• Education - Academia - Higher education - Universities and colleges - Colleges - United States - Hillsdale College

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• COMMENT (2023-04-25): this entry includes a superb 3-part investigation by investigative reporter Kathryn Joyce on Hillsdale College and the war on public schools (https://www.salon.com/2022/03/16/salon-investigates-the-on-public-schools-is-being-fought-from-hillsdale-college/).

A key point in that series of articles are the that the intensifying rhetoric surrounding sex, gender, and race in public education reflects a divide and conquer approach by wealthy neoliberals and the Christian right against public education - with the aim of for-profit, white-serving, education (charter schools) serving Christian and neoconservative ideologies.

• This is the main entry for "Hillsdale College".

"Politics - Political philosophy - Political theories - Political ideologies - Conservatism - Conservatism in the United States - Hillsdale College" redirects here.

• curation date: 2023-01-15

• Hillsdale College is a private conservative Christian liberal arts college in Hillsdale, Michigan.

It was founded in 1844 by members of the Free Will Baptists.

Its mission statement says that liberal arts curriculum is based on Western heritage as a product of Greco-Roman culture and Christian tradition.

The required core curriculum has courses on the Great Books, the U.S. Constitution, biology, chemistry, and physics.

Since the late 20th century, in order to opt out of the U.S. government's Title IX anti-discrimination requirements, Hillsdale has been among a small number of U.S. colleges to decline governmental financial support.

Instead, Hillsdale depends entirely on private donations to supplement students' tuition. ... POLICIES.

Hillsdale's charter prohibits discrimination based on race, religion, or sex.

Concerning such discrimination, in the early 1980s a controversy over the school's practices threatened federal student loans to 200 Hillsdale students.

Title IX prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or other education program that receives federal money.

The federal government required colleges where students received federal funding to document their compliance with Title IX, but Hillsdale refused, arguing that the government could not deny federal funds to its students because the college received no direct federal funding and there was no allegation of actual sex discrimination.

The Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) sought to terminate federal financial assistance to Hillsdale's students; an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) denied HEW's request in 1978, and both HEW and Hillsdale appealed to HEW's Civil Rights Reviewing Authority.

In October 1979, the Reviewing Authority rejected Hillsdale's arguments and the ALJ's decision, ruling that HEW could require Hillsdale to sign the Assurance of Compliance as a condition of its students receiving federal financial assistance.

The college appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit; in 1982, the Sixth Circuit ruled that government aid to individual students could be terminated without a finding that a college actually discriminated, but nevertheless upheld Hillsdale's refusal to sign the compliance forms because only its student loan and grant program is subject to Title IX regulation, not the entire college.

In the related 1984 case Grove City College v. Bell, the Supreme Court required every college or university to fulfill federal requirements - past and future requirements - if its students received federal aid.

As a result of the decision, Hillsdale withdrew from all federal assistance beginning with the 1984-85 academic year; Grove City College, the plaintiff in that case, followed Hillsdale's lead four years later.

Beginning in the 2007-08 academic year, Hillsdale stopped accepting Michigan state assistance, instead matching with its own aid any funds that a student would have received from the state.

Since 2007, Hillsdale's entire operating budget, including scholarships, has come from private funding and endowments. ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsdale_College

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hillsdale_College

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• (2022-07-05, https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2022/07/01/conservative-hillsdale-college-is-helping-desantis-reshape-florida-education/) "Conservative Hillsdale College is helping Ron DeSantis reshape Florida education.

The small private Christian college in Michigan is playing an influential role in Florida." The spotlight was on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, as it so often has been over the past three years.

"Our speaker tonight is one of the most important people living," Larry P. Arnn said as he introduced Ron DeSantis as the keynote speaker at the Hillsdale National Leadership Seminar on 2022-02-23 in Naples, Florida (https://freedomlibrary.hillsdale.edu/programs/national-leadership-seminar-naples-florida/challenges-to-american-liberty).

Larry P. Arnn is the president of Hillsdale College, a politically influential private Christian college in southern Michigan.

"This person's most important work is before him - and we need him" (Larry P. Arnn said of Ron DeSantis).

The introduction highlights the relationship between Ron DeSantis and the conservative Hillsdale College, which 12 years ago set out to reshape public education through the growth of charter schools, and in recent years has expanded its reach in Florida's education system.

The Hillsdale College's influence has been seen in the Florida's rejection of math textbooks over what Ron DeSantis called "indoctrinating concepts," the state's push to renew the importance of civics education in public schools, and the rapid growth of Hillsdale College's network of affiliated public charter schools in Florida.

Hillsdale College also has had sway over Florida's Republican-led Legislature.

In 2019, Florida lawmakers approved a law that allowed the college and three other groups to help the state revise its civics standards.

Three years later, those guidelines are part of a Ron DeSantis-led civics initiative that has concerned several educators about an infusion of Christianity and conservative ideologies.

At the Hillsdale College seminar in 2022-02 (https://freedomlibrary.hillsdale.edu/programs/national-leadership-seminar-naples-florida/challenges-to-american-liberty), Ron DeSantis was met with cheers and applause and delivered a speech focused on policy issues that have made https://freedomlibrary.hillsdale.edu/programs/national-leadership-seminar-naples-florida/challenges-to-american-liberty a rising star to the political right.

Ron DeSantis talked about how since becoming Governor of Florida, he has banned so-called sanctuary cities, fought lockdown policies during the pandemic, rejected "corporate media" pressures and reshaped the Florida Supreme Court to what he referred to as "the most conservative Supreme Court of any state in the country." Florida Governor Ron DeSantis also highlighted his push to reform Florida's education system by continuing the two-decadeslong push by Republicans to expand school vouchers and charter schools.

Ron DeSantis also touted Hillsdale College's "flourishing" network of classical schools in Florida.

"I mean how many places, other than Hillsdale College, are actually standing for truth, excellence and to produce people who will be leaders?" Ron DeSantis said, after arguing that "woke-ism" is embedded in academic institutions.

CIVICS AND MATH TEXTBOOKS.

A few months after Ron DeSantis' speech, two state-led efforts further highlighted the relationship between the governor and the college.

In 2022-04 the Florida Department of Education made national headlines for its decision to reject dozens of math textbooks because they included references to critical race theory and other "prohibited topics" and "unsolicited strategies," officials said at the time.

A Times/Herald review of nearly 6,000 pages of textbook examination showed only three of the 125 reviewers found objectionable content.

Two of the three were affiliated with Hillsdale College.

One was Jonah Apel - a sophomore student majoring in political science - and the other was Jordan Adams, a civics education specialist at the college.

Jonah Apel is listed as the secretary of the Hillsdale College Republicans, a group whose mission includes connecting students to the "political arena" and "changing the United States in accordance with truth, liberty and human flourishing." Jordan Adams is tied to Hillsdale College's 1776 curriculum - a history- and civics-based education program that covers American history, government and civics to provide the "knowledge and understanding of American history and of the American republic as governed by the Constitution and morally grounded in the Declaration of Independence." Hillsdale College's 1776 curriculum was released by Hillsdale College in 2021-07 amid growing partisan battles in school districts over issues like critical race theory, and The New York Times' "The 1619 Project" - which re-centered the focus on the nation's history on the year the first enslaved Africans arrived.

Lessons dealing with critical race theory and "The 1619 Project" were banned in Florida's public schools a month earlier (2021-06), at the request of Ron DeSantis.

Jonah Apel and Jordan Adams were invited by the state of Florida to review "prohibited topics," though Florida Department of Education officials have not responded to questions inquiring why they specifically invited people to scour for contentious issues like critical race theory.

Florida paid "prohibited topic" reviewers $500 per review, $170 more than they paid others who reviewed books to ensure the books matched the rest of the state's math standards, Florida state records show.

The Florida Department of Education reached out to the college to participate in the review, but Hillsdale College spokesperson Emily Stacks Davis said the college declined "but provided the names of individuals who might aid the Florida Department of Education in this effort." The Florida Department of Education then "communicated directly with those individuals as independent contractors.

