I like American higher education. I don’t like how disconnected it has become to the day-to-day lives of most Americans. I don’t like how it has become overwhelmingly politically one-sided. I don’t like that that one-sidedness has led to professors moving from teaching students to learn to inculcating and indoctrinating them. I don’t like how expensive it has become.

On the other hand, I consider the Trump administration’s attack on many of the most elite schools counterproductive to reforming them. I don’t think it’s achieving what it wants and I think it’s undermining one of this nation’s most valuable assets.

What’s motivating its actions? What are its vision and strategies?

I last looked to answer such questions when I learned of the Leadership Institute. I took several of its courses, including Conservatism 101, which led me to read and watch dozens of basic sources on conservative thought. I had grown up with liberal parents in schools with mostly liberal cultures, and had never looked at conservatism from its own principles. You can see many of the sources I read and watched here.

Recently I learned of Hillsdale College, which collaborated with the Heritage Foundation on Project 2025—a vision and policy statement describing many things the administration is doing, including its actions with higher education.

So I decided to take its courses and learn from them their views and motivations. I finished its flagship course Constitution 101: The Meaning and History of the Constitution. People who oppose its actions might say “Don’t work with them. They’re causing the problems.”

Well, how do you expect to influence them if you don’t know what’s motivating them? They aren’t fools. They are acting for reasons that make sense to them. Beyond not hiding them, they’re making them available for free in online courses that are well produced and easy and convenient to take from the comfort of your home.

I’m trying to understand people on their own terms. People have a hard time understanding that understanding someone doesn’t mean agreeing with or supporting. This point is so important and in my experience so misunderstood, I’ll repeat it: People have a hard time understanding that understanding someone doesn’t mean agreeing with or supporting. I’m trying to understand people I don’t yet understand. I have no problem learning from them.

Are you more open to influence from people who understand you or people who don’t?

From people who speak your language or those who call you names?

From people who acknowledge your values or those who try to impose theirs on you?

Here’s my certificate for passing the course:

I found the course informative. Much of it presented what I think most people would consider neutral historical facts without much editorializing. Still, its choice of what it presented showed a strong concern for the results of the Progressive Era and the New Left from the 1960s, what it saw as moves away from government by the consent of the governed in favor of people proclaimed as experts deciding what was best for the governed. It covered many other things.

I’ve heard people who describe themselves as progressive say things like, “Those Trump supporters feel like if things don’t work for them, they might as well burn it all down.” Those views seem devoid of empathy, compassion, or any attempt to understand them on their terms. I hear Trump supporters say things about progressives equally lacking empathy, compassion, and understanding too. In neither case do I think one group understands the others. Yet they each want to be understood.

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For background for those who don’t know Hillsdale, here is Wikipedia’s description:

Hillsdale College is a private, conservative, Christian liberal arts college in Hillsdale, Michigan, United States. It was founded in 1844 by members of the Free Will Baptists. Women were admitted to the college in 1844, making the college the second-oldest coeducational institution in the United States. Hillsdale’s required core curriculum includes courses on the Great Books, the U.S. Constitution, theology, biology, chemistry, and physics.

Wikipedia noted Hillsdale’s role in Project 2025:

Hillsdale College is a member of the advisory board of Project 2025, a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals from The Heritage Foundation to reshape the United States federal government and consolidate executive power since Trump won the 2024 presidential election.

Quoting Hillsdale in its own words:

Hillsdale College is an independent institution of higher learning founded in 1844 by men and women “grateful to God for the inestimable blessings” resulting from civil and religious liberty and “believing that the diffusion of learning is essential to the perpetuity of these blessings.” It pursues the stated object of the founders: “to furnish all persons who wish, irrespective of nation, color, or sex, a literary, scientific, [and] theological education” outstanding among American colleges “and to combine with this such moral and social instruction as will best develop the minds and improve the hearts of its pupils.” As a nonsectarian Christian institution, Hillsdale College maintains “by precept and example” the immemorial teachings and practices of the Christian faith.

The College also considers itself a trustee of our Western philosophical and theological inheritance tracing to Athens and Jerusalem, a heritage finding its clearest expression in the American experiment of self-government under law.

By training the young in the liberal arts, Hillsdale College prepares students to become leaders worthy of that legacy. By encouraging the scholarship of its faculty, it contributes to the preservation of that legacy for future generations. By publicly defending that legacy, it enlists the aid of other friends of free civilization and thus secures the conditions of its own survival and independence.

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EDIT, July 26, 2025: My second Hillsdale course certificate, for Introduction to the Constitution:

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EDIT, August 3, 2025, My third Hillsdale course certificate, for Marxism, Socialism, and Communism:

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EDIT: December 2, 2025, I finished Constitution 201:

• ← I wrote a poem: The Poem of the High-Fiber Diet (trigger warning: juvenile humor)
• This week’s selected media, June 2025: Thomas Jefferson and The Choice →