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Comment by mustache_kimono | Hacker News Reader

> When I was applying to unis in mainland Europe (because US/UK was too costly) any place below at least a hundred year old was “too nuvo” for my academic taste ;-)

Hillsdale is a college founded expressly to be a conservative alternative to the Ivies/older liberal arts schools. And its graduates have been very influential in the recent American conservative movement.

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Hillsdale college is a fundamentalist Christian college. “Bible is the literal word of god” stuff. Many people there believe the world is 6000 years old and evolution didn’t happen.

Source for that claim? If you had spent half a second researching before blindly launching into “Christians r dum” rhetoric you’d have noticed that they actually teach a course on evolution: https://www.hillsdale.edu/courses/evolution-biological-diver...

My sister went there and her and her friends and their families believe these things.

It is not clear at all from the course description what that course teaches:

"An introduction to the vast diversity of life from prokaryotic forms to the eukaryotic vertebrate mammals. This course introduces the beginning biology student to all the major groups of organisms and to their fundamental taxonomic relationships."

"This vast diversity exists because that's the way God made them" is perfectly compatible with that description.

Also, from the description of an event held April 11, 2025:

"Are the special creation of Adam and Eve and the evolution of humans over millions of years compatible? 100 years after the Scopes Trial, the debate continues."

So "they actually teach a course on evolution" seems to fall well short of a full description of exactly what they teach there.

For comparison's sake, here is a description of a more typical Evolutionary Biology course:

"Emphasizes the fundamental evolutionary concepts that provide explanations for the diversification of life on Earth. Specific topics include the evidence for evolution, adaptation by natural selection, speciation, systematics, molecular and genome evolution, and macroevolutionary patterns and processes."

Need to understand that there are many Christians that are not young earth creationists nor have an with evolution. It is pure materialism that they would have an issue with. Don’t stereotype an entire group of people.

This is a complex topic, as alluded by others here as well. My dad's employer sent him to take an economics course at Hillsdale in the 1980s. I attended college at a Christian liberal arts school around the same time. Reaganomics and the Moral Majority were in their ascendance. As a freshman, I took Econ 101, and it was taught from what the professor called a "Christian economics" perspective, which was essentially Reaganomics. We even learned the Laffer Curve. I learned a pro tip, which is that professors with a strong ideological bias tend to be easy graders, because they want to be liked. The course was fluff.

"Fundamentalism" was getting a lot of buzz during that time, and I remember my fellow freshmen debating whether their sect was "fundamentalist" or not. On the other hand, the biology department taught straight-up evolution with no religious disclaimers, and no objections from the college administration. If there were any objections, it was from a handful of students.

What it suggests to me is that the actual character of an officially Christian college can defy expectations, conflict with the technicalities of official doctrine, and change over time. My own rule, which I think is fair to everybody, is to avoid speculating about anybody's religious beliefs unless they actually say what they are, and then, it's whatever they want.

I think the fundamentalist Christian radicalism is more a comorbidity of the West Coast Straussian obsession of the place than a primary focus; nonetheless, the school is pretty much the funnel into the DC Trump echelons, and the students are politically radicalized to the degree one would expect from a Liberty or a Bob Jones, rather than, say, a GMU or even Washington-Lee. (It also has essentially zero STEM footprint — I believe one, maybe two comp sci professors, for example — and its liberal arts curriculum is, to put it mildly, somewhat outside the mainstream of every discipline represented.)

I mentioned that part about my own country. I think it was not clear. I’ll try to edit. (Edit: it is clear)

> Hillsdale is a college founded expressly to be a conservative alternative to the Ivies/older liberal arts schools.

This is not correct. Hillsdale was founded in 1844 at a time when the contemporary so-called "conservative" movement in the US didn't even exist.

> This is not correct.

Oops this is my mistake. I shouldn't have said founded when I didn't actually know. These days it is at the very least marketed as such. A conservative alternative to...

Hillsdale was co-oped in living memory to be an expressly conservative liberal arts school. Not the kind of place the values freedom of expression.

Can you show where they don't value freedom of expression?

Are departments free to implement DEI for their hiring a Hillsdale? How many Hillsdale presentations begin with a land acknowledgment? Would it be allowed?

You made an assertion and it appears you cannot back it up. Asking a bunch of irrelevant questions isn’t helping your case much.

By the way, I have a sincere question about land acknowledgments. How far do they go back? For example, should the Comanche do land acknowledgments for the Apaches? Are the descendants of Vikings responsible for land acknowledgments to the British whom they conquered?

Should modern Mexicans start their speeches with land acknowledgments to the Maya, Inca, and other Mestizo Indians? Indians and Mayans committed genocide at a big scale. Should their descendants be responsible for land acknowledgments?

I would say it is exactly the opposite. Most other universities have given up freedom of expression. You would be far freer at Hillsdale than most universities.

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