"who threatens the most?": lunch & lecture with Hillsdale's Larry Arnn
Thanks for visiting Narrative Nation! Some of the material I post in this column will be incorporated into the book I’m developing with the working title “Loads of Heresy”: Far Right Revisions of the American Narrative.
Last week I attended a lunch-and-lecture primarily intended for Hillsdale College donors. The Jacksonville, Florida event was part of Hillsdale’s winter fundraising tour and included a planned giving session followed by a luncheon with a prayer, pledge, promo video featuring celebrity shill Pat Sajak, and a long lecture from College President Larry Arnn entitled “Education and Politics.”
There was a lot to take in, but my post today focuses primarily on the theme of destroying good things.
“we’re the important one”
Hillsdale is a conservative private college founded in Michigan in 1844. It accepts no government funding and does not allow students to use government aid for the hefty tuition. This means Hillsdale is supported by (and answers to) America’s most conservative, libertarian, anti-government factions and does not need to comply with standard practices designed to achieve equity and diversity in hiring and admission. Its curriculum centers the white, Western, Christian, classical, and traditional male experience. Though it’s a small college with an enrollment of under 2000, Hillsdale’s influence increases every year through its Barney Charter Initiative—a free curriculum now used in public “classical education” charter schools and private schools all over the country—in addition to their widely-distributed free online courses for adults. Hillsdale graduates conditioned to this narrow worldview go on to populate conservative think tanks, firms, and organizations around the country.
Over lunch in one of the ballrooms at the Hyatt in downtown Jacksonville, Larry P. Arnn, president of the college for the last 12 years, arrogantly reminded a room full of donors,
“I think there are four or five colleges that don’t take any money from the government, and we’re the important one.”
Unfortunately it’s true. Hillsdale is at the center of a much larger, long-range movement to inculcate anti-progressive, anti-government, anti-civil rights, libertarian, and Christian nationalist values in what Arnn projects will be “tens of millions” of American students. Arnn envisions Hillsdale at the helm of a “Great Awakening” of Christian governance in America.
“What should I blow up?”
The tone was set when a guy warming up for Arnn mentioned their previous stop near “the newly named Gulf of America.” This smug and satisfied nod to Trump’s recent jingo intimidation met with general laughter and applause from the audience of over 200 people, as did Arnn’s own quips about the “51st state” and taking over Greenland.
Arnn’s long lecture was filled with ridiculous comments and warped narratives, much of which I expected. But during the Q&A session he said something that kind of surprised me:
“I can make a bomb. What should I blow up with it? Or not? “
It’s quite a thing to say, but let me clarify. No, Larry P. Arnn is not planning to make a bomb. But he does think it’s pretty cool to talk about wrecking things in his cocky, adolescent “who’s gonna stop me from being so outrageous” kind of way.
The immediate context was a question from an audience member planted at the front table. Michael, a high schooler accepted for admission to the college next semester, asked President Arnn what he should say to “friends who are more concerned with their careers than with their educations.” At that, Arnn sprung into the contemporary obsession with STEM in education, with India as his example of all that’s wrong. Learning to make bombs was Arnn’s counterpoint to the fruits of a humanistic education at places like Hillsdale and the “classical academies” he spent a good part of the talk praising.
It was jarring to see Arnn go straight to bombs when reaching for an example. But that was not terribly out of place in what felt like a pep rally before ”laying siege on the institutions,” as Christopher Rufo, another Hillsdale employee and the Desantis-appointed chair of the New College board, has encouraged the far right to systematically do.
As the Trump juggernaut rumbles toward us, we’ve seen some faultlines about immigration visas, but one thing the coalition of libertarian billionaires and Christian nationalists gaining power in this country seem to agree on is dismantling public education. The Department of Education and its DEI initiatives are their most important targets.
Arnn’s mocking description of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) was the typical far-right effort to make progressive policies and concepts appear amorphous and nonsensical. His supposed assessment of a complex but easily explainable set of principles was really only a list of rhetorical questions:
“What do the most say? Who shouts the most? Who threatens the most?”
