The New Yorker reporter did not come to Hillsdale to flatter us

By Alexandra Hall

When Hillsdale students were bickering with New Yorker readers in the comments section on Instagram last week, one thing was clear: only a small percentage of people had read Emma Green’s article in its entirety. From the April 10 issue of the New Yorker, Green’s article “The Christian Liberal-Arts School at the Heart of the Culture Wars” was printed, more than six months after Green visited campus. Some students were enraged by Green’s playful descriptions about freshman convocation being as dramatic as going off to battle or College President Larry Arnn’s shoes being described as “orthopedic.” But if you’ve ever stepped foot at a singular Hillsdale function, you can’t deny we’re inclined toward the dramatic. Hillsdale is a place that for better or for worse, takes itself very seriously. This is why Green’s article felt like a personal attack on Hillsdale. Here was a woman who came to campus for only a few days, the place most of us will spend a significant portion of our young adult lives and whose professors and administrators have dedicated their careers. Making any sort of definitive claim about what Hillsdale is and the identities of those who compose its infrastructure is a catch-22. If it was all positive, it not only would’ve been a lie, but we still would’ve found some fault in it.

The article doesn’t have a cohesive storyline or singular point— it reads as a collection of thoughts, quotes, and research Green conducted while on campus. So to a Hillsdale audience, it seems lame and un-telling of anything new. But to the typical New Yorker reader, this article served its purpose. It captured a birds-eye view of an institution that to most of the country, is a mysterious, scary little city on an imaginary hill.

Another major criticism that was repeatedly brought up over the week following the article’s release was Green’s inclusion of Hillsdale’s past scandals.

“Why did they have to bring up George Roche III again?”

Because that’s our history. Shying away from mentioning very public scandals would be a disservice to both Green’s readers and Hillsdale as a whole. For a school that claims not to shy away from the past or eliminate evidence of it, why should the collective approach to our own institution be any different?

Green’s sharpest point was the distinction she drew between Hillsdale’s external image versus its internal reality. While some Hillsdale folks are gung-ho about all things GOP, others are merely drawn to the promise of a liberal arts education, what Green describes as “a devotion to the Western canon, an emphasis on primary sources over academic theory, and a focus on equipping students to be able, virtuous citizens.” Many students are weary of some of Hillsdale’s gaudy marketing moves, but as Green points out, they’re necessary to the survival of our school.

Of course Green’s profile was limited. A profile in a newspaper or magazine will never be able to capture the full, rich image of anything, let alone an entire institution filled to the brim with dynamic and strange characters. Green’s article was a charcuterie board of some of what Hillsdale has to offer and where its ingredients are found on a national level— Green didn’t write her article for us.

Alexandra Hall is a sophomore studying rhetoric and media. She is science and tech editor for the Collegian.

New Yorker misquote shows how media distorts Hillsdale

By Haley Strack

Journalist Emma Green’s article on Hillsdale College in last week’s New Yorker placed our school “at the center of the culture war.” Save one line about the “relatively little appetite for partisanship” on campus, she failed to pin down Hillsdale’s political philosophy. And she failed to quote at least one of our fellow students accurately.

Discovering Hillsdale’s political alignment is easy. We’re not shy thinkers; ask our president. Professors quoted in the piece labeled Hillsdale as staunchly conservative—as long as conservative means “conserving things.” It’s an “uncooperative” label, Green said.

Green could have explained why Hillsdale is at the center of the culture war by including what we conserve. If Hillsdale is conservative, it is so because of its rootedness in the Western tradition. It is so because its students are truth-seekers who pursue education as students of the Almighty.

The danger of joining such a lovely venture is the tendency to sound pretentious. Green picked up on that when she misquoted senior Olivia Ols’s convocation speech:

“A curly-haired senior kicked off the ceremony.

‘We’re always one graduating class away from losing the student culture here,’ she said from the lectern. ‘Hold yourself to a higher standard, because it’s what you need. It’s what Hillsdale needs. It’s what our country needs. It’s what God needs.’”

Maybe Green heard what her piece needed: A damning line that shows Hillsdale believes itself righteously ordained by God as the only institution that can change the world. Green didn’t hear what Ols actually said: “[A high standard] is what Hillsdale needs, what our country needs, and what God demands.” Ols followed that with a verse from Colossians 3:23: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.”

Anybody who listens to the audio recording of her remarks can hear what she said, rather than what Green claims in her article.

Emily Stack Davis, the college’s executive director of media relations and communications, confirmed that Ols was misquoted by the New