It's a reasonable inference that the failure to nurture critical thinking skills leads to the acceptance of Trumpism. That's not to discount the role of gut level revulsion in the rejection of Trumpism. The 'gut level' seasons, spices up, my critical thinking.
Contradictions were on the minds of the nearly two dozen students and alumni who sought me out after hearing about my reporting on social media or from friends. Almost all expressed gratitude for their liberal-arts education and said that, despite the hard-edged pitch to donors, Hillsdale had nurtured the critical-thinking skills that led them to reject Trumpism. But many felt revulsion at the public coziness between the college and the former president. “The undergraduate college has been used as a base for the intervention into American politics,” said Will Smiley, class of 2005. Arnn, he added, “was lending the institutional credibility of Hillsdale to Donald Trump.”
Anna Meckel arrived at Hillsdale in 2014 as a star student celebrated in The Omaha World-Herald with the headline “Home-Schooled Nebraska Senior Tallies Perfect SAT, ACT Scores.” She came from a conservative family but had been drawn to Hillsdale by its focus on the classics, not its politics. Yet even as she thrived academically, she found her values unmoored from the emergent brand of conservatism espoused by Arnn and his administration. In an interview, she recalled her graduation, in May 2018. She was the valedictorian. Pence delivered the commencement address, declaring that the Trump administration was “advancing the very principles that you learned here in the halls at Hillsdale.”
“I was sitting there in the audience in tears, in embarrassment and frustration,” Meckel told me. “This is supposed to be the culmination of the education that I received, and instead the school is making a mockery of itself.” She added: “I was literally crying. I’m going to sound like a snowflake, I guess, but whatever. It was a travesty. Another student heard me crying and reached out to me afterward and said, ‘This isn’t the send-off we deserved.’”
Meckel sent me a link to a fund-raising pitch that cited one of the college’s free online courses, on Dante. It warned that “the Biden administration is trying to force critical race theory into K-12 curricula” and offered the poet as an antidote to “the Left’s assault on American education.”
“It’s not about Dante or the ‘Iliad’ or the ‘Odyssey,’” she said. “It’s about getting clicks and views from people who want to own the libs and be enraged by the Biden administration or by cancel culture. And that’s nothing like what I was taught in the classroom when we went through great books. My professors didn’t say anything about reading Dante to own the libs.”
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