Students should spend a summer in Hillsdale

Let’s face it: despite the warmer weather this week, most Hillsdale students don’t get to enjoy the full extent of spring in Michigan. People rightfully note that trees are just about to burst into full foliage just as students pack up and finish the semester.

But not all Hillsdalians have to go home. Instead, spending spring and summer in Michigan might be a great way to enjoy the weather and gain new experiences. If you want to get an extra core class or upper-level out of the way, you can choose dozens of courses with great professors.

Michigan may not be the first place you think of when you are making summer plans. But the warm weather, low humidity, and the Great Lakes provide an ideal summer.

After classes, job opportunities and adventures await. Career Services and Handshake offer plenty of internships and job opportunities right on campus. Want to try life in a bigger city? Hillsdale has connections to alumni and friends of the college in cities like Ann Arbor and Detroit who would be willing to set a budding student to work. Additionally, Career Services offers ways to find housing through The Hub, which could make living in Michigan affordable as well as convenient. So before you’re set on going back home for the warmer months, consider the great options right here in the Mitten.

Make the library as beautiful as the rest of campus

By Jillian Parks

to development. Parking, set-back, and greenspace requirements forced lower density than the market may have wanted. City planners also zoned much of the city as single-family residential, preventing developers from increasing density to create more affordable housing closer to Hillsdale’s central business district, the downtown.

For many U.S. cities, these mistakes were detrimental to their financial health. They became dependent on state grants to cover their large infrastructure costs and replace the depleted property values downtown. However, the City of Hillsdale avoided this mistake. For instance, a new Meijer is slated to break ground in 2023, just north of Tire Discounters on W Carleton Road. Instead of subsidizing their decentralized location, the city required Meijer to fund the expansion of the water main to their own site, while allowing them to lease out usage of that section to future businesses. This incentivizes Meijer to be frugal with its infrastructure and location choices and prevents additional liabilities for the city. According to the 2015 and 2021 City Master Plan, Hillsdale has also stated a commitment to expanding mixed use zoning in areas conducive to higher density, increasing walkability, and rerouting M-99 to decrease heavy traffic downtown.

These steps are integral to Hillsdale’s city planning strategy as it faces a unique challenge: because of Michigan state law, the would-be largest contributors to Hillsdale’s property tax base are exempt. This includes hospitals, churches, educational institutions, and government buildings. Therefore, the city must find ways to optimize its remaining tax base. They plan on increasing the connection between Hillsdale College and the downtown area, as currently many of the visitors to the college never contribute to the local economy through commerce. Additionally, both the Meijer project and the downtown revitalization efforts are an attempt at drawing the distant rural population to Hillsdale over places like Fort Wayne or Ann Arbor that might be the same distance away. Hillsdale’s downtown is also listed in the National Register of Historic Places, giving all the more reason for the city to support its vitality. Hillsdale is a small city with relatively slow growth so change will take time. However, with fiscal prudence and future plans, the City of Hillsdale will continue to be a strong, beautiful place for a long time to come.

Jacob Fox is a sophomore studying economics.

For a school that touts beauty as a real virtue to pursue, Hillsdale College has one of the ugliest libraries I have ever seen. My childhood public library and the library in my high school were both more inviting, thematically cohesive, and able to inspire a love of learning, which is our purpose while at Hillsdale.

Mossey Library has an honorable, sweet history behind it. Named after Micheal Alex Mossey, it pays homage to the memory of a beloved child of alumni parents. With more than 300,000 items - physical and online - in its collection, the library provides a wealth of resources for student and faculty research and projects. It has continued to be updated and funded by a multitude of different donors since its original construction. It is also home to some of the most capable, kindest librarians and library staff, and they deserve a prettier place to work.

Mossey Library’s current layout and design hurt student study habits by making library trips a chore, and its outdated design does not match the campus’ overall aesthetic. The college should hire an interior decorator to fix the ambiance, color scheme, and layout of the library to increase the campus’s ability to pursue and appreciate academic excellence.

If a student wants to study in the library, he or she is left with three floor options that students have named Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell. Each floor features stand alone, wooden bookshelves and a colorless atmosphere that pervades the entire building.

At the top, there is Heaven. Wind down with Plato and Aristotle by sitting in the back room with lime green walls, teal accents, and cherry red furniture. Frankly, it is shagadelic. The alternative is sitting among reference books, DVDs, and magazines displayed on bookshelves. On the bright side, there are usually a good amount of people up there to study alongside. On the not-as-bright side, there are approximately 215 places to sit; I know because I counted. The other two floors seat a collective 120. That may sound like a lot of seating opportunities, however, that is less than 25% of campus, and a majority of those seats are in sets of four. Most people aren’t comfortable sitting down at a table next to a stranger to study, which effectively means three seats are no longer available if one person claims a spot.

Heaven houses the Heritage Room, which embodies exactly what the rest of the library ought to be; however, any breath too loud or cough too consistent, and I’m afraid of being taken out by the daggers people throw with their glances.

