In Hillsdale College, a ‘Shining City on a Hill’ for Conservatives

The New York Times reports:

At first, Hillsdale College seems to resemble dozens of other small liberal arts schools with rich histories. There are statues of Washington and Lincoln, Jefferson and Churchill, and a monument to students who fought for the Union — a point of pride at a college that was founded by abolitionists, visited by the crusading former slave Frederick Douglass and open to black students and women from its founding in 1844.

Cross the quad on what is known as the Liberty Walk, though, and you encounter something different: statues of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. If it isn’t ready to add a bronzed Donald J. Trump to this pantheon, this is one college, at least, where his presidency is viewed with more hope than dread. In a letter to prospective donors, Hillsdale’s president, Larry P. Arnn, said that 2017 promises a “beginning to restore limited government.”

Hillsdale, a private college of 1,400 students in southern Michigan that describes itself as “nonsectarian Christian” and dedicated to “civil and religious liberty,” is scarcely known in many circles. But among erudite conservatives — think progeny of William F. Buckley Jr. — it is considered a hidden gem.

What they admire is the college’s concentration on the Western philosophical and literary canon (sometimes disparaged as the Great Books of dead white men) and its reverent treatment of the American founding documents as the political culmination of that tradition — a tradition that scholars at Hillsdale say has been desecrated by a century of governmental overreach, including the New Deal and Obamacare.

A real higher education institution.