This is not an explanation or an argument, but the audience nodded along as if a point had been made. This was much like the audience I witnessed last summer at the Moms for Liberty summit, breaking their necks to confirm PragerU CEO Marissa Streit’s evidence-free claims about the school system attacking children.
Lack of supporting evidence is, as we hear often enough in discussions of far- right strategy, part of the design and not the flaw. By avoiding or banning discussion of the causes of inequity, conservatives have been successful in spreading confusion about American history and suspicion of basic American institutions and the people who work in them (e.g., teachers and poll workers).
An irony that matters here is the level of “threat” signaled and approved by Arnn himself throughout his talk. Of course we are accustomed to such tiresome projection from the far right, accusing the left of all the indoctrination, social destruction, and political violence they’ve so carefully engineered themselves over the last 60 years and more.
Arnn flippantly joked about destroying the Department of Education and anything else he deemed as “unconstitutional.” Suggesting that a building’s architectural beauty can tell us about the legitimacy of the government departments housed within it, he made these three childish observations:
“The capitol is very beautiful.”
“The D.O.E. is very ugly.”
“Unconstitutional things are all in ugly buildings.”
None of it makes very good sense. He likes to say the D.O.E. is “unconstitutional” because the Constitution does not specifically call for this federal department. But the legal argument has been made enough times, and we can understand that the 14th Amendment’s protection clause provides the constitutionality of this department. Arnn must know that he’s conflating something that runs against a constitutional principle with something that could be allowed under the constitution but was not developed and named at the time of its writing (such as this, the creation of a federal department to satisfy the requirements of an amendment).
But pleased with himself on his perch, he went on like a bore making sure his audience got the joke: see, he prodded, “the D.O.E. looks like a bureau.” It looks like it has “cubbyholes,” like an old desk. It would have helped to show a picture of the building on the projection screen, but Arnn is so obsessed with destroying the Department that he assumed everyone else in the room knew the building. Here it is:
Sure, the building’s exterior has the look of “cubbyholes.” We see. Because the building matters so much to Arnn, let’s take a moment to appreciate it.
The Lyndon Baines Johnson Building on Maryland Avenue is an important part of D.C.’s architectural history and represents a change in the way federal buildings were created. Constructed from 1959-1961, this example of International Modernism played an important role in the city’s urban renewal. Originally called Federal Office Building #6 (FOB6), it was in fact the first of nine “FOB”s built in the 60s and 70s that were not designed and decorated for any particular department, as had been the tradition for government buildings in the capital before that time. The first agencies housed in FOB6 were NASA (obviously much smaller at the time) and HEW (the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare before it was split into the HHS and the DOE we have today). In 2007, George Bush renamed the building after President Johnson.
Arnn hates these facts, of course. These buildings were designed as functional and versatile spaces where the work of a huge country could be done. They are modern in style instead of the neoclassical and colonial styles he would prefer to look upon and that remind him of The Founders. But, though he’s supposed to be in charge of a place of humanistic education, his best and only word for an architectural classic is “ugly.” That’s so telling.
“helping to destroy”
After hating on a building, Arnn revealed the next step in his manifest-destiny narrative: now, with the incoming Trump administration and the help of bad actors like Musk, there is “a resolute attempt underway to drain the swamp.” We heard this promise/threat last time, and that well-worn phrase is also the title of Arnn’s editorial in the recent issue of Hillsdale’s newsletter, Imprimis, where he makes a case for the second Trump administration’s opportunity to severely diminish the progressive “administrative state.”
Supposedly, shrinking the government will be overseen by the new entity known as D.O.G.E., the Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk (and Vivek Ramaswamy, who I’ll just quietly stash in these parentheses because he simply never came up). Arnn told Hillsdale investors where he puts his own money, supporting Trump’s ridiculous new “department” and Musk’s private empire in more than words:
“I’m so excited about the D.O.G.E. that I’ve purchased a Cybertruck.”
While Arnn conceded “it is ugly”—a theme with him—he also blushed that, compared to other electric trucks on the market, “this one looks manly.” It seems that the little-known law of the bad container, whereby “unconstitutional” departments occupy “ugly” structures, does not translate to vehicles made by certain companies. In the case of the Cybertruck, a different universal principle is applied whereby manliness compensates for ugliness.
But, as he stated, Arnn’s own reason to buy is strictly political. Recalling a supposed conversation with a friend who suggested he get a higher quality electric vehicle from another company, Arnn regaled us with this clever response:
“Is the owner of that other brand helping to destroy the bureaucracy?"
A broad coalition of bad actors on the far-right has been working to bring the country to a halt for a long time now, and the speed of their operation stands to pick up precipitously when Trump takes the office next week. While Arnn repeatedly told us he’s “met Musk a few times” and thinks he’s “weird,” he also supports Musk because Musk can wreck all the stuff.
Running a small Christian college is just not that cool compared to the guy with the trucks and a bunch a kids with different women, or the pussy-grabbing gangster who got shot on TV and has 34 felonies. But now Larry can go to the big inauguration and represent with the crew. The overgrown child with a microphone standing before us announced,
“I’m taking my Cybertruck to DC and driving it around so everyone knows where I stand! “
That was January 9th. I don’t know how Trump’s recently-announced plans to have the inauguration indoors will impact Larry’s plans to show off his giant Matchbox car. Think of this! Maybe this president of a Christian college, who thinks everything should be handled privately and government assistance is a sham, will offer his personal truck as a mobile warming station for some of the capital city’s less fortunate residents who need to get off those freezing streets for a few minutes. “So everyone knows where he stands” on the brotherly love thing. Nah.
Arnn will not be showing any concern for the distribution of the country’s wealth and opportunity. When I saw him, he was on tour hyping up donors about the chance thatWeird Elon and the D.O.G.E. could demolish a department that oversees federal programs protecting against discrimination under Title IX, as well as those managing the equitable distribution of federal funds under Title I.
I certainly haven’t heard of any plans to destroy the Lyndon Baines Johnson building if Trump fulfills his threat to close the department, but in December the libertarian CATO Institute published a long “Report to the D.O.G.E.” encouraging privatization wherever possible, including massive sell-offs of federally-owned land and buildings. Of course some obsolete holdings should routinely be sold, but if the Department of Education is shut down as part of Trump’s anti-education, anti-government agenda, we have to wonder about the fate of this historic Federal Office Building, the first of its kind.
Imagine the Lyndon Baines Johnson Building sold to a mysterious private company and re-opening in two years as Elon Lofts—soon enough for Musk to announce a 2028 presidential run in there, on an unbulletproof escalator built from the side panels of unsold Cybertrucks. This is where my mind goes while I sit in some of these far-right events without a kindred soul to the left or the right.
“a society of volunteers”
Arnn’s generally cocky and childish comportment was accompanied by more disturbing commentary. Describing the Hillsdale campus as “a society of volunteers,” he smiled about how uncomfortable he can make things for students. Michael, our prospective student in the front row, was warned to expect random attacks of intellectual bullying from the faculty and often from the college president himself.
Arnn grossly bragged that he’s “a very powerful college president” who derives his authority from everyone there—not through daily affirmation of true leadership, but through a “consent form” everyone signs upon admittance. He felt very clever connecting Hillsdale’s consent process to that sacred covenant described in the Declaration of Independence: consent of the governed. But every example I heard of what “the governed” (college students) would “consent” to seemed to be Arnn’s control and the dismissal of personal choice and development.
Seeming to look at Michael’s mother Jennifer, seated by her son, Arnn ominously said, “My authority over Michael will come from that signature.” Then a disturbing segué brought us back to Elon Musk. After announcing to the crowd that “Jennifer only has two children” (!), he said of Musk,
“He’s telling us all to have babies, and I repeat the advice.”
The demographic crisis of rich countries is a something Musk is known to be obsessed with (and doing his best to solve personally), and childbirth mandates are also an increasing part of white Christian nationalist ideology. Though the audience response to this comment was pretty muted, Hillsdale’s general “father knows best” and “spare the rod” (even if not a literal rod) paradigm seemed to go over well with this crowd.
