Campus responds to the power outage

By Benedict Kennedy

In a letter to the editor in the March 2 issue of the Collegian, Josiah Lippincott, a graduate student, expressed his alarm over the college “unnecessarily” canceling classes for two days. This shutdown came amid trifles such as exploding transformers, shattered windshields, and blocked roads, while response crews were spread out between Hillsdale College and three-quarters of a million Michigan residents who lost power. This student’s central contention was that because historical figures did not require the mere comforts of heating, electricity, or the internet to transcribe their thoughts to paper, Hillsdale College should continue requiring class attendance during a natural disaster.

While our initial tendency might be to dismiss the idea that learning is equivalent to writing historical documents as a satire piece, we must be careful to address this argument at its core.

College is a partnership— one much more sophisticated than that between an author and his pen. It is a partnership that not only involves students and teachers but the hard work of food staff, maintenance, house directors, et al. While it may be easy to consider only our own costs and benefits in our assessment of the college’s decision, there is much more at play. Other factors range from professors who had to leave the state so that their young children did not have to spend the night in a 45-degree house, to those who couldn’t make the commute to the college because it is hard to drive with a tree limb in the passenger seat. For some the cost of continuing school was much higher than making sure they remembered their Burberry scarf.