The middle floor is affectionately called Purgatory. The controversy of the name embodies the controversy of the place itself. Wikipedia describes purgatory as “an intermediate state after physical death for expiatory purification,” which sounds about right.

Some people love that floor. Those people have never been to a good library. Purgatory features cinder block walls, windows that let in light around the room’s perimeter and leave the middle of the room subject to bright fluorescent light, and study rooms. These study rooms are not at all soundproof, so they are only effective for independent, silent study time, i.e. the point of the entire floor, i.e. a useless feature. The windows are a plus, but the color of Purgatory is beige, and Michigan winters do not help with that.

The bottom floor is called Hell, and it is called Hell for a reason. It is sad like Purgatory, just smaller and more silent. Once a student makes his or her way down to Hell, the red has been stripped of the chairs and wooden, independent desk areas are all that remain.

The only way out is a creaky, shakey elevator or a staircase that can only be described as dingy. While I have never committed a crime, the floor reminds me of the cells I saw on a field trip to the local jail I took many years ago. People often use Hell when they really need to crack down on an assignment because it is quiet. The punishment of being in a sterile and unfriendly environment is simply an unnecessary pile-on.

If you can get a seat, getting work done in these areas still feels like a punishment for trying to learn.

Also, not a single floor, in vibe or in appearances, is beautiful. Even the books themselves are stored, not displayed. The library should be warm, inviting, and an enjoyable experience like the other keystone buildings on campus.

Christ Chapel emphasizes the school’s commitment to Christian worship. The amphitheater-reminiscent Markel Auditorium for performance proclaims an attention to the roots of theater and an appreciation of the arts. The presence of plenty of coffee shops and communal spaces for student conversation provide space for the free speech and open exchange of ideas on campus. The school cares about worship, performance and free speech, and it has spaces and architecture that physically manifest those ideals. If the school really values the liberal arts, learning for the sake of learning, it should provide a space where spending hours reading and studying for finals is a joy. Hillsdale has proven to be capable of creating beautiful spaces, and I’m confident it could do it again in pursuit of a better library space. I love what I am learning here; I want a space where I am able to love the process of learning it.

Jillian is a sophomore studying rhetoric and media and journalism. She is the social media manager for the Collegian.

There should be an optional sex-segregated physical wellness

By Erin Osborne

“I had a gym date today,” sophomore Natalie Parker said.

As part of her physical wellness class, Parker’s professor asked the men and women in the class to raise their hands if they were familiar with the equipment in the gym. The men in the class raised their hands. According to Parker, the professor then asked the students to raise their hands if they were unfamiliar with the equipment in the gym. Parker and the other women in the class raised their hands.

The students were then told to pair up as a “gym date,” in which the men who were familiar with gym equipment showed the women who were unfamiliar with gym equipment around the gym. This method may be an efficient way to teach people how to use gym equipment, but it also reveals a problem in the physical wellness classes: men and women have different abilities and interests about their own physical health and wellness. Men and women often exercise differently. They have different maximum aerobic capacities, can lift different amounts of weight, and have different preferences regarding exercise category.

For example, Matt Brzycki of Princeton University said “the absolute total-body strength of women has been reported as being roughly 67% that of men.” With these different capacities, men and women often act differently in the gym. If the physical wellness class required by Hillsdale College wants to encourage students to exercise and care about their physical wellbeing, there should be an option that is sex-segregated, in order for men and women to get a more valuable experience that reflects the different capacities of both sexes. Hillsdale College offers self-defense and shooting classes that are exclusive to women, so why not extend the same separation to the class that all students are required to take?

The physical wellness curriculum is not exclusively about physical exercise. It also includes emotional and relational wellness instruction. This is another area where men and women often have innately different interests.

Women, for example, may prefer to learn about their own hormonal cycles and fertility, while men may be uninterested in that sort of education.

The Women’s Health and Nutrition class does specify women’s health, but there is only one section offered per semester, and the class is only open to seniors. Therefore, as good of a class as it is, comparatively few women can actually take it.

I went to a public school for 13 years, and had every single co-ed health instruction that that entailed, including lectures on sexual material where both male and female students were present. That environment fuels incredible discomfort and keeps students from asking questions that may otherwise be important to their health.

Hillsdale College’s physical wellness class includes components about relational wellness, which is important. However, women and men yet again have widely different needs as far as curriculum. Again, if the goal of a physical wellness class requirement is to encourage students to learn about their own bodies and how to be healthy, then shouldn’t the class cater to the questions and educational needs of the students?

Optional sex-segregated physical wellness classes would allow men and women to gain the most out of their physical wellness experience in all areas of the curriculum. They would be able to further their knowledge of physical exercise, human emotions, and healthy relationships in a comfortable environment where they can prioritize their health as it aligns with their sexes.

There is a place for co-educational wellness. There is a time for learning about the wellness of the opposite sex. But physical wellness classes should be an environment in which both men and women can best learn about their own needs, and sex-segregated class offerings is one of the ways to accomplish that.

Erin Osborne is a sophomore studying Spanish, journalism, and military history and grand strategy.