Conservatives see Hillsdale College as a model for education nationwide.  Illustration by Álvaro Bernis Today, the staff writer Emma Green takes us behind the scenes of her new story. The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, will make a stop during a trip to Michigan today to talk about K-12 education at Hillsdale College. This small liberal-arts school might seem like a surprising draw for DeSantis, who is widely believed to be running for President in 2024. But, as I discovered while reporting for my story in this week’s issue, Hillsdale is now everywhere in Republican politics. The college has given politicians such as DeSantis the language to describe what they think schools should look like. Hillsdale’s influence is growing: in recent years, through a K-12 outreach initiative, the college has helped conservatives around the country launch their own classical schools, mostly charters, devoted to study of the Western canon and primary texts. The man behind Hillsdale’s rising profile is Larry Arnn, the school’s president. Arnn is a well-known figure in Republican politics; his friends include former Vice-President Mike Pence and Senator Tom Cotton. Hillsdale doesn’t take any federal funding, so it needs even more private financial support than a typical college. Arnn has developed a canny strategy for recruiting allies for the school, including donors who never attended or sent kids there: he uses the culture wars to engage with a sympathetic base of supporters, but tries to keep the campus itself free from partisan acrimony. His ambition for Hillsdale—which reaches a large audience through free online courses and a monthly publication called Imprimis—is “to try to find a way to teach anyone who wants us to help them learn.” Hillsdale has recently made headlines, and not always favorable ones. During an event in Tennessee, where the governor, Bill Lee, hopes to launch dozens of Hillsdale-affiliated charter schools, Arnn was caught on video saying that “teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.” In Florida, a classical charter school that uses Hillsdale’s curriculum forced out its principal after students were shown photos of Michelangelo’s David in the classroom without their parents being warned in advance. After the story went viral, Hillsdale revoked the school’s curriculum license, calling its actions a “parody” of “the actual aims of classical education.” I wanted to understand how Hillsdale has become so influential—and so central to America’s political battles. I spent some time on the campus talking with professors and getting to know Arnn. What I found was complicated—and crucially important for understanding how conservatives think about education in America today. Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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