The consulting individuals do not represent Hillsdale College or its work," Emily Stacks Davis added.

The Florida Department of Education has not commented on why it hired a student and civics specialist from Hillsdale College to review Florida's math textbooks for "prohibited topics." Hillsdale College played a more active role in helping Florida state revise its civics standards, and develop a civics training program that teachers statewide can volunteer to participate in and earn a $700 stipend for attending.

Hillsdale College was among four groups that the Florida Department of Education partnered with to create the training program.

Florida also consulted with the Bill of Rights Institute, the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America's Founding Principles and History, and the Florida Joint Center for Citizens, a partnership between the Lou Frey Institute of Politics and Government at the University of Central Florida and the Bob Graham Center for Public Service at the University of Florida.

The efforts are part of Ron DeSantis' Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative, which was announced in spring 2021.

Improving civics education has been a priority for Governor Ron DeSantis since before his election.

Hillsdale College has not commented on the college's role in the training program.

But in an earlier statement, Emily Stacks Davis said Hillsdale College is often "sought for consultation on matters related to education since it is an authority in that realm." "The Department of Education was proud to partner with various organizations to help develop our revised civics and government standards," department spokesperson Alex Lanfranconi said in a statement Thursday(2022-07-05) when asked about Florida's relationship with Michigan's Hillsdale College.

"Hillsdale College boasts an impressive civics education program and stands as a top-50 liberal arts university." WHY HILLSDALE COLLEGE?

Hillsdale College's approach to teaching history has drawn praise from Ron DeSantis and former Florida Secretary of Education Richard Corcoran, as well as national conservative figures like former President Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

Larry P. Arnn - Hillsdale College's president - was appointed by Donald Trump to be the chairperson of the president's Advisory 1776 Commission, which was formed to "advise the president about the core principles of the American founding, and to protect those principles by promoting patriotic education," according to Matthew Spalding, whom Donald Trump appointed as the commission's executive director.

Matthew Spalding is the vice president for Washington operations and the dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College's Washington, D.C., extension.

Hillsdale College's digital digest - "Imprimis" - features the writing of conservative thinkers like Christopher Rufo, who has worked with Ron DeSantis to combat issues like critical race theory and gender identity.

The publication also includes articles with titles like, "The January 6 Insurrection Hoax," "The Disaster at Our Southern Border," "Gender Ideology Run Amok," "Critical Race Theory: What it is and How to Fight it," and "Who is in Control?

The need to Rein in Big Tech." Through that brand, Hillsdale College also has been able to rapidly grow its network of charter schools in Florida.

The Barney Charter School Initiative is "devoted to the revitalization of public education through the launch and support of K-12 classical charter schools," according to the college.

Hillsdale College-affiliated charter schools are not owned or operated by Hillsdale College.

Instead, Hillsdale College offers training for faculty and staff and shares its curriculum with the charter schools, which are publicly funded and privately run.

The services, which are offered free of charge, allow Hillsdale College to expand the reach of its curriculum, which puts an emphasis on classical literature, core subjects and developing "moral character and civic virtue." The affiliation to Hillsdale College can also be helpful to attract more parents, said Barney Bishop, a lobbyist who is a board member at the Tallahassee Classical School, which launched in 2020 with the help of Hillsdale College.

"What attracts parents to us is they understand who and what Hillsdale College is," Barney Bishop said.

Barney Bishop says people are also drawn to a classical education because he believes the teaching model emphasizes the difference between "right and wrong," the "virtues that we hold in high esteem" and the "values and importance of personal responsibility." Since 2018, five classical public charter schools affiliated with Hillsdale College have opened in Florida.

Three of them have opened since 2020 - with four more in the pipeline in the next two school years.

Overall, there are seven Hillsdale College-affiliated public charter schools in Florida.

Back at the Hillsdale College event in 2022-02, Ron DeSantis shared why he personally likes what Hillsdale College is doing overall.

"When I get people who submit resumes, quite frankly if I got one from Yale, I would be negatively disposed to that individual unless they showed some type of significant counter to the prevailing narrative," Ron DeSantis, a Yale alumni, said.

"If I get someone from Hillsdale College, I know they have the foundations necessary to be able to be helpful in pursuing conservative policies," Ron DeSantis said.

• (Kathryn Joyce, Investigative Reporter, https://www.salon.com/writer/kathryn_joyce, 2022-03-16, https://www.salon.com/2022/03/16/salon-investigates-the-on-public-schools-is-being-fought-from-hillsdale-college/) "Salon investigates: The war on public schools is being fought from Hillsdale College.

In a 3-part investigation, Salon shows how this tiny Christian college is leading the right-wing fight on education." "Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it's our weapon." Those are the words of Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, a small private Christian college in Michigan that, in recent years, has quietly become a driving force in nearly all of the country's ongoing fights around education.

During the Donald Trump years, Hillsdale College functioned as a "feeder school" sending alumni into the administration and the offices of its allies on Capitol Hill.

Hillsdale College officials led Donald Trump's controversial 1776 Commission, established to create a "patriotic education" alternative to contemporary scholarship on America's racial history.

Hillsdale College's lecture series and magazine serve as a testing ground for the right's most ambitious and outlandish ideas: that diversity isn't a strength but a "solvent" that destroys national unity; that Vladimir Putin is a populist hero; that Republicans should aspire to lure so many children out of public schools that the entire system might collapse.

To that end, Hillsdale College has inconspicuously been building a network of "classical education" charter schools, which use public tax dollars to teach that systemic racism was effectively vanquished in the 1960s, that America was founded on "Judeo-Christian" principles and that progressivism is fundamentally anti-American.

In late 2022-01 the governor of Tennessee announced plans to partner with Hillsdale College to launch as many as 50 such schools in that state - something public education advocates fear could be a tipping point in the fight to save public education.

In this three-part investigative series, Salon looks at Hillsdale's multifaceted and far-reaching role in shaping and disseminating the ideas and strategies that power the right.

In an era of book bans, crusades against teaching about racism, and ever-widening proposals to punish teachers and librarians, Hillsdale is not just a central player, but a ready-made solution for conservatives who seek to reclaim an educational system they believe was ceded decades ago to liberal interests.

Taken together, these linked trends - and the deep-rooted conservative network supporting them - amount to a vision of things to come if Republicans succeed in what they describe as a "war" that "will be won in education." { • (Part 1/3: 2022-03-15, https://www.salon.com/2022/03/15/how-this-tiny-christian-college-is-driving-the-rights-nationwide-against-public-schools/) "How this tiny Christian college is driving the right's nationwide war against public schools.

Exclusive: In the full-scale conservative assault on public education, Hillsdale College is leading the charge." • (Part 2/3: 2022-03-16, https://www.salon.com/2022/03/16/coming-to-a-school-near-you-stealth-religion-and-a-trumped-up-version-of-american-history/) "Coming to a school near you: Stealth religion and a Trumped-up version of American history.

Exclusive: Hillsdale College's charter school network pushes "patriotic education." Critics say it's propaganda." • (Part 3/3: 2022-03-17, https://www.salon.com/2022/03/17/the-far-rights-national-plan-for-schools-plant-charters-defund-public-education/) "The far right's national plan for schools: Plant charters, defund public education.

Exclusive: Hillsdale College's "classical" charter schools are spreading fast - but the true goal is much bigger." }

• (Kathryn Joyce, Investigative Reporter, 2022-03-16, https://www.salon.com/2022/03/16/salon-investigates-the-on-public-schools-is-being-fought-from-hillsdale-college/) "Salon investigates: The war on public schools is being fought from Hillsdale College.

In a 3-part investigation, Salon shows how this tiny Christian college is leading the right-wing fight on education."

• (Part 1/3: 2022-03-15, https://www.salon.com/2022/03/15/how-this-tiny-christian-college-is-driving-the-rights-nationwide-against-public-schools/) "How this tiny Christian college is driving the right's nationwide war against public schools.

Exclusive: In the full-scale conservative assault on public education, Hillsdale College is leading the charge." The mood in Costa Mesa on 2022-02-02 was more love bomb than fire bomb: yet another school board meeting packed with impassioned parents.

