Hillsdale College: the conservative model for education

On the north side of the main quadrangle at Hillsdale College in Michigan, a recent oversize building symbolises the growing influence of this tiny US educational institution.

Christ Chapel, modelled on St-Martins-in-the-Fields in London, looms over “Liberty Walk”, a square lined with donor-funded statues of historical figures including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It was dedicated in 2019 by the conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after a $30mn fundraising campaign kick-started with $12.5mn from Jack Babbitt, a chemical engineer turned Christian philanthropist.

The projects are the vision of Larry Arnn, Hillsdale president since 2000, to cultivate and magnify conservative thought. He has scaled up funding by appealing to those on the political right keen to use education to spread their views and influence. “We don’t raise money; people give it,” he says. “They have been generous.”

To some, however, such generosity marks a change in the way wealth is being used to support education, and in the motivation of the wealthy college donor.

Hillsdale’s numerous donors have swelled the value of its assets fivefold to $1.7bn in the past two decades. Its endowment has risen in value from $200mn in 2000 to nearly $1bn today — five times the median level in US colleges, according to the latest survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

Affluent benefactors include Charles Koch, the industrialist billionaire who supports libertarian causes; Richard Uihlein, co-founder of the shipping supplies company Uline, backer of Donald Trump, and scion of a brewing family; and Betsy DeVos, an advocate of private schools and for-profit colleges who became Trump’s education secretary. Her brother, Erik Prince, studied at Hillsdale and founded the private security company Blackwater.

The board of trustees is chaired by Pat Sajak, a former TV game show host and a supporter of multiple right-wing political candidates. Other board members include Jeffrey Coors of the eponymous brewing company. The vice-chair is Stephen Van Andel, an alumnus who co-chairs Amway, the nutrition, beauty and home products direct sales company founded by his father and Rich DeVos, Betsy’s father in law. He backed the Steve and Amy Van Andel Graduate School of Government in Washington, located opposite the rightwing Heritage Foundation think-tank, which shares trustees with Hillsdale.

Hillsdale’s graduate school hosts the Academy for Science and Freedom, which claims to educate Americans in “the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth”. It was established in response to what it describes as the “herd thinking” behind Covid-19 lockdowns and “the suppression of clinical trials” during the pandemic.

With just 1,600 students on a small campus two hours’ drive west from Detroit, the college itself would barely stand out from dozens of other liberal arts institutions across the country — except for two characteristics that have been attracting fresh scrutiny in the build-up to the US presidential elections this November.

First, while many rivals are under attack as “woke” liberal bastions, Hillsdale has adopted an increasingly conservative Christian, populist and libertarian ethos. It offers a defiantly “classical liberal arts” education with an extensive core curriculum focused on “the Western tradition”. In contrast, many other colleges have trimmed the traditional compulsory academic canon in order to offer a broader range of global options.

“The fundamentals of American literature don’t leave a lot of room for African literature at the bachelor’s level,” says David Whalen, associate vice-president for curriculum. “You have to know your own front yard and culture to find a point of connection with others. The local precedes the global.”

Second, its influence stretches far beyond its modest Midwest home. It has been praised by — and tapped for ideas, people and expertise — by several Republican politicians, including Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, who has used it as a model to overhaul the state’s New College, a former haven for more progressive, liberal studies.

There is a long-standing US tradition of wealthy alumni donating to their alma mater. But David Austin Walsh, a postdoctoral associate at Yale who studies conservative movements, says Hillsdale reflects a wider trend since Trump’s election as president in 2016 of surging grassroots donations to education. These include contributions from many who are not even former students.

“So much of the American right is obsessed with the defence of Western civilisation,” he says. “Hillsdale is part of a two-pronged strategy of building explicitly conservative educational institutions on the one hand and conservative “bridgeheads” on elite campuses on the other.” It generates a pipeline of graduates for Republican staff positions; and a model to apply to publicly-funded institutions in states such as Florida.

