Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, talks about his vision for the future of the college and what it means to be a college. Dr. Arnn also talks about the founding of the College and why it is America's Greatest College.
00:00:43.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:01:59.000It's great for many reasons, also thanks to your leadership.
00:02:03.000But speak about the, is it the bylaws or the constitution of the college is rather short.
00:02:09.000It's not a big administrative document.
00:02:11.000No, it's from 1844. The people who started Hillsdale College were preachers on the frontier from New England, and they were classically educated.
00:02:22.000You had to know Latin and Greek to enter the college in 1844, and they were patriotic, learned Americans.
00:02:34.000So the document begins, the nomination of Christians known as Free Will Baptist, along with other friends of education grateful to God for the prevalence in the land of civil and religious freedom and intelligent piety.
00:02:49.000Believing sound learning is necessary to preserve these, hereby endow it.
00:02:54.000So we exist to provide sound learning in support of civil and religious freedom, which is America's gift to the world, by the way, and God's gift to America and America's gift to the world, and intelligent piety.
00:03:07.000Those are the purposes of Hillsdale College.
00:03:10.000What makes your college different than just the everyday college?
00:03:14.000If you were to walk around Hillsdale, which I have, I sense it, I feel it.
00:03:19.000How do you do this in practice differently?
00:03:22.000Well, first of all, it's not part of the national maw of a system today.
00:03:30.000We don't take the money from the government, which money carries several hundred pages of rules that are impenetrable and difficult to even follow, even understand.
00:03:48.000The reason Hillsdale gets on and proceeds is because to come to Hillsdale College in any capacity, you must make a commitment to the founding mission of the college.
00:03:59.000You must believe, you must agree that the college has a right to pursue the mission, and you will help it.
00:04:18.000And so that means that we, you know, the first line of Aristotle's politics is, every community is formed for the sake of some good, right?
00:04:27.000Well, we have a good that we're formed for, and we follow it.
00:07:06.000So, now that we've defined what education is, and we could talk at length about how incredible Hillsdale is, let's talk about the Department of Education.
00:07:53.000Well, it does, actually, at the beginning of Article I, Section 8. But if the general welfare clause meant that, then the rest of Article I, Section 8 would be redundant.
00:08:06.000So, yet, in the summer that they were writing the Constitution of the United States, they were passing the Northwest Ordinance, which is one of the four organic laws of the United States, and it gave one 64th of the western lands in the Northwest Territory, reserved for only one public purpose, education in each township.
00:08:32.000Now, that meant that the federal government and the biggest asset it ever owned supported education through the states.
00:08:41.000That's the constitutional arrangement.
00:08:43.000It's not that education is not important.
00:11:59.000The whole government of the United States is radically top-heavy and expensive.
00:12:05.000And so education is a great place to start in reforming that because of the nature of education itself, which is you don't need a lot of bureaucracy to run it.
00:13:50.000And so in a free society, things work from the bottom up and people are responsible for themselves because you have to locate authority and responsibility together.
00:14:02.000And so if you move authority to a central place, people lose responsibility for their lives.
00:14:09.000If you return authority to them, They must accept responsibility for their lives, and then they can live as free people.
00:14:21.000And from my understanding of what you've taught me and Hillsdale online courses have taught me, which people should check out, charlieforhillsdale.com, there was an inflection point.
00:14:30.000Woodrow Wilson, who was a historicist, we don't have to go too far in that direction, but this was all happening simultaneously with John Dewey and the change of our view of education.
00:14:40.000Can you speak to how The administrative state was born in practice during that period of time, and we're almost now fighting the 110-year hangover war in 2025. But that simultaneously was happening as we got derailed of what education actually is as well.
00:15:15.000The purpose of learning or knowledge or reason is not to know, but to make.
00:15:23.000And so we're going to remake the society.
00:15:27.000When he's president at Princeton, Woodrow Wilson said that his object was to make the young men, his men back then, of Princeton as little like their fathers as possible.
00:17:14.000Whereas, just, you know, I was told when I went to work at Hillsdale College, we don't take the money from the government so we don't have to find the sign or abide by the various federal titles.
00:17:24.000And I asked a lawyer, education lawyer, I said, why don't you send me Title IV of the Higher Education Act?
00:17:33.000I was curious, you know, what is it we escape by not taking this money?
00:20:33.000But I read a long article by a highly intelligent man about him the other day, and I said, oh yeah, I see.
00:20:42.000That's what N.C. Soros, that's what he's doing to our country.
00:20:47.000He's going to undermine our attachments.
00:20:52.000And that means the worst thing in the world is for somebody to get elected president on the ground that he's going to work on his country first.
00:21:02.000Because we're not supposed to have a country.
00:21:04.000Because then we'll have wars, you know.
00:21:07.000But the purpose of the country, by the way, is to protect us.
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00:22:18.000Have we ever seen anything like this, this Doge thing?
00:22:23.000I can't think of a single movement in politics that I have seen that is as important or skillful.
00:22:32.000And even the skillful part, I mean, first of all, to make it the center, you know, Donald Trump, first of all, I met Donald Trump for the first time in...
