When Bryn Mawr shut down for Covid, many of my classmates retreated to their family’s second homes, writes Jane Kitchen. I moved into the two-bedroom apartment I share with my mom and my three younger sisters. And everything I’d worked for evaporated.https://t.co/tqW2AhdQZD
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) January 31, 2022
Bari Weiss is promoting an essay by Jane Kitchen, a former Bryn College student, who says she is happier now that she has transferred to Hillsdale College.
Weiss is a former New York Times columnist. She left the paper in July of 2020. – from her resignation letter –
The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.
Even now, I am confident that most people at The Times do not hold these views. Yet they are cowed by those who do. Why? Perhaps because they believe the ultimate goal is righteous. Perhaps because they believe that they will be granted protection if they nod along as the coin of our realm—language—is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes. Perhaps because there are millions of unemployed people in this country and they feel lucky to have a job in a contracting industry.
Now Weiss publishes Common Sense on Substack. On January 21 she was a panelist on Bill Maher’s show.
On its website, Hillsdale College describes itself as a small, Christian, classical liberal arts college in southern Michigan that operates independently of government funding. Our students represent each of the fifty states and more than a dozen foreign countries, and drawn to the challenge of a Hillsdale education, they grow in heart and mind by studying timeless truths in a supportive community dedicated to the highest things.
In 2017, Erik Eckholm, wrote in the New York Times –
It is no coincidence that Justice Clarence Thomas, an advocate of strict “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution, delivered the commencement address last spring, likening Hillsdale to a “shining city on a hill” for its devotion to “liberty as an antecedent of government, not a benefit from government.”
Conservatives are also entranced by Hillsdale’s decision to forgo any federal or state funds so as to be “unfettered” by government mandates. In 1984, in Grove City College v. Bell, the Supreme Court ruled that even Pell grants for needy students or G.I. Bill money for veterans subjects a college to federal regulations, and so Hillsdale students are not allowed to accept such funds (most receive institutional grants). As a result, the college does not follow Title IX guidelines on sex discrimination and the handling of sexual assault cases and it has refused to engage in the otherwise required reporting on student race and ethnicity, let alone develop an affirmative action plan. Not surprisingly, the school’s “race blind” admissions policy results in an overwhelmingly white student body.
In her essay, Kitchen describes how after spending all of her junior year at home, she began a search for college “that was operating even remotely normally.” That brought her to Hillsdale. Describing her admission interview with Hillsdale she writes –
I praised Christopher Hitchens—a staunch and unapologetic atheist—as one of my intellectual heroes. I disclosed that I was not religious. I debated with my interviewer about whether math was invented or discovered.
And they wanted me anyway. When I received that acceptance letter in November for the Spring 2022 semester, I cried.
So far, Kitchen says she is happy with her decision. She says that life here is blissfully normal. I have sorority sisters. We get together and study and play board games. The student union and dining hall are packed. No one asks anyone else’s vaccine status. There are no mask mandates, and no mandatory Covid testing. You’ll see an occasional student in a mask but no one thinks anything of it.