Michael Moody, professor of Philanthropic Studies at Indiana University, agrees that some wealthy individuals are funding on the basis of politics. He says while always “big donors love ‘eds’ and ‘meds’” [educational and medical funding], now, “universities are becoming more the object of political fighting”.

Moody adds that there has been a growth in opaque funding through anonymised donor-advised funds or for-profit entities. “Some donors may want to give but don’t want to get as much attention because they feel there might be a reputational hit and they want their philanthropy driven by personal passions to be different from and separate from their businesses,” he says.

The architect of the transformation of Hillsdale is Arnn, a professor of politics and history. He was a founder of the right-wing Claremont Institute think-tank, and is a trustee of the Heritage Foundation. He supported Trump’s past presidential campaigns, and was in the running to be his education secretary.

Instead, Trump named him chair of the 1776 Commission — often described as a counter to the New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project” examining the legacy of slavery and racism in America. It is reflected in Hillsdale’s curriculum, which emphasises the positive aspects of “American exceptionalism” in history, including in its curriculum faculty member Wilfred McClay’s textbook “Land of hope: An invitation to the Great American Story”.

Hillsdale’s own history dates to 1844, when it was established by Free Will Baptists to furnish “a comprehensive education” to “all persons who wish, irrespective of nationality, color, or sex”. As such, it became a pioneer in admitting female and black students. It supported the abolition of slavery, and sent many students to fight in the Union army during the American Civil War.

However, it resisted post-Civil Rights government affirmative action demands from the 1960s to disclose the racial breakdown of its students. After losing in the courts, it chose to relinquish access to all federal loans and grants to students rather than comply. It instead turned this defeat into a centrepiece of its pitch to wealthy American private donors to support freedom from state interference with “truly independent education”.

“I’m sometimes criticised for not talking about that enough,” says Arnn. “We don’t like this idea that every classroom is governed by rules from above. Federal money is a symbol of that.” He says he has supported “every Republican since Ronald Reagan” but has “never campaigned for any politician in the name of the college or at college events”.

He has yet to endorse Trump’s candidacy this year. “It’s a very violent time right now. I try as hard as I can to keep that out of the college. [Students] should focus on their studies and turn themselves into excellent human beings and then they can be involved in politics or not as much as they want to later. I should not politicise the college.”

On a recent campus visit, many students and academics alike certainly seemed to enjoy an intellectual refuge in a world of diminishing outlets for classical western education — distanced from contemporary politics, “progressive” subjects or any overly pragmatic focus on preparing graduates with vocational skills directly relevant for working life.

In his US Constitution class, Khalil Habib explored the ideas and original meanings of words in writings by Aristotle and Plato, Thucydides and Homer, Hobbes and Nietzsche. The discussion bore a striking resemblance to biblical scriptural exegesis — and the “originalist” tradition of Clarence Thomas and others on the Supreme Court who interpret the Constitution in the way they believe it was understood at the time of the drafters. “If there are disagreements, they are theological more than ideological,” he said afterwards.

Yet Sam Torode, a Hillsdale alumnus who is now a writer and designer in Nashville, sees the college’s recent evolution and off-campus activities as part of a more radical re-engineering of American education and practice under donor influence. He recalls with nostalgia his time as an undergraduate in the mid 1990s, mixing classical liberal arts education with more traditional Republican views and a twist of libertarianism.

He drafted an open letter critical of the leadership after the Capitol Hill riots in January 2021, which was when Arnn unveiled the findings of the 1776 Commission — swiftly condemned by the American Historical Association for proposing “a form of government indoctrination of American students, and in the process elevat[ing] ignorance about the past to a civic virtue.”

“In order to please the donors, Arnn pushed in a more Trumpian direction,” he says. “He realised there’s a lot of money if you toe the line of the current Republican party. Now there’s an attempt to become a brand, to spread all over the nation. That’s distressing.”

This article is part of FT Wealth, a section providing in-depth coverage of philanthropy, entrepreneurs, family offices, as well as alternative and impact investment