00:22:45.000Early 2015. Astonished myself by deciding to take him seriously.
00:22:54.000Because before, you know, I thought what everybody thought about him.
00:24:07.000And the plan, I happen to know at the time, Because I knew Don Rumsfeld very well and admired him very much, was to go over there and get them, light force, use their enemies against each other, kill them and get out.
00:24:38.000But then to stay and build a democracy there and in Iraq, I believe, what information I've learned, that they decided that after the fact, right?
00:24:50.000Which means they don't quite understand how politics works or how democracy is built, in my opinion.
00:24:57.000Yeah, so, but, you know, that's one reason why it's good for a person, if he's going to be a citizen in a free country, To be a student and learn a bunch of stuff.
00:26:05.000Can Churchill teach us about foreign policy?
00:26:09.000Well, you know, we've gotten a lot of things wrong about Churchill in both directions.
00:26:14.000We think that Churchill is for war and Churchill is for winning war but avoiding it at possible and winning it at the most economical possible cost.
00:26:27.000And now we think that some people are arguing Churchill caused the Second World War.
00:26:42.000And so that means that we've now made both mistakes.
00:26:46.000We thought Winston Churchill, you know, I happen to know that people in power thought that Winston Churchill was their example for building democracy in Iraq.
00:27:02.000It's just a factual point that he was, in fact, in charge of Iraq at the end of the First World War and for three years, and that his plan was to cut the cost of being there and get out of there as quick as he could.
00:28:14.000The only way to prevent it, and there's no perfect way, is to be in a position to win it at the cheapest possible cost.
00:28:23.000And the reason for that is only a fool, no classic philosopher.
00:28:30.000Thinks that the purpose of politics is to win war.
00:28:35.000They all think, and the founders of America thought, and every sensible person thinks, that the purpose of war is to preserve freedom and peace in politics.
00:28:45.000And that means you do as little of it as you must.
00:28:48.000And you spend as little on it as you have to.
00:28:51.000And that means you need to be efficient about it.
00:28:54.000And you may have to spend a very great deal.
00:28:59.000You regret it and look for a way to stop.
00:29:02.000And that whole thing that, you know, there's a national greatness movement.
00:29:08.000Winston Churchill would not be a good leader of such a movement because he thought the greatness of Britain was in its protection of its people.
00:29:17.000And so, yeah, so I argued those things.
00:29:21.000I've written a book to argue those things.
00:29:28.000And, you know, I'm not immune to it either, probably, except that I've just made a series of propositions and I think I can prove them, have labored to prove them.
00:29:38.000There's a tendency to use all kinds of information, including about things in the past, for a purpose alien to them.
00:29:48.000And that's because, and all humans have that, of course we have that.
00:32:50.000So when the war broke out, the Second World War actually broke out over German and Soviet invasion of Poland, and Britain declared war on September 3, 1939, because of that thing.
00:33:06.000And then they took no step, no serious step anyway, to actually defend Poland, because they couldn't even get there.
00:33:14.000And the Soviets and the Germans and the Nazis carved up Poland.
00:33:19.000And now there's a Polish government in exile in London.
00:33:28.000And now he's dealing with the Soviet government in exile.
00:33:31.000And Britain has gone into war over Poland.
00:33:35.000And so he has hours of conversations with him.
00:33:38.000I turn out to be the man who edited those conversations and published them in the document volumes to the official biography.
00:33:45.000And the Polish leaders say, look, we have to confront these Russians before they get after the Battle of Stalingrad.
00:33:52.000Everybody knows the Russians are coming and they're strong, really strong.
00:33:56.000And they say, you've got major forces with Americans in Europe.
00:34:01.000We've got to confront the Russians, the Soviets, not let them take Poland.
00:34:08.000Churchill says, it would be lunacy to think.
00:34:14.000That we will fight the Soviets over Poland.
00:34:19.000What he was for instead was you should give Russia territory in the east and we will give you territory from the Germans in the west and then maybe Stalin will not gobble up Poland.
00:34:40.000And both Yalta and Potsdam, the two...
00:34:42.000Final conferences of the Second World War.
00:34:45.000There was no deal, but Stalin gave, offered, gave guarantees of the free elections with independent international observers in Poland at both those conferences.
00:34:58.000The Potsdam conference was in July 1945, and then the war's over, and in August of 1945, one month over later, he arrested all the Polish leaders and closed Poland.
00:35:13.000And Churchill was not prepared to go to war over that.
00:35:21.000Even with us, because the Soviet Army was very big, and we were busy bringing ours home.
00:35:26.000So the point is, that's not exactly opposite.
00:35:30.000But, you know, it's in the middle of Europe.
00:35:34.000Churchill favored the peripheral strategy, you know, we got a big navy, we can reach the edges of everything.
00:35:40.000If you look at a map of the British Empire, it rings Eurasia, and some in South America, Canada, you know, important place where nobody lives.
00:37:34.000I have been doubtful about us drawing a complete line in Ukraine from the beginning.
00:37:43.000There are some who think, and I don't know the story as well as they, that we could have made a deal with Russia about Ukraine a long time ago if we gave them the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, and that seems to be roughly what Trump is offering.