I see a lot of discussion that they were “founded” in a certain way but they aren’t a baptist church school now. It claims to not track minorities even though their student paper reported it’s a lie and they have tracked minorities for sports programs for years http://hillsdalecollegian.com/2016/10/college-sent-racial-data-student-athletes-ncaa/ The current college president offensively called minorities “dark ones” as if they’re all darkies to him, it’s grotesque, is it bad there unless you are in sports? https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/31/michigan-college-president-calls-minorities-dark-ones/2605723/
Its got a reputation for being very conservative.
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I cannot answer this question, as I have no experience at Hillsdale and don’t know anyone who does.
However, it appears that the president’s words may have been taken out of context, and he did not intend for this to be a derogatory term for students, but was actually in reference to the method independent assessors used to determine whether the college is racially diverse.
Since Hillsdale does not report (or collect, it appears) the racial identifications of their students, there’s no way to know from the data how racially diverse the school is. After the Michigan Department of Education visited the school in 2000 and collected data on the demographic makeup of the college, they sent a letter to Hillsdale saying they “violated the standards for diversity” at the college. But the president was baffled as to how they could know this, given that the college doesn’t report racial data. And that’s when he made his unfortunate statement:
“They said we violated the standards for diversity because we didn’t have enough dark ones, I guess is what they meant,” Arnn said.
He was sarcastically/ironically implying that the assessors came in and literally counted the students who looked racially diverse (aka, were darker in skin color) to make an assessment of the racial diversity of the college. Here’s a fuller statement he made later:
“The State of Michigan sent a group of people down to my campus, with clipboards … to look at the colors of people’s faces and write down what they saw. We don’t keep records of that information. What were they looking for besides dark ones?”
I don’t always agree with Arnn’s beliefs, but in this case he seemed to be standing up for a nuanced understanding of racial identity - that you can’t always tell what someone is based on what they look like - and that’s not racist to me. That actually leans towards anti-racist to me.
Conservative doesn’t have to mean unfriendly to African Americans or any other people of color. There are lots of black conservatives. It just depends on the atmosphere and the people involved.
Hillsdale has a notable anti-racist and anti-slavery history - it was founded by abolitionists, allowed the enrollment of black students since its founding in 1844, and invited black luminaries (including Frederick Douglass) to come speak at a time when black people were still legally enslaved in the U.S… The college’s leaders were involved with the early founding of the Republican Party (which was actually founded in opposition to the expansion of slavery, among other reasons). Hillsdale actually withdrew from receiving public funds because they wanted to implement a non-discrimination policy of their own, and they actually have a pretty solid history of anti-racist actions (like refusing to play in football games when black players at other schools were prohibited from playing).
Does all of that mean that Hillsdale continues its anti-racist charter and past into the present day? I don’t know. I think the reasons for its refusal of public funds is predicated on a good cause - they don’t want to count students by race because they don’t want to discriminate against students based on race. However, “colorblind” admissions policies (and colorblindness in general) are actually generally not super friendly to people of color. They don’t take into account all of the systemic and cultural factors that impact a person’s experience and preparation for college.
Here’s an interesting article on Hillsdale from the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/education/edlife/hillsdale-college-great-books-constitution-conservatives.html). I pretty much agree with their assertion that a focus on classical literature and a Great Books curriculum has much to recommend it and isn’t inherently conservative or racist. For better or worse, a lot of modern thought has been shaped by the writings of “dead white men,” as one put it. It’s an and, not an or - we can read the great works of those folks AND the great works of other voices, too.
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