The smearing of Hillsdale’s president

Posted by hpayne on August 6, 2013

Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, is an outspoken proponent of race-blind admissions. Hillsdale was the first college in the country to ban discrimination in admissions.

Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, is an outspoken proponent of race-blind admissions. Hillsdale was the first college in the country to ban discrimination in admissions. (Hillsdale College)

A century before Martin Luther King’s dream of a United States where his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” Michigan’s Hillsdale College was the first college to prohibit discrimination in admissions.

An early force for the abolition of slavery and Abe Lincoln’s presidential campaign, more Hillsdale students enlisted to fight the Civil War for the Union than any western school, with 60 dying on the battlefield. So formidable was its equal rights reputation that it was a magnet for black, abolitionist speakers like Frederick Douglass. Under current President Larry Arnn, Hillsdale has continued to be a progressive voice, including its role in advancing access to better education for inner-city black students via charter schools.

Its reputation has attracted talented youth to Michigan like Kayla Cash, an African-American from Rochester, N.Y. “I came to Hillsdale because race is not a factor,” she says. “They see me for my talents as a student.”

So at a public hearing on Common Core state standards and on front pages last week, Democrats and their media stooges tried to smear Hillsdale’s reputation by framing its president as a bigot. I’m not making this up.

“Hillsdale president blasted over race remark,” screamed the Detroit Free Press’s A1 headline, trumpeting Democratic attacks on Arnn for allegedly using a racial slur. “It’s absolutely unbelievable to me that the president of an institution of higher learning would utter such a derogatory statement,” roared Rep. David Knezek, D-Dearborn Heights.

But the hearing transcript reveals that Democrats willfully took Arnn’s comments out of context. Arnn’s use of the term “dark ones” was clearly a description of Michigan education bureaucrats’ crude practice of walking around campus counting Hillsdale students by the color of their skin. The real outrage here is the Michigan Education Department’s (MDE) treatment of one of the state’s most upstanding colleges. Arnn’s contempt is understandable. In a 1999 visit to Hillsdale, the MDE criticized Hillsdale for not having a “diverse” student body because it did not record racial criteria for its students — that is, it did not discriminate to achieve racial admissions quotas.

According to page 10 of the MDE’s own 16-page report, “the team had to respond to this standard based on observation of the students on campus.” That is, MDE bureaucrats took their clipboards and began literally recording which students were light-colored and which were dark-colored.

“That makes me uncomfortable,” says Cash, who is a senior at Hillsdale. “If I had seen that, I would have been offended that they were judging students just by their skin color.”

When Arnn exposed this outrage, an MDE spokeswoman initially claimed the visit never happened. No wonder. Its report of the visit is disturbing evidence of how government has turned civil rights on its head into a quota system.

Arnn’s real sin is that he’s a prominent conservative who has opposed the Democratic education establishment on expanding charter schools and ending racial preferences. So Democrats got out the long knives. These McCarthyite tactics are all too familiar to conservatives who cross the Left’s agenda.

Last year, Michigan Democrats tried to punish ex-Republican Party Chair Ron Weiser for his leading role in making Michigan a right-to-work state. After the successful vote, Weiser — like Arnn — awoke to a front page headline twisting months-old comments he made in Detroit to make him appear insensitive to minorities. The charge was absurd given that Weiser — a minority himself (Jewish) — is a longtime Detroit benefactor and ex-chairman of Washtenaw County’s United Negro College Fund. Oh.

These Democratic smear campaigns hurt Michigan’s image. The manufactured Arnn story was picked up by national media outlets like USA Today, bruising the image of a college that competes across 50 states for top students. In a state that has a long history of racial conflict, Hillsdale has been an ambassador of racial equality.

As president, Arnn has continued the school’s tradition of advancing education for all. This summer, it hosted charter school principals ensuring all Americans have equal access to good schools. Arnn helped draft the 1996 California Civil Rights Initiative, which banned admissions discrimination and has led to an increase in California’s black graduation rates. The college is a participant in inner-city student outreach programs like the Detroit Compact and Camp Enterprise.

“At the highest goal of education, (it does not) make the slightest difference what color someone is. Any other view … reduces the human being to incidental and material characteristics,” writes Arnn in his book “Liberty and Learning.”

That is welcomed diversity in a Michigan college system that has too often discriminated by race. It’s a standard that Michigan’s Left should celebrate, not denigrate.

From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130806/OPINION01/308060008#ixzz2bKMB0WYv

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