better off if it were more diverse.  And I'm a big fan of Title IX, though I do think the feds should think a lot harder than they do about how cumbersome and expensive it is to demonstrate to the bureaucrats that you're complying with various legal rules.

So there's plenty I disagree with Hillsdale about.  I could add more.  The old president recently resurfaced with a lecture on American history festooned with crazy judgments:  if his intellectual agenda for the school featured that sort of thing, I shudder for the students.  And the current president is a Straussian political theorist, so I'm sure I have all kinds of deep disagreements with him, just as I'm sure his little piece attacking Grutter is way off the mark.  So why am I such a fan of Hillsdale?  Because they're intriguingly different, and not in any blatantly offensive or unacceptable way.  (I would not be a fan of Ku Klux Klan U.  But don't bother trying to persuade me that conservatism is just the polite face of racism:  that's staggeringly ignorant as well as blatantly offensive.)  No one's forced to go to Hillsdale.  The rest of us can learn from its experience thumbing its nose at the feds.  We can learn about what the problems are of a staunchly conservative little college, and how they compare and contrast to those of staunchly liberal little colleges.

But there's more, and here's what I really want to insist on.  A liberal society will have plenty of groups and institutions that defy liberal orthodoxies.  Tolerance isn't yellow-bellied "relativism," and pluralism doesn't mean smiling sweetly at Nazis.  But Hillsdale is well within the bounds of liberal tolerance and pluralism.  No self-respecting liberal should wish that one association after another fall into line and dutifully affirm the same old rules about freedom, equality, the role of government, and the like.  No self-respecting liberal should want everyone to be a liberal.  No self-respecting liberal should want such a monochrome society.

In short, my disagreements with Hillsdale are precisely why I like them so much.  So this unreconstructed liberal is a big fan of Hillsdale College.  (They do lose half a cheer — for the allegations of thought control.)  For real.