Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry Arnn: If You Appreciate Beauty, You Reject the Woke Left

Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry Arnn appeared on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow on Monday to discuss how his American universities are being destroyed by leftists. According to Arnn, “If you can read something beautiful from the past, if you can appreciate the fact that Shakespeare and Plato are beautiful, you have cut the legs out from under modern liberalism.”

Arnn, president of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, appeared on Breitbart News Daily this week to discuss his approach to leading an institution that refuses to embrace the progressivism that controls most of academia.

Arnn argued that the modern university is failing because professors fear that the leftist student activists will call for their termination if they offer politically incorrect perspectives. To Arnn, universities need to return to their original purpose, expanding young minds by giving them the tools to think for themselves.

“What they are doing is very powerful. And they do dominate on the campuses. There is an article called ‘The Woke Movement at Williams College.’ … Williams College is always the first- or second-ranked liberal arts college in the country, and it’s a fine place,” Arnn said. “But the college is breaking down. Professors are afraid to teach their classes. And that’s because they can be picketed against, and they can be shouted down … so this is extreme. The solution is not to push a bunch of right-wing stuff at people. … The purpose of a serious education is to step outside yourself and your time.”

Arnn offered some advice on how to turn young Americans over to conservatism. “Read old books,” Arnn advised. “If you can read something beautiful from the past, if you can appreciate the fact that Shakespeare and Plato are beautiful, you have cut the legs out from under modern liberalism.”

“People who are conservative, what that word means, it means that you think there is something in the past that is worthy to keep, and you think that thing cannot go away,” Arnn continued. “That means that all of this leftist violence is vulnerable too.”