At Hillsdale, a College Education Is Still Possible

The news pouring out of the nation’s colleges and universities is grim. Wokeness pervades every discipline. The non-left is being purged from both students and faculty. The vaccine mandate has been a useful tool in that respect. It gets rid of those willing to think for themselves.

Already long ago, the curriculum seemed ever less to do with anything the West would have called education in the last several hundred years. Then came the lockdowns, dorm quarantines, and bans on even attending college, after which the forced tests, masked lectures, and vaccine mandates, all for which parents pay in the six figures....

Enrollment is down 3.2 percent, which will create a serious financial problem for many institutions. Go woke, go broke is a principle that seems to explain the fate of most of these institutions....

But thanks to Hillsdale College, we have at least one case that shows what it means to be brave in the service of learning. The idea of the university, wrote John Henry Cardinal Newman, was to be a sanctuary for truth when the rest of the world is consumed with error, superstition, violence, and frenzy. That was the whole point of the medieval university: protection for ideas, research for truth, teaching for the next generation, and as a light to the world.

Today Hillsdale serves as a light to the country and the world. For years, the college has grown in stature with high-quality faculty, earnest students, and ever more services, including graduate degrees and online education that serves hungry learners the world over. I...

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