DeeGeesLifeBlog ~ Life as Art ~ Or is it Heart?

Hillsdale College rises to the fore…

Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. ~ Isaiah 40: 28-29

The educational gem that is Hillsdale College was basically forced this past week to post a quite remarkable response to counter what can only be referred to as a BLM threat. And that doesn’t stand for ‘Bureau of Land Management’! All because, amidst the events of recent weeks, a number of alumni and others took it upon themselves to insist that Hillsdale College issue statements concerning these events.

Why? The College is charged with negligence - or worse.

It wasn’t enough that – unlike every elite college in America – Hillsdale has spent the last 176 years dedicating itself to the principle that, in a world predicated on the Constitution and the Judeo-Christian Bible, all lives matter. In our new McCarthyite world, Hillsdale was told that “silence is violence.”

Hillsdale College … statue of Conservative Margaret Thatcher…

So Hillsdale spoke. The official Hillsdale statement (link down below) doesn’t lend itself to an easy summary. You have to read it all, especially the last paragraph. When you’re done, you’ll find yourself wishing every academic institution and corporation in America would have the courage to issue a similar statement in the face of the Democrats’ violent demands for institutional conformity:

Amidst the events of recent weeks, a number of alumni and others have taken up formal and public means to insist that Hillsdale College issue statements concerning these events. The College is charged with negligence – or worse.

It is not the practice of the College to respond to petitions or other instruments meant to gain an object by pressure. The College operates by reasoned deliberation, study, and thought. The following observations, however, may be helpful and pertinent.

The College is pressed to speak. It is told that saying what it always has said is insufficient. Instead, it must decry racism and the mistreatment of Black Americans in particular. This, however, is precisely what the College has always said.

The College is told that invoking the high example of the Civil War or Frederick Douglass is not permitted. Perhaps it is thought that nothing relevant can be learned about justice and equality from the words and actions of great men and women in history. Instead, the College is guilty of the gravest moral failure for not making declarations about … justice and equality.

The College is told that it garners no honor now for its abolitionist past - or that it fails to live up to that past - but instead it must issue statements today. Statements about what? It must issue statements about the brutal and deadly evil of hating other people and/or treating them differently because of the color of their skin. That is, it must issue statements about the very things that moved the abolitionists whom the College has ever invoked.

It is told that failure to issue statements is an erasure, a complicity, an abandonment of principle. The silence of the College is deafening.

The College founding is a statement - as is each reiteration and reminder of its meaning and necessity. The curriculum is a statement, especially in its faithful presentation of the College’s founding mission. Teaching is a statement, especially as it takes up - with vigor - the evils we are alleged to ignore, evils like murder, brutality, injustice, destruction of person or property, and passionate irrationality. Teaching these same things across all the land is a statement, or a thousand statements.

Organizing our practical affairs so that we can maintain principles of equity and justice - though the cost is high and sympathy is short - is a statement. Dispensing unparalleled financial help to students who cannot afford even a moderate tuition, is a statement. Helping private and public schools across the country lift their primary and secondary students out of a sea of disadvantages with excellent instruction, curricula, and the civic principles of freedom and equality - without any recompense to the College - is a statement.

Hillsdale College … statue of Conservative Ronald Reagan …

Postgraduate programs with the express aim of advancing the ideas of human dignity, justice, equality, and the citizen as the source of the government’s power, these are all statements. And all of these statements are acts, deeds that speak, undertaken and perpetuated now, every day, all the time. Everything the College does, though its work is not that of an activist or agitator, is for the moral and intellectual uplift of all.

There may be something deafening in the culture – certainly there are those who cannot hear - but it is not from the silence of the College.

There is a kind of virtue that is cheap. It consists of jumping on cost-free bandwagons of public feeling - perhaps even deeply justified public feeling - and winning approval by espousing the right opinion. No one who wishes the College to issue statements is assumed to be a party to such behavior. But the fact that very real racial problems are now being cynically exploited for profit, gain, and public favor by some organizations and people is impossible to overlook. It is a scandal and a shame that compounds our ills and impedes their correction.

Hillsdale College, though far from perfect, will continue to do the work of education in the great principles that are, second only to divine grace, the solution to the grave ills that beset our times. [end]

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We really do need at least a few Hillsdale Colleges in each state. And we need the K-12 curriculum Hillsdale has created to be adopted in our government and private schools. Not by force of law, but because the Hillsdale curriculum is a vast improvement over what is being taught in our schools today. And of course we need to create a universal voucher system to replace our government school model. The brainwash mind control that is taking place within our government schools would make the rulers of the old USSR very proud. And the vast majority of American universities are even worse. If we continue on the road we’re on right now, the United States won’t be a free republic in 20 years. The situation is that dire. The time to act is now!

But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. ~ Isaiah 40: 30-31

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The Collegian: On the College and Silence: A Letter from Hillsdale College

Andrea Widburg, American Thinker: In a World of Sheep-like Conformity, Hillsdale College takes a Stand

See also related:

Sumantra Maitra, The Federalist: 3 Crucial lessons from Great Britain

Inez Feltscher Stepman, The Federalist: Anti-American Education system

Joy Pullman, The Federalist: SCOTUS Transgender ruling Firebombs Constitution

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Soli Deo Gloria!

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