But this time they'd come out, on a mild Southern California evening, not to let the board know how angry they were, but how delighted.

The parents who rose to speak at the monthly meeting of the Orange County Board of Education weren't shouting about mask mandates, vaccine requirements, trans kids on sports teams or books about racism.

They didn't have to.

Instead, mother after mother, with young children in tow or on their hips, came to the podium to say that their kids used to cry before going to school, but now were filled with confidence and wonder; that they had found a transformative community among the school's other moms; that the teachers were giving their children "the best education in the entire country." One former homeschooler said she'd always sworn to keep her kids out of public school, but the one they attended now had changed all that.

One father was moved to talk about sunsets in explaining how the school's mission was uniquely equipped to guide children toward goodness, beauty and truth.

From the dais, the board members beamed back at the parents, and when a lone trustee protested that they should address a conflict of interest that appeared to undermine the entire proceedings, the audience burst into laughter and the trustee's colleagues, amid jokes, voted her down.

The school under discussion that night (2022-02-02) wasn't a regular public school.

It was a recently-launched charter called the Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA) - which is funded with taxpayer money, but follows a private school-like curriculum centered "on the history and cultural achievements of Western civilization" and an ambiguous mission to instill "virtue." The public face of OCCA is its charismatic co-founder, Dr. Jeff Barke, a Newport Beach "concierge physician" who gained national notoriety as one of the most outspoken skeptics of pandemic public health policies and has voiced vitriolic opposition to today's public schools.

Jeff Barke's wife Mari Barke, as it happens, is president of the Orange County Board of Education, which was deciding whether to allow OCCA to expand to new campuses throughout the affluent suburban county of nearly 3.2 million people.

(That was the evident conflict of interest that sparked laughter from the crowd.) Although Orange County is more a purple than a deep-red jurisdiction these days, that board is dominated by a conservative majority, swept into power over the last several years thanks to an unprecedented influx of right-wing cash.

But OCCA isn't only a school, or even a network of schools.

It's just one facet of a national movement driven by the vision and curriculum of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that has quietly become one of the most influential entities in conservative politics.

In an era of book bans, crusades against teaching about racism, and ever-widening proposals to punish teachers and librarians, Hillsdale College is not just a central player, but a ready-made solution for conservatives who seek to reclaim an educational system they believe was ceded decades ago to liberal interests.

Hillsdale College has become a leading force in promoting a conservative and overtly Christian reading of American history and the U.S. Constitution.

Hillsdale College opposes progressive education reforms in general, and contemporary scholarship on inequality in particular.

Hillsdale College has featured lectures describing the Jan.

6 insurrection (2021-01-06) as a hoax, and Vladimir Putin as a "hero to populist conservatives around the world." If you thought that Donald Trump's 1776 Commission - a jingoistic alternative to The New York Times' "1619 Project", that was roundly panned by historians - died with Donald Trump's presidency, that effort is now being amplified and exported, on a massive scale, around the country.

If you wonder what conservatives hope to install in place of the books they're trying to ban, the answer often lies in Hillsdale College's freely-licensed curricula.

And as Republicans move into a new phase of their long-game efforts to privatize public education, Hillsdale College has become a key resource.

Across the United States, conservative officials from state leaders to insurgent school board members are clamoring to implement Hillsdale College's proudly anti-woke lesson plans - including the "patriotic education" premises of its recently released 1776 Curriculum, or add to Hillsdale College's growing network of affiliated classical charter schools.

In late 2022-01 Tennessee Governor Bill Lee - a Republican - used his State of the State address to tease the most ambitious Hillsdale College-inspired plan to date: building as many as 50 new charter schools in partnership with Hillsdale College; using its 1776 Curriculum to foster what Bill Lee calls "informed patriotism"; and launching a university civics institute to combat "anti-American thought." These linked trends amount to a vision of things to come if Republicans win their current war on public education.

And war is how they see it.

As one Republican leader promised at Hillsdale College last spring (2021): if conservatives can "get education right," they'll "win" the country "back." Or as Hillsdale College's president himself likes to say, "Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it's our weapon." *** In the video that introduced most Americans to Jeff Barke, the doctor stands on the steps of a municipal building in Riverside, California in 2020-05 wearing green scrubs and a white lab coat and claiming to speak for thousands of silenced medical workers who believed the experts were wrong about COVID-19.

In Jeff Barke's improbable telling, the video was an accident: Jeff Barke asked his wife to take a picture of him addressing the anti-lockdown rally for their adult children, but Mari Barke inadvertently hit her phone's "record" button.

The resulting footage was too large to email, so they posted it to Facebook instead, and the rest was unintentional history.

The video went viral, and Jeff Barke began meeting fellow "freedom fighters" around the country.

Jeff Barke helped organize "America's Frontline Doctors" - the right-wing group that became famous that July (2022-07) when around a dozen of its members stood before the U.S. Supreme Court, again in white coats, to call for reopening the country without delay.

As later became clear, America's Frontline Doctors was organized in cooperation with the Donald Trump campaign, and Jeff Barke's supposedly accidental activism was no more organic.

Jeff Barke has been involved for years in right-wing politics in and around California's Orange County, a realm of beaches and upscale suburban sprawl that has been a centerpiece of American pop culture and is perceived as the birthplace of modern conservatism.

Those 948 square miles south and east of Los Angeles, California are the "Nixonland" that helped create the prosperity gospel and served as the case study for Lisa McGirr's seminal history "Suburban Warriors." California's Orange County is the place - Ronald Reagan often said - where "good Republicans go to die." Jeff Barke is a member of Orange County's Republican Central Committee, and the conservative donor organization the Lincoln Club (Lincoln Club of Orange County).

When Mari Barke was a delegate at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Jeff Barke and their son attended as alternates, wearing matching stars-and-stripes suits.

For 12 years, Jeff Barke was a member of the Los Alamitos school board, where he led a successful effort to require that a new course on environmental science also include dissenting opinions about climate change.

But in 2020, Jeff Barke graduated from local activism to national right-wing stardom as one of the most provocative voices around pandemic policy.

Jeff Barke wrote a book, "COVID-19: A Physician's Take on the Exaggerated Fear of Coronavirus," with a foreword by Dennis Prager, co-founder of the right-wing video outlet PragerU.

(Its fifth edition was published last month, 2022-02.) Jeff Barke also became a combative presence on social media, under the handle @RxForLiberty, calling for fast-tracking herd immunity through widespread virus infection, and suggesting that masking children is child abuse.

In one livestream interview, Jeff Barke whipped out a Sig Sauer pistol, describing it as his preferred pandemic protection.

More recently, Jeff Barke has compared widespread COVID-19 testing to unnecessary breast biopsies for healthy women.

Although the Jeff Barke and Mari Barke are Jewish, Jeff Barke undertook a regional mini-tour of megachurches that refused to shut down during the early days of the pandemic, and befriended a number of high-profile evangelical leaders, such as Chino megachurch pastor Jack Hibbs (himself somewhat notorious for blaming the violence of the Capitol insurrection on removing "God from the courts and from the schools").

The headmaster Jeff Barke hired to run the Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA) is a member of Jack Hibbs' congregation.

For her part, Mari Barke is a former Donald Trump 2016 campaign volunteer and an adviser to the Unity Project, a conservative coalition formed in 2021 to oppose vaccine mandates that has since become involved in the U.S. "trucker convoy" protesting pandemic restrictions (although Mari Barke says she has no involvement with that effort).

Along with all this advocacy, Jeff Barke was also working to get his school - Orange County Classical Academy - up and running, and the two campaigns appear strongly connected.

Amid Jeff Barke's short viral speech in Riverside, California Jeff Barke pulled out a pocket version of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, telling the crowd they were written to restrain the government, not the people.

The booklet, Jeff Barke later explained, was published by Hillsdale College, where his son - after taking a break to work for Donald Trump's Department of Agriculture - is an undergraduate.

