By Madeline Johnson As I emerged one late-summer morning from a dream about Barack Obama giving a poorly attended talk at Hillsdale, I found my mind (despite the inexplicable dream) perceptibly clearer for having spent the weekend at my parents’ house on the Mississippi. For hours on end a broad, deep sky had flooded my small frame with gold light and heat. The surrounding flora’s … Continue reading Puzzle-solving, Adventure, Discovery: A conversation with Claire Schumock

By Sarah Schweizer It took three summers of living in the town small town of Montagnola, Switzerland, pointing German tourists toward his house at the end of every morning run, and one moment of sheer desperation for me to finally read a book by the German Modernist writer Hermann Hesse. Hesse, I discovered, had influenced the American beat poets in the mid-1900s and somehow avoided … Continue reading Book Review: Siddhartha 

By Noah Weinrich Among the reunited friends and classmates returning to Hillsdale College this fall wanders a strange new social group: a swarm of wide-eyed, eager students commonly referred to as “freshmen.” They explore the campus, taking pictures in front of Ronald Reagan and Central Hall. An investigation into these newcomers has yielded several key statistics: 64% have expressed an intention to major in politics, … Continue reading Satire: Freshman Disorientation

Letter from the Editor In 2003, Hans Zeiger founded a small newspaper at Hillsdale College “To facilitate a forum for Conservative issues in order to stimulate thinking on various aspects of political life.” That newspaper, the Hillsdale Conservative, hoped to combat liberalism across America, and worked with the Hillsdale College Republicans to pursue that goal. When that relationship proved rocky, Zeiger ceded the role of … Continue reading Letter From the Editor, April 2015

“Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair,” Annie Dillard says of writing; reading often has a similar self-propelling precarity to it. Page 271 of the Phenomenology of Perception was one of those diminutive daily passions. Two hundred and seventy pages in, my eyes were crossing as, ironically, they tried to follow a description of … Continue reading Courageous Specialization

February 2015’s issue of The Hillsdale Forum is here. Inside: five essays (including a review), two interviews, a “humor” item, and, least of all, this letter. Briefly, senior Sean Kunath explains why he loves his fountain pens so much (page 10), and Assistant Professor of Education Dr. Jeffrey Lehman explains just a bit of what we talk about when we talk about the liberal arts … Continue reading Letter From the Editor, February 2015