The Patriot Post® · Hillsdale to BLM: No T'anks

Hillsdale, a small conservative college of 1,400 students tucked away in a sleepy southern Michigan town, is The Little School That Could, the smallish kid that punches way above his weight. And so it was last week, when the school took a lonely but principled stand against the nation’s most powerful pressure group: Black Lives Matter.

BLM, whose very name is a straw man, has been making its way across the country in the wake of the George Floyd riots, shaking down every organization and corporate entity it deems worth the trouble. Ten million dollars is the protection price for Big Tech brands like Amazon and Facebook — at least for now. But if you’re Nike, and you take orders from the likes of Colin Kaepernick, you’re on the hook for $40 million.

Nice business ya got there. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.

As for Hillsdale, the school has come under pressure from a handful of alumni and students in recent days to make a statement in support of BLM — you know, a show of subservience like those of Harvard and Yale.

“Say that Black Lives Matter and they will be protected by Hillsdale College and its graduates,” said a recent graduate and one of the school’s petitioners.

Hillsdale made a statement all right: No.

Not that “no” means the school is in any way insensitive to the plight of black Americans past or present. As its History page points out, Hillsdale “was the first American college to prohibit in its charter any discrimination based on race, religion, or sex, and became an early force for the abolition of slavery.” In fact, the school’s anti-slavery reputation and its role in founding a new political party — the Republican Party — attracted Frederick Douglass to speak there.

Suffice it to say that Hillsdale has plenty of street cred on matters of race and equality.

“It is not the practice of the College to respond to petitions or other instruments meant to gain an object by pressure,” said Hillsdale’s leadership in a letter to the school newspaper, The Collegian.

“There is a kind of virtue that is cheap,” the letter continues. “It consists of jumping on cost-free bandwagons of public feeling —  perhaps even deeply justified public feeling — and winning approval by espousing the right opinion. … The fact that very real racial problems are now being cynically exploited for profit, gain, and public favor by some organizations and people is … a scandal and a shame that compounds our ills and impedes their correction. Hillsdale College, though far from perfect, will continue to do the work of education in the great principles that are, second only to divine grace, the solution to the grave ills that beset our times.”

Hillsdale, then, understands what the schools with the multibillion-dollar endowments do not: Appeasement only invites more appeasement. Besides, the demand to “Say that Black Lives Matter and they will be protected” would seem to imply that the school’s default position is that black lives don’t matter and that black students aren’t protected — a position that’s both laughable and obscene.

Or, to put it in terms that Hillsdale President and early Patriot Post endorser Dr. Larry Arnn might appreciate, “For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” (That’s Hamilton in Federalist No. 84, for you Ivy Leaguers.)

Hillsdale also received support from a recent graduate, a young lady named Tori Hope Petersen, whose “Dear Hillsdale” letter has gone viral.

“I was one of your ‘token black’ students,” her letter begins. “The essays I wrote on my admissions application spoke about my newly found faith in Christ, experiences as a former foster youth, and adversities faced while growing up with a mentally ill mother. Though my ACT score was not just below your average, but the national average, you accepted me anyways. While other prestigious colleges might have seen me as a high risk statistic, you saw me as an individual with human dignity.”

In a similar vein, the language on Hillsdale’s Mission page is almost eerie in the way it seems to have anticipated the rise of BLM: “The College values the merit of each unique individual, rather than succumbing to the dehumanizing, discriminatory trend of so-called ‘social justice’ and ‘multicultural diversity,’ which judges individuals not as individuals, but as members of a group and which pits one group against other competing groups.”

And what is the purpose of Black Lives Matter if not to pit one group against all others?