In an interview, Jeff Barke told me that attending multiple parents' weekends at Hillsdale College had led him to see Hillsdale College as "a beacon of liberty" that is "fighting to return America back to its founding roots." In appreciation, Jeff Barke and Mari Barke became members of Hillsdale College's top-tier donor "President's Club," and were listed on Hillsdale College's website as members of its Parents Association Steering Committee.

(In an interview with Salon, Mari Barke said she turned the invitation down, but her election biography includes the committee as one of her volunteer affiliations.) It was also through Hillsdale College that Jeff Barke became friends with Tea Party activist Mark Meckler - cofounder of the right-wing group Convention of States, which seeks to hold an Article V convention that could lead to rewriting the U.S. Constitution, and where Jeff Barke holds the puzzling title of "head physician." In 2018, Jeff Barke lost his seat on the Los Alamitos school board, which Jeff Barke's critics say was the result of controversial positions, such as Jeff Barke's advocacy of climate-change denialism - although Jeff Barke blames a campaign against him by the local teachers' union.

But as Jeff Barke later told Jack Hibbs' church, "God had bigger plans." In that same year (2018) Mari Barke was elected to the Orange County Board of Education (OCBE) on a platform of "school choice and parental rights." Mari Barke's campaign amassed an unheard-of war chest of around $425,000, more than half of that donated by the Charter Public Schools PAC.

Mari Barke also benefited from the support of the California Policy Center (CPC) - a state-level affiliate of the State Policy Network, a coalition of more than 150 right-wing groups that promote model conservative legislation.

According to a 2018 lawsuit, a CPC offshoot hired Mari Barke - shortly before she announced her OCBE candidacy - to instruct an ESL course for some of its Spanish-speaking pro-charter parent activists, thus enabling Mari Barke to campaign "as a teacher." Today, Mari Barke serves as the director of a CPC initiative that provides conservative policy analysis and training to state and local politicians.

Through his wife's campaign, Jeff Barke got to know Mark Bucher, the California Policy Center's co-founder and a fellow member of the Lincoln Club (Lincoln Club of Orange County).

Mark Bucher had been involved in local education politics for decades, promoting a series of school privatization and charter initiatives and using funds from far-right Christian philanthropist Howard Ahmanson to orchestrate a mid-'90s conservative takeover of the Orange Unified School Board - one of the county's 28 independent school districts, in and around the city of Orange (a different elected body than the OCBE).

But by 2019, Jeff Barke said, Mark Bucher had developed "a vision about classical education." Jeff Barke told him about Hillsdale College, and history was made again.

For decades, 1,500-student Hillsdale College - a liberal arts school in rural southern Michigan, founded by Baptist abolitionists in 1844 - has been known as a "citadel of conservatism." Hillsdale College's campus features prominent statues of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Hillsdale College's curriculum leans heavily into the Western canon of "Great Books" and Hillsdale College describes itself as "a trustee of modern man's intellectual and spiritual inheritance from the Judeo-Christian faith and Greco-Roman culture." In the 1980s, Hillsdale College earned right-wing adulation for refusing to accept any federal funding - including student aid, to maintain its "independence in every regard"; in practice, this means it doesn't have to comply with federal regulations, such as Title IX prohibitions on sex discrimination, or the reporting of student racial demographics.

(In 2013, Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn complained to a Michigan legislative committee about state officials visiting campus to assess whether the student body included enough "dark ones.") Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas once summoned up Ronald Reagan and American colonist John Winthrop in calling Hillsdale College a "shining city on a hill." But in recent years, Hillsdale College has greatly expanded its influence, becoming one of the most significant actors in U.S. conservative politics - if also one of the least conspicuous.

Throughout the Donald Trump years, there was a virtual revolving door that shuttled Hillsdale College staff and alumni back and forth between Hillsdale College, the White House and Capitol Hill.

(Vanity Fair described Hillsdale College as "a feeder school for the Trump administration.") Right-wing politicians and thought leaders vie to give speeches at Hillsdale College, which are then disseminated to a claimed audience of 6.2 million through Hillsdale College's monthly publication, Imprimis.

Larry Arnn - who has led Hillsdale College for the last 22 years - is a Churchill scholar from Arkansas with a penchant for folksy and antiquated diction.

For Larry Arnn, college is "a hoot," freshmen are "little wigglers," his sons (affectionately) are "wastrels," and the emotional namesake patron of Hillsdale College's charter school program, conservative philanthropist Stephen Barney, is (also affectionately) "a blubber baby." Larry Arnn came to Hillsdale College in 2000, in the wake of a shocking scandal that appeared to threaten Hillsdale College's future.

(The previous president allegedly had an affair with his son's wife, who subsequently killed herself.) But Larry Arnn's mission went well beyond restoring stability.

Larry Arnn was co-founder and later president of the Claremont Institute - an influential right-wing think tank that has spent the last six years trying to ret-con an intellectual platform for Trumpism.

The Claremont Institute is also home to John Eastman - the law professor who tried to convince Mike Pence to throw out electoral votes and overturn Donald Trump's defeat.

Given those connections, Larry Arnn seemed destined to deepen Hillsdale College's ties to the conservative movement.

Larry Arnn has succeeded, probably more than he could have expected.

In 2009 Hillsdale College hired right-wing activist Ginni Thomas - the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas - to help Hillsdale College launch a Washington campus on Capitol Hill, across the street from The Heritage Foundation (where Larry Arnn is a board member).

From that facility - which inspired a 2018 Politico feature entitled "The College that Wants to Take Over Washington" - Hillsdale College initially ran a joint fellowship program for senior congressional staff with The Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society.

Ben Domenech - founder of right-wing publication The Federalist - has used a studio at Hillsdale College's Washington campus to record his podcast, and Federalist editor in chief Mollie Hemingway teaches journalism at Hillsdale College's Washington campus.

Michael Anton - a former Donald Trump White House adviser and author of the notorious essay, "The Flight 93 Election," which made an apocalyptic case for the necessity of electing Donald Trump - has joined Hillsdale College's Washington staff to lecture on politics.

Hillsdale College's cheerleaders have included many of the biggest names in right-wing media, including the late Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Hugh Hewitt (who for years has run a weekly interview series with Larry Arnn and other Hillsdale College faculty members that now includes hundreds of episodes).

Larry Arnn endorsed Donald Trump in 2016 (along with a number of Hillsdale College staff, who dominated a group endorsement titled "Scholars & Writers for America"), and Larry Arnn was on the short list to serve as Donald Trump's secretary of education.

The new president of course picked Betsy DeVos instead, and Betsy DeVos too has Hillsdale College ties.

Betsy DeVos' brother Erik Prince - founder of the "military contractor" company previously known as Blackwater USA - is a Hillsdale College graduate, and Betsy DeVos' family's foundations have made extensive donations to Hillsdale College over the years.

For a small liberal arts school, Hillsdale College has amassed an astonishing endowment of more than $900 million.

Betsy DeVos is philosophically aligned with Hillsdale College's mission as well.

In 2001, Betsy DeVos called on conservative Christians to embrace the Republican "school choice" agenda as a more efficient means of advancing "God's Kingdom" than merely funding private Christian schools, since - as Betsy DeVos told one group of wealthy believers - "everybody in this room could give every single penny they had, and it wouldn't begin to touch what is currently spent on education every year in this country." Nineteen years later, in a speech at Hillsdale College shortly before the 2020 election, Betsy DeVos invoked Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper (perhaps questionably) to argue that government should have little role in education and parents should be able to direct taxpayer funds to private schools.

Two months later, Larry Arnn was tapped to lead Donald Trump's 1776 Commission, drafting a blueprint for "patriotic education" as a rebuttal to "The 1619 Project." (The vice president of Hillsdale College's Washington operations was also appointed to serve as the commission's executive director.) Although President Joe Biden disbanded the commission the day he took office, Hillsdale College released a closely related project last July (2021-07) - the 2,425-page "1776 Curriculum", offered as a free download on Hillsdale College's website.

In his own speech at Hillsdale College in September (2021-09), former secretary of state and potential 2024 presidential candidate Mike Pompeo called for the 1776 Curriculum to "be taught each place and everywhere." Hillsdale College's alumni are not unanimously happy with the direction Larry Arnn has taken Hillsdale College.

Julie Vassilatos - who attended Hillsdale College in the 1980s - said that in those heady Ronald Reagan days Hillsdale College was certainly a world unto itself, "but not like Republican bubbles are now.

I don't know if I can get this across - it wasn't insane." By the time Julie Vassilatos neared graduation, she said, the first signs of a shift were visible, as students began trickling in from homeschooling "survivalist" families.

Nevertheless, Larry Arnn's endorsement of Donald Trump left Julie Vassilatos speechless.

"When I was there, it was very ideologically oriented in a Great Books kind of way, towards 'the higher things,' 'the permanent things,' 'the good, the true and the beautiful.' So I have never been more shocked in my life than that they went for Donald Trump, because he's the absolute opposite of everything I thought I was taught in college." Another alumnus, Tennessee writer and podcaster Sam Torode - who graduated in the late-1990s - likewise saw Larry Arnn's support for Donald Trump - particularly his 2020 re-endorsement, after the first impeachment, the family separation crisis and Charlottesville - as "a betrayal of everything I learned at Hillsdale College." When Larry Arnn's 1776 Commission released its report less than two weeks after the Jan.

6 (2021-01-06) attack, Sam Torode drafted an open letter, signed by a few dozen former students, chastising Larry Arnn for promoting the project in the immediate aftermath of "the greatest threat to the Constitution and America's representative democracy in our lifetimes." But Hillsdale College's actual and planned expansion is much broader than its direct links to political power.

In 2020, Hillsdale College began building a Center for Faith and Freedom in a replica Monticello mansion in Connecticut, donated to Hillsdale College along with a $25 million endowment by Friendly's restaurant magnate S. Prestley Blake.

In 2021-12, Hillsdale College launched a new Washington project - the Academy of Science and Freedom - to highlight the arguments of three prominent COVID-19 skeptics, including Dr. Scott Atlas, Donald Trump's former pandemic adviser.

In recent months Hillsdale College has acquired a sizable tract of land outside Sacramento, California as part of plans to establish an education center in California.

Hillsdale College is adapting its curricula for homeschooling parents, and this year (2022) will launch a master's program to train teachers to staff its charter schools.

Larry Arnn recently said that South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem offered to build Hillsdale College "an entire campus" in South Dakota.

• (Kathryn Joyce, Investigative Reporter, 2022-03-16, https://www.salon.com/2022/03/16/salon-investigates-the-on-public-schools-is-being-fought-from-hillsdale-college/) "Salon investigates: The war on public schools is being fought from Hillsdale College.

In a 3-part investigation, Salon shows how this tiny Christian college is leading the right-wing fight on education." (Part 2/3: 2022-03-16, https://www.salon.com/2022/03/16/coming-to-a-school-near-you-stealth-religion-and-a-trumped-up-version-of-american-history/) "Coming to a school near you: Stealth religion and a Trumped-up version of American history.

Exclusive: Hillsdale College's charter school network pushes "patriotic education." Critics say it's propaganda." { This is the second in a three-part investigative series on Hillsdale College, its charter school network and its connection to the national struggle over education.

Read Part 1 here.

In recent years, Hillsdale College, a small private Christian school in Michigan, has quietly become a driving force in America's ongoing fights around education.

A "feeder school" for the Donald Trump administration, Hillsdale College led President Donald Trump's controversial 1776 Commission and serves as a testing ground for the right's most ambitious ideas: For instance, that diversity erodes national unity, that Vladimir Putin is a populist hero and that conservatives should lure so many children out of public schools that the entire system collapses.

Hillsdale College has inconspicuously been building a network of "classical education" charter schools, which use public tax dollars to teach that the U.S. was founded on "Judeo-Christian" principles and that progressivism is fundamentally anti-American.

In January, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced plans to partner with Hillsdale College to launch as many as 50 such schools, which public education advocates fear could be a tipping point in the privatization battle.

In this three-part series, Salon looks at Hillsdale College's multifaceted and far-reaching role in shaping and disseminating the ideas and strategies that power the right.

In our first installment, we met Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn, a Winston Churchill scholar who led Donald Trump's short-lived 1776 Commission and has used his connections to right-wing thought leaders like Ginni Thomas and Betsy DeVos to turn Hillsdale College into a political powerhouse.

He has described education as a "weapon" in the conservative war to reclaim America. }.In 2011 Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn began offering slices of his institution's intellectual output to the public with a series of free online courses on subjects like the Constitution, the Bible and, more recently, "American Citizenship and Its Decline." This open-source continuing ed project, Larry Arnn says, has attracted 3.5 million pupils to date and social media abounds with conservatives energized by what they've learned.

Peter Montgomery - a senior fellow at People for the American Way - sees the courses as a means of popularizing an extremely conservative "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution, in which "a lot of what the federal government does now, including pretty much anything related to the social safety net, is illegitimate." Imprimis - Hillsdale College's publication - churns out essays adapted from speeches given at Hillsdale College events - including jeremiads on such topics as "gender ideology," "the Great Reset" and "The January 6 Insurrection Hoax" (which includes a defense of an Oath Keeper arrested for the Capitol assault).

Recent weeks have seen the recirculation of a 2017 Imprimis article, "How to Think About Vladimir Putin" (by "traditional measures," perhaps "the pre-eminent statesman of our time").

In 2018, as much of the world was horrified by the public unfolding of Donald Trump's kids-in-cages policy, Imprimis offered a provocative defense, arguing that the then-resident Donald Trump was taking a "stand on behalf of the nation-state and citizenship against the idea of a homogenous world-state populated by 'universal persons.'" Any honest observer must admit, the essay continued, "that diversity is a solvent that dissolves the unity and cohesiveness of a nation." "The idea that birthright citizenship is wrong used to be a very fringe position," said Peter Montgomery.

"Promoting the idea that ethnic diversity is not a strength but 'a solvent' is pretty toxic stuff to be saying when white nationalism and antisemitism are on the rise." But that's where Hillsdale College's strength lies, he added: in providing an intellectual veneer to right-wing ideology.

"This is the same stuff you would hear from Dinesh D'Souza or Ann Coulter, but it seems different coming from this classical institution supposedly committed to the search for the truth." Around the same time Hillsdale College began offering online courses, Hillsdale College expanded into primary and secondary education as well.

Hillsdale College already ran a private K-12 academy on its campus.

According to an old edition of that school's curriculum, students at the Hillsdale Academy memorized Bible verses and attended both weekly prayer services and daily flag ceremonies as part of the school's "advocacy of ceremony and pageantry in transmitting principles, strengthening traditions and making children feel part of something greater than themselves." They were also instructed to stand up whenever an adult entered a classroom and remain standing until they were acknowledged.

Lists of academy-approved books came with a warning to use only original editions, since later versions might "contain revisionist forewords and introductions" that could sway "impressionable children unequipped to recognize and discount the politicization of literary scholarship." Meanwhile, the academy's history curriculum began with the bedrock premise that "The settling of America and the founding of the United States are an expression of Christian Intention." (A spokesperson for Hillsdale College said the academy's curriculum has since been replaced.) In 2010, Hillsdale College launched a new program, the Barney Charter School Initiative (BCSI) - intended to spread that model, adapted to local requirements, nationwide.

In the words of the program's head - Hillsdale College assistant provost for K-12 education Kathleen O'Toole - BCSI's conception of classical education "is what we used to do in this country back when education was working." Charters launched in partnership with BCSI follow Hillsdale College's focus on "the Western tradition," from the Greeks on down, including a heavy emphasis on U.S. founding documents and, somewhat more hazily, an overall "approach to instruction that acknowledges objective standards of correctness, logic, beauty, weightiness, and truth." That's common language at Hillsdale College, where classes and promotional materials promise an education driven by "the good, the beautiful and the true" - rhetoric drawn from Plato and Aristotle, but also ubiquitous in conservative Christian discourse.

That ambiguous inspiration is also reflected in BCSI's ostensibly secular approach to teaching "virtue." In place of explicit scripture recitation, BCSI students study the Bible as an example of "Lasting Ideas from Ancient Civilizations." Rather than outright sermons, students are taught, as Kathleen O'Toole says, "to love the right things" and "spend their lives pursuing the good." What that means in practice is suggested, at least in part, by BCSI "chief architect" Terrence Moore, who explained in an essay that classical education teaches "students that true freedom and happiness are to be obtained through limited, balanced, federal, and accountable government protecting the rights and liberties of a vibrant, enterprising people" - which is to say, a particularly conservative vision of the proper ordering of society.

There are further hints in the BCSI K-12 program guide, which Hillsdale College licenses for free to both charters and other schools it considers compatible.

In one teaching guide shared online, BCSI offers extensive classroom resources and text recommendations, heavy on Hillsdale College professors' work, laissez-faire economics and the conviction that progressives have betrayed America's founding principles.

Among the suggested titles are former Hillsdale College history professor Burton Folsom's "New Deal or Raw Deal?

How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America," Ronald Reagan education secretary William Bennett's "America: The Last Best Hope" (Volumes 1-3), and Hillsdale College economist Gary Wolfram's "A Capitalist Manifesto." "The concern with the Barney Charter School Initiative is that it's a stealth way of getting public dollars for 'Judeo-Christian' religious ideology" and a deeply conservative vision of America, said Kathleen Oropeza - founder of the progressive grassroots group Fund Education Now.

"There seems to be an agenda behind it, which is not the typical equity that public schools strive for in telling the story of history." Journalist Katherine Stewart - author of "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism" - says recent years have seen a growing number of complaints about charter schools incorporating religious instruction in various guises - particularly through the classical school movement's focus on virtue, heritage and founding principles.

One former teacher at a Florida BCSI school told Katherine Stewart that his charter had a chaplain teach students that "America is a Judeo-Christian nation" founded on "biblical principles." (A spokesperson for Hillsdale College responded, "Because BCSI charter schools - by law - are not religiously affiliated, we would remind school leaders that no visitors can advocate or present to the student body the truth of one particular faith.") In 2018, Arizona's then-superintendent of public instruction was so inspired by the Barney Charter School Initiative (BCSI) curriculum that she sought to institute it in place of Arizona's history and science standards - which she derided as "vague and incomplete at best, indoctrination at worst." That effort failed, but these days, she might have better luck.

Hillsdale College's newest K-12 offering - the 1776 Curriculum - has been widely embraced by Republican state and local elected officials.

Introduced on Hillsdale College's website with the declaration that "America is an exceptionally good country," the curriculum depicts America's founding fathers - even those who owned slaves - as closet abolitionists, while the reformers of the late 19th to early 20th century Progressive era - who sought to address symptoms of Gilded Age inequality such as sweatshops and child labor - were promoters of "group rights" whose activism was fundamentally anti-American.

("Progressivism was a rejection of the principles of the Declaration of Independence as well as the form of the Constitution," the 1776 Curriculum argues.

"Young American citizens must understand why and how the government of the country they now live in was changed from what their country's Founders originally intended.") The 1776 Curriculum also suggests that systemic American racism was effectively ended by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and that the ideals of that movement were "almost immediately turned into programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders." The 1776 Curriculum argues that most diversity policies amount to a "regime of formal inequality," and asks students to ponder the study question, "How are critical race theory and 'anti-racism' discriminatory?" As a recent analysis from Phil Williams at Tennessee's NewsChannel 5 elaborates, the 1776 Curriculum further suggests that civil rights sit-ins at Southern lunch counters were an unconstitutional infringement on private property, and falsely implies that Martin Luther King Jr. didn't believe in using "the force of law" to achieve equality, but only an appeal to individual consciences.

A Hillsdale College spokesperson said that the thousands of pages released to date "are just the first portions of a greater whole," and that forthcoming units of the 1776 Curriculum "will provide a fuller treatment" of civil rights figures like Martin Luther King Jr. But in a letter to teachers included with the 1776 Curriculum, Kathleen O'Toole emphasizes that educators should proceed from the principle that "the more important thing in American history is that which has endured rather than that which has passed." *** Although it's long gone from Hillsdale College's website, the Barney Charter School Initiative (BCSI)'s original mission was described as an effort to "recover our public schools from the tide of a hundred years of progressivism that has corrupted our nation's original faithfulness to the previous 24 centuries of teaching the young the liberal arts in the West." Exactly how Hillsdale College defines this corrupting tide is unclear.

Partly they're referring to the sort of student-led, project-based pedagogy pioneered by figures like John Dewey in the early 20th century.

Although historians describe progressive education as a shift from rote memorization and authoritarian classrooms to more child-centered teaching, a Hillsdale College spokesperson described progressive education's legacy as having "reduced education to a vocationally focused, utilitarian enterprise that merely equips students with the skills required for future jobs." But Hillsdale College's opposition to "progressive" education also defines an ambitious effort - as Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn often describes it - to turn back the clock on "a great engineering project that was born in the Progressive era," in which educators like John Dewey began to conceive of universities as a means to guide society's evolution through a new elite of university-trained experts and administrators.

In Larry Arnn's words, educators decided, "We could be the ones who would plan the future of society.

Now we will rule." With that appropriation of power, Larry Arnn argues, came a relativistic, progressive reinterpretation of America's founding documents - now wrongly construed to empower an activist government commissioned to solve societal problems, and establish a new realm of "positive rights" (like the right to food or housing) instead of just the "negative rights" (freedom from government oppression) outlined in the Constitution.

And today, Larry Arnn argues, teachers function as "conveyor belts" to feed that top-down progressive ideology to the nation's young.

In other words, Hillsdale College understands the foundational conflicts between conservatives and liberals, at least in part, as fallout from changes in educational philosophy.

But Hillsdale College sees the solution there as well.

As the Barney Charter School Initiative (BCSI)'s original mission statement proclaimed, "The public school is arguably among the most important battlegrounds in our war to reclaim our country from forces that have drawn so many away from first principles." And in that war, "the charter school vehicle possesses the conceptual elements that permit the launching of a significant campaign of classical school planting to redeem American public education." Today that campaign is making significant progress, with 53 schools around the country either operating as full BCSI "member schools" or implementing its curriculum.

Larry Arnn says the last two years (~2020-2022) have created surging demand for all of Hillsdale College's offerings; that applications to Hillsdale College - which recruited and fundraised on its lack of COVID-19 restrictions and its anti-"woke" curriculum - are way up; that half a million people registered for Hillsdale College's online courses in a recent 12-month stretch; and that there's more public demand for BCSI charter schools than they can possibly fulfill.

A 2021-12 "tele-town hall" for Hillsdale College supporters drew an audience of some 13,000 people, along with multiple calls from school board members seeking advice on introducing BCSI charters in their districts.

On the call, Kathleen O'Toole said they'd been contacted by officials from 15 states asking for advice.

Most prominent among these - of course - is Tennessee, where Larry Arnn says Tennessee Governor Bill Lee initially asked him last year (2021) to launch 100 BCSI charters.

Given BCSI's extensive hand-holding in launching each school, including spending weeks training charter staff, Larry Arnn committed to a somewhat more modest plan of 50 schools over six years.

(A Hillsdale College spokesperson said no specific plans have yet been formalized.) But while Bill Lee assured skeptical local reporters that the charters will be secular schools serving a general population, Hillsdale College and its supporters seem to see a higher purpose.

Last May (2021-05) Florida education commissioner Richard Corcoran - a close aide to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis - told a Hillsdale College audience, "The war will be won in education.

If we can get education right - we can have kids be literate and then understand what it means to be a self-governing citizen in a self-governing country - we'll win it back." In a 2021-09 speech in Tennessee (recently removed from the internet), Hillsdale College's President Larry Arnn went a step further.

In answer to an attendee concerned - in a month marred by ugly nationwide school board fights - that America might not "make it," Larry Arnn counseled, "Go home and read some Winston Churchill." Larry Arnn also believed that the United States was facing "the greatest danger I've ever seen in my life," but said distressed conservatives should embrace the cold comfort of Winston Churchill's wartime motto, imagining the house-to-house fighting that might follow a Nazi invasion of Britain: "You can always take one with you." "Now that's Sparta talk," Larry Arnn said.

As though anticipating Donald Trump's call last weekend (2022-03) for conservatives to "lay down their very lives" to fight critical race theory, Larry Arnn continued, "We don't know what our last reserves are; we may be about to find out.

But let's say they're insufficient.

It is glorious and honorable to give oneself to a beautiful and losing cause.

But it is very wrong to think it's going to lose."

• (Kathryn Joyce, Investigative Reporter, 2022-03-16, https://www.salon.com/2022/03/16/salon-investigates-the-on-public-schools-is-being-fought-from-hillsdale-college/) "Salon investigates: The war on public schools is being fought from Hillsdale College.

In a 3-part investigation, Salon shows how this tiny Christian college is leading the right-wing fight on education." (Part 3/3: 2022-03-17, https://www.salon.com/2022/03/17/the-far-rights-national-plan-for-schools-plant-charters-defund-public-education/) "The far right's national plan for schools: Plant charters, defund public education.

Exclusive: Hillsdale College's "classical" charter schools are spreading fast - but the true goal is much bigger." { This is the final installment of a three-part investigative series on Hillsdale College, its charter school network and its connection to the national struggle over education.

In recent years, Hillsdale College, a small private Christian school in Michigan, has quietly become a driving force in America's ongoing fights around education.

A "feeder school" for the Donald Trump administration, Hillsdale College led President Donald Trump's controversial 1776 Commission and serves as a testing ground for the right's most ambitious ideas: For instance, that diversity erodes national unity, that Vladimir Putin is a populist hero and that conservatives should lure so many children out of public schools that the entire system collapses.

Hillsdale College has inconspicuously been building a network of "classical education" charter schools, which use public tax dollars to teach that the U.S. was founded on "Judeo-Christian" principles and that progressivism is fundamentally anti-American.

In January, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced plans to partner with Hillsdale College to launch as many as 50 such schools, which public education advocates fear could be a tipping point in the privatization battle.

In this three-part series, Salon looks at Hillsdale College's multifaceted and far-reaching role in shaping and disseminating the ideas and strategies that power the right.

In our first installment, we met Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn - a Winston Churchill scholar who led Donald Trump's short-lived 1776 Commission, and has used his connections to right-wing thought leaders like Ginni Thomas and Betsy DeVos to turn Hillsdale College into a political powerhouse.

In the second installment, we explored the curriculum taught at Hillsdale College and widely promoted through its national network of charter schools, which is informed by a deeply conservative understanding of American history, an "originalist" reading of the U.S. Constitution and an explicit desire to undo progressive educational reforms of the last 100 years. }.The Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA) - part of Hillsdale College's Barney Charter School Initiative (BCSI) - opened its doors in 2020-08 with a combative flair.

Orange County Classical Academy flew a pro-police "Thin Blue Line" flag, and announced its adoption of a sex-ed curriculum "designed to support parent authority and family values" - which, an ACLU review has found, includes the suggestion that LGBTQ students may outgrow their orientations or identities, and that women who have abortions are "destroying" themselves.

While other school districts around the country stressed over COVID-19 related masking - or whether to open in person at all - OCCA advertised its complete lack of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.

An FAQ on Orange County Classical Academy's website makes clear that - like Hillsdale College itself - Orange County Classical Academy offers a classical education focused primarily "on the history and cultural achievements of Western civilization," which it sees as "the heritage of every scholar at OCCA," no matter where they come from.

Students at Orange County Classical Academy primarily read the works of white men - since "the great leaders, thinkers, scientists, writers, and artists of Western Civilization have mostly been white men." While teachers will discuss historical bigotry or discrimination "when appropriate," they won't judge historical figures by modern standards.

In sum, it's a plan tailor-made to address the conservative complaints of the past two years (~2020-2022), which OCCA co-founder Jeff Barke says has now earned Orange County Classical Academy a 1,000-student waitlist - largely from conservative homeschooling families.

But it wasn't an easy road to get there.

Jeff Barke and his OCCA partner, Mark Bucher, had to try multiple times before the Orange Unified School Board (a local elected body, not the county-wide board led by Jeff Barke's wife, Mari Barke) finally approved their petition in 2019-12, after a contentious, five-hour meeting that lasted past 1 a.m.

At that meeting and before, critics both among the public and board raised a number of red flags about the OCCA proposal.

The school's supporters, noted board members, seemed to have gathered signatures for their petition by canvassing minority neighborhoods and making the unfounded promise that OCCA graduates would receive preferential consideration and scholarships to nearby Chapman University, where one of Mari Barke's colleagues on California's Orange County Board of Education (OCBE) is a dean and that colleague's husband is president.

(Chapman University is also where Donald Trump coup planner John Eastman taught, until last year: 2021.) Over his years of education advocacy, board member Kathryn Moffat said that Mark Bucher had been involved in a handful of scandals: There was a bus privatization contract that left students stranded on the street, and a school whose charter was revoked after accusations of nepotism, self-dealing and the fraudulent use of more than $25 million in taxpayer funds.

The woman OCCA first proposed as its headmaster had caused public outcry the year before over a Facebook post in which she called Colin Kaepernick an "anti-American thug." Amid the final 2019 hearing, three of the seven Orange United board members opposed the Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA) petition, calling it a "fiscal" and "curricular nightmare" with a transparent religious and cultural bias, and saying that Jeff Barke and Mark Bucher weren't professional educators but "ideological and political activists." Even the administrator of an area Christian school wrote in to warn that OCCA's plan amounted to illegal public funding of religious schools.

But the three critics on the board were in the minority, up against four conservatives, two of whom had received nearly their entire campaign budget from a PAC affiliated with the California Charter Schools Association.

"Clearly they needed to recuse themselves," said Lynne Riddle - a retired federal judge, who spoke at the meeting to warn about the apparent conflicts of interest.

"If you ask anybody, anywhere, which way you might lean if you get almost 100 percent of your money from one donor and the donor is a party to a decision you're going to make, it's not rocket science." Jeff Barke and Mark Bucher also brought more than 100 supporters to pack the meeting, squaring off against a cadre of opponents affiliated with the teachers' union, whom Jeff Barke later described, in an interview with the right-wing Epoch Times, as resembling members of "antifa." In an interview with Salon, Jeff Barke chalked the criticism he and Mark Bucher received up to "character assassination" from unions that hate OCCA "because we're competition." Jeff Barke said neither he nor Mark Bucher would ever financially profit from the charter, and that, to the contrary, Jeff Barke had donated much of his own time and money to the school.

Jeff Barke dismissed the suggestion that OCCA was "a religious school in disguise" as "a flat-out lie designed to stir up opposition." That said, Jeff Barke continued, the school is "not afraid to teach kids about the deep religious founding of our country and the beliefs of our founders that were steeped in Judeo-Christian values." In the summer of 2020, amid Jeff Barke's growing celebrity as an anti-lockdown activist, Mari Barke used her position at California's Orange County Board of Education (OCBE) to issue a set of guidelines calling for in-person schooling without masks, social distancing or reduced class sizes.

Those guidelines were ostensibly the result of an expert panel OCBE convened that June (2020-06), but were actually written by the panel's moderator, Will Swaim - president of the California Policy Center, the right-wing think tank where Mari Barke works.

(Will Swaim later admitted that he'd written most of the document before the panel even met.) When the guidelines drew significant national attention, four of the panelists distanced themselves or asked to have their names removed from the document.

Nonetheless, Mari Barke cited it soon thereafter in written testimony for a lawsuit seeking to compel Governor Gavin Newsom to reopen California schools.

This January (2022-01), Jeff Barke echoed him (Will Swaim), urging the congregation at Calvary Chapel Chino Hills to "Leave the government schools! ... And if you're not going to do that, then run for the school board." Over the summer (2021 ?), Mari Barke suggested that parents looking for in-person education should consider charters, and Jeff Barke promised that the Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA) would open that fall (2021 ?) "with no restrictions." That July (2021-07 ?), Will Swaim said that OCCA would somehow "operate under the aegis" of the California Policy Center, and, like Jeff Barke and Mari Barke, urged parents angry about pandemic restrictions to seek out charters as a rebuke to the regular public school system.

"If we can get parents switched into charter schools or private schools," Will Swaim told the Los Angeles Times, "we're going to make those union schools pay for their failings." If public schools began mandating vaccines for children, Will Swaim added, hundreds of thousands of people should descend on Sacramento, California in protest.

"If enough of us stand up, and enough of us say, 'If you do this, my child will no longer be in a government school,'" Will Swaim told the church, they could win.

"Because with your child comes the education dollars, and if your child isn't in school, they won't have the money, the unions won't get funded, and those schools will close down." Until recent years, the term "government schools" was pejorative rhetoric used almost exclusively by the Christian right, which for decades has called on believers to leave public schools.

But through the pandemic, both that language and the sentiment behind it - that a slow war of attrition might cause the public education system to collapse - have gone mainstream.

When I asked Jeff Barke about this, he doubled down, suggesting that the "silver lining of COVID-19" is a "mass exodus from traditional government schools," and calling for the abolition of the federal Department of Education.

But none of that, Jeff Barke says, is political.

"It's not our desire to fight politics in education," Jeff Barke told me.

"It's our desire to rescue education from politics." "Orange County is a hotbed of extremism and has been for a while, but it's really exploded over the past couple of years," said Katie Hill - a parent activist in nearby Riverside, California who has tracked Jeff Barke and Mari Barke's influence on local schools closely.

"People in Orange County are pretty tuned into the radicalization of the school boards and their fellow community members.

It's just a matter of what you can do to stop it, because there is so much money funding all of this." During Mari Barke's tenure, California's Orange County Board of Education (OCBE) has emerged as a culture-war force unto itself.

The OCBE opens its meetings with a prayer, and when a school board in nearby Chino, California voted in 2019 to drop its long-standing legal battle to allow prayer and Bible readings during public meetings, the OCBE picked up the case on Chino's behalf.

The OCBE has sued Orange County's superintendent twice in the last few years, in addition to its three lawsuits against Governor Gavin Newsom, all on the public dime.

The board's primary purpose, Mari Barke says, is to serve as a sort of appellate court for charter schools that have been rejected at the local level, and in such cases, the charters almost always win.

But Mari Barke dismissed the notion that campaign donations she or her OCBE colleagues have received from pro-charter groups represent a conflict of interest.

"I don't do what I do because they support me," Mari Barke said.

"They support me because of my beliefs and because I am pro-school choice." As even conservative local media have pointed out, OCBE has repeatedly hosted public meetings on topics over which it has no control, largely to serve as a platform for angry right-wing parents, as with a 2021-07 forum on "critical race theory," organized in response to new state standards for ethnic studies courses and one such course proposed at a local county high school.

(Jeff Barke also wrote a series of letters to the editor during that conflict, suggesting that approving the course would somehow lower property values in the surrounding neighborhood.) At one point in 2021, Mari Barke also spoke at another Calvary Chapel church, in Silverado, urging congregants to show up at local meetings on school oversight and pandemic restrictions, describing the scene they'd encounter as "kind of like a mini-Trump rally out in our parking lot." "Every meeting, show up," Mari Barke continued.

"If we all fight, we'll win." Nine days later, noted Katie Hill, a contingent of Proud Boys and other far-right activists from outside Orange County, California showed up to protest a Los Alamitos school board meeting, leading police to recommend the board cancel their in-person session.

This January (2021-01), after Orange County, California began a post-census redistricting process, and a bill was proposed to move school board elections to align with general elections in November (2022-11), when the electorate is likely to be much larger and more liberal - the OCBE's conservatives counterattacked, describing the plans as a partisan Democratic effort to "break up our board majority fighting for parental rights." On the night Jeff Barke spoke at Jack Hibbs' church, he said many Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA) parents had gone to a different local meeting instead, to protest "evil forces that are trying to prevent Mari Barke and her board from doing what they're doing." Two weeks later, a related hearing was held at the county's Committee on School District Organization, where one of Mari Barke's conservative OCBE colleagues led supporters in prayer in the parking lot outside.

Retired federal judge Lynne Riddle recalled that meeting as a bizarre experience, with a parade of speakers, many wearing OCCA shirts, testifying against the plan and in favor of the OCBE.

"They were led to believe that something untoward was going on in this discussion that put them or others like them in jeopardy," Lynne Riddle said.

"Some of them were actually weeping - about things that had nothing to do with putting their children at risk, nothing to do with this mapping process." Eventually the meeting devolved into shouts that the redistricting committee was discriminating against the parents, that they were Communists or Nazis or "white racist bitches." Now the OCBE is suing that committee too.

The drama around OCCA has been particularly volatile, thanks to both the COVID-19 pandemic politics swirling around Jeff Barke, and Mari Barke's seeming conflicts of interest.

But similar dramas have played out around the United States - if often more quietly - as Hillsdale College's charter school initiative has spread.

"This is the sort of campaign that goes under the radar.

It takes place school-by-school, district-by-district, and so doesn't get that much national attention," said Jeff Bryant - a journalist with the Independent Media Institute, who covered a Hillsdale College charter fight in Colorado seven years ago, which sparked heated accusations that the proposed school was seeking to offer religious instruction in disguise.

That charter ultimately passed, despite its request for numerous exemptions from state laws related to bullying, student privacy and discrimination, among others.

More recently, a school board director outside Colorado Springs sought to introduce Hillsdale College's 1776 Curriculum so students would "know what it means to be an American." That school board director wasn't the first.

In the mid-2010s in Michigan, Tea Party activist Pasquale Battaglia tried to open a Barney Charter School Initiative (BCSI) charter - the Livingston Classical Academy - in order to "train up American Citizen Patriots." Local critics highlighted the fact that Pasquale Battaglia initially proposed the school under the name "Livingston Christian Academy," and for years discussed plans to build a "God and Country" education project to return schooling to the days in which "The first and foremost 'text book' is always the Holy Bible." They also pointed to Pasquale Battaglia's track record of posting inflammatory material online, including calling climate change a "Prog ploy," sharing a meme comparing Michelle Obama to "The Predator" - declaring "The only way to successfully negotiate with Islam is to present them their complete destruction," and quoting Joseph Stalin as perverse inspiration: "Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." In Florida, the principal of Naples Classical Academy - a BCSI charter - similarly came under scrutiny for his social media history, including posts about Muslim "gang rape marathons," "Muslim indoctrination in US schools," and purported revelations about ties between Common Core curriculum and "Libya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia." (Asked about these examples, a spokesperson for Hillsdale College responded that Hillsdale College "does not own, govern, or manage any of its affiliated schools," but that if "uncivil behavior comes to our attention," they flag it for school leaders.) Sometimes BCSI schools have had to shop around extensively before finding an authority willing to approve their petition.

In Michigan, the Livingston Classical Academy eventually opened as a BCSI charter - though not under Pasquale Battaglia - after a roundabout method of obtaining a "cyber charter" authorization to open what is in practice primarily an in-person school.

(In 2021, the school's board announced it would not renew its partnership agreement with BCSI.) In Indiana, said MaryAnn Ruegger, a board member of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education, Hillsdale College has repeatedly sought to make inroads in a state that's already a locus of the "school choice" movement.

It has only managed to open one school so far - the Seven Oaks Classical Academy - which was twice denied by Indiana's Charter School Board, on which MaryAnn Ruegger now sits.

On its third try, the charter was authorized by Grace College, a small private evangelical school in Winona Lake, a town with deep roots in fundamentalist Christian history and the onetime home of famed evangelist Billy Sunday.

Last year (2021) the Barney Charter School Initiative (BCSI) turned to a