Before Arnn began speaking that day, we watched a long promo claiming to explain the four pillars of Hillsdale—“Learning, Character, Faith, and Freedom.” In the film, Arnn comments that bringing people from the age of 18 to 21 is unpleasant for everyone involved. The audience loved that negative take on young people as well as the general dismissal of their need to navigate some things independently. Arnn confidently remarked that students don’t deserve choices because they don’t know enough to make their own decisions.
I thought of someone else I’ve been writing about recently, Mark Bauerlein, author of the disdainful bookThe Dumbest Generation . . . (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). Bauerlein, who joined Christopher Rufo on the conservative Christian board of trustees for New College of Florida about a year ago, was a proponent of removing the gender studies program and has participated in national initiatives that would effectively limit high school literature studies to pre-1960s material.
Some former Hillsdale students selected for the promo were a bit unsettling. Though smiling, they often focus on the suffering and pain of their experiences, especially in the first two years. Traumatic laughter is followed by reassurances that it’s the best thing that ever happened to them. The emphasis on childbirth is also part of it—about half of the students profiled in the film met their spouses at Hillsdale, and one is shown heavily pregnant, carrying on the tradition. At the Moms for Liberty rally I wrote about recently, Marissa Streit complained that kids are being taught at colleges to marry their jobs and “corporations” instead.
Some recent graduates in the film say that after a few years at Hillsdale, they were no longer the same person. That’s what I’m afraid of.
And you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here?
I scored an invitation to this event because I’ve been taking the free Hillsdale College online courses for the last year or so. Researching for my book, I pick through the classes and quizzes and receive their widely-read newsletter. So on January 9th I tried again to figure out the curling iron, grabbed my little Constitution and the latest issue of Imprimis, and headed to the riverfront Hyatt.
I arrived at the end of the fundraising session to blend into the lunch and lecture. Attendees, mostly over 65, gathered around the reception tables to be validated via preprinted lanyard and then file into the ballroom where the requisite grilled chicken salads with balsamic and chocolate mousse were waiting.
Before the speaker started, I made pleasant enough conversation with my table mates. An older couple had driven down from one of the Georgia barrier islands for this. The man, who seemed to have been born into his untailored navy blazer, joked that he’s not used to dressing up since he retired. His wife’s dry and practiced rejoinder was the sound of rich people all over: true, if we didn’t have to attend a funeral every week. They revealed only enough to clarify their status: they had visited the Hillsdale campus in Michigan more than once and were satisfied with the morning session’s advice on restructuring their annuities. Or something.
The Christian-counselor type dad across the table, a more middle-class fellow, brought his two high-school daughters who’ve already started taking some of the online classes. He told us about a Biblically-based version of the Boy Scouts he’s involved in and a white water rafting trip, and then I engaged the kids about the Hillsdale class on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol until the event began.
The girls, who are homeschooled, seem to have enjoyed their classes about music history and literature, but they’re not sure where they’d really like to attend college. One blurted out she had no idea what was going on so far that day. But perhaps the day’s event provided a little more clarity about their choice. I hope so. I hope they heard the same things I heard, Arnn’s weird controlling comments about Michael, and the disturbing undertone of the students in the promotional film.
I began this rather long piece with Arnn’s exaggerated contrast between learning to make bombs and studying texts of the classical European tradition. I’ll end with one more example of the alternate reality at this type of event. Here is how Arnn compared students at another private college to the joyful contractually-governed students of Hillsdale. “The kids at Harvard,” he told us,
“they’re not happy because there isn’t actually anything to do except rant.”
Amazing. As a recovering architecture student, "law of the bad container" had me in stitches.
This stuff is happening increasingly openly. The New College thing was almost two years ago now. It was stunning, astonishing, infuriating. Now it's seemingly an expected Florida practice. I admire the lengths that you will go to in order to bring this first-hand observation. Impressive, Dr. Jeffries. Who do they think that you are? Do you engage? I try to imagine the scene in the room, your demeanor as you're sitting there. As a playwright, I can't help it :)