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| Hillsdale College |
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| Hillsdale College |
My wife Andrée and I attended a week’s worth of classes related to the U.S. Constitution from June 23 to June 28 offered at Hillsdale College. The classes, a rare treat, were taught by four of Hillsdale’s accomplished professors: Paul Rahe, Will Morrisey, John Grant, and Joseph Postell, all of them sitting comfortably on the shoulders of the intellectual and philosophical giants to whom we owe the creation of the American Republic and its precocious child, the U.S. Constitution.
Hillsdale offers courses to the
general public and distributes its newsletter Imprimis at no cost to the reader.
I’ve long regarded Imprimis as an indispensable tool in managing mentally our
bewildering postmodern age.
The
college was also offering a like course on Literature from Athens to Oak Park,
Illinois, the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway. The literature professor, Whalen
Gillespie, conducted a pocket class during which anyone was able to question
him on any literary subject. I was able to put to him a question that had
tormented me for years: Given what Shakespeare had written concerning the monarchy
in his plays, not all of it flattering to monarchical rule, how was he able to
escape hanging?
Gillespie’s
answer was full of enticing historical details touching on recusancy, Ben
Johnson, a playwright and promoter of Shakespeare, and the bard’s character,
very different from that of Johnson, whose words and actions tended to be
flamboyant.
Shakespeare,
on the other hand was convivial, witty, and, if the questioner will forgive the
assessment, sly in the matter of social convention, politics and religion.
There
is good deal of evidence to suggest that Shakespeare’s father was a recusant
Catholic, and little and some disputed historical evidence to show that Will
Shakespeare was in this regard a chip off his father’s block.
Ben
Johnson was for a time boisterously rebellious, a recusant Catholic who declined
to pay a fine levied against those in Queen Elizabeth’s kingdom who did not
attend services at a state approved Anglican Church.
But
one day Johnson changed his mind. Imagine the scene: the church doors burst
open, Johnson marched down the aisle, grabbed the chalice and, with one gulp,
downed it, signaling his acceptance of the new orthodoxy. Naturally, fines
against him were lifted.
“Shakespeare,”
Gillespie said, “was not like that.”
The seminars
on Constitutional issues were highly detailed, and stress was laid upon the
differences of a Constitutional order and a progressive rendering of the
American experiment.
Despite
the efforts of progressive President Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president of the
United States (1913–21), to treat the U.S. Constitution as a species of
statutory law – rather than a form of governance – the United States will
celebrate the 250th birth of the nation in two short years.
That
celebration started at the foundation of Hillsdale College in 1844. The twin
mottos of Hillsdale College -- “virtus tentamine gaudet,” (strength
rejoices in the challenge) and "pursuing truth and defending liberty,
since 1844” – are well chosen. Travelling about the campus, one encounters
undefiled statues of The Young Soldier, dedicated in 1895 to honor Hillsdale’s
soldiers who fought in the Civil War to end slavery and reinstitute a broken
union, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln,
Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, and even Ronald Reagan, found,
appropriately, at Hillsdale’s Shooting Range.
Cardinal
Newman says somewhere that 1) to know and 2) to know
that one knows are two entirely different things. Following a true
classical liberal arts education, to which Hillsdale is passionately devoted, a
student will both know and know that he knows. His or her knowledge will be a
lifelong bulwark against slovenly thought, always the enemy of liberty and
justice. Hillsdale’s classical liberal arts education is one of the most
comprehensive offered anywhere in the United States, largely because of the
quality and dedication of its staff.
It is
impossible in such a short review as this to touch on all the courses we
hungrily devoured during our stay. The four professors presented us with a
small “r” republican review of governance from Greece and Rome to the
postmodern period. Classes were relatively brief, about an hour and a half.
There were four classes a day with each of the above-named professors, and the
course on “Constitutional Issues and Controversies” lasted from June 23 through
June 28.
The
meals we were served at Hillsdale, I should mention, were various and superb, a
reminder that the way to a married couple’s heart and mind is through their
stomachs. Hillsdale is very big on marriage, child upbringing, and lifesaving
and rewarding intellectual labor. At Hillsdale “Learning, Character, Faith, and
Freedom” are the indispensable building blocks of a sound Republic. Everyone at
Hillsdale is mindful of the admonition given by Benjamin Franklin to Mrs.
Elizabeth Powel when she asked him, following the conclusion of the
Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in September 1787, “Sir, what have you
given us?”
“A
Republic, madam – if you can keep it,” Franklin responded.
It is
much easier to keep the American Republic than to reinvent an alternative.
Joseph Postell, Associate Professor of Politics
at Hillsdale College, is keenly aware of the possibility of losing the American
Republic to slovenly intellectual and moral re-inventers of the American
Republic who could not find Hillsdale College on a Michigan map. Hint:
It’s in Hillsdale.
Postell’s
most recent book is Bureaucracy in America: The Administrative State’s
Challenge to Constitutional Government.
The
course ended for us with Postell’s final presentation on the perils of the
administrative state, during which Postell launched a vigorous attack on the
father of American Progressivism, Woodrow Wilson, an academic egghead before he
entered the White House.
Wilson
laid the groundwork for the progressive reinterpretation of the Constitution in
“What is Progress?”, a campaign speech he delivered in 1912 in which he prayed to the progressive gods to deliver the nation
from Newtonian theory, the checks and balances of the Constitution, and the
principal outworn political theories of John Locke and Montesquieu.
The
non-mechanical universe is guided by the Darwinian theory of an organic, living
universe, Wilson spouted. Checks and balances prevent organic development, and
“Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and practice …
All that progressives ask or desire is permission -- in an era when
‘development,’ ‘evolution’ is the scientific word – to interpret the
Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition
of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.”
There
is, Postell asserted, a direct and causative line from Wilsonian Constitutional
reinterpretation to our postmodern, unrestrained, progressive
Leviathan. Unchecked organic growth in the absence of restraint has
led to a moral and political universe that has more in common with Thomas
Hobbes than Darwin. And in the Hobbesian universe, life is “Solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short.”
The
absence of moral and political checks and balances, however mechanical, leads
to a progressive, self-mutating political structure in which decisive political
decisions are made not by an enlightened president, or even by enlightened
academics like Wilson. Instead, important economic and cultural decisions are
fashioned by an ever growing, organic, unrestrained and unelected
administrative state such as prevailed in a shattered Roman Republic under
Suetonius’ twelve Caesars.
Hours
after we returned home, the Supreme Court, in a masterful decision, clipped the
wings of audacious progressives and returned the authority to make laws where
they belonged – to a timid and occasionally cowardly legislative branch. A
constitutionally conscious Supreme Court struck down a 1984 decision, Chevron
v. Natural Resources Defense Council that had established what had
come to be called the “Chevron deference”, after which, according to Forbes Media, “Government entities went on a
binge of creating rules and regulations that were hard to challenge in court.
Now the Supreme Court has resuscitated Article III of the Constitution, which
says the courts are supposed to handle cases or controversies that arise from
federal law. The ruling made the sharp distinction between agency expertise in,
say, the specifics of airline safety, versus interpreting laws, which is up to
the judiciary.”
Future U.S. Congresses will find it more difficult on the heels of that decision to farm out its constitutionally balanced legislative powers to a wildly ungoverned organic administrative state.
Postell
will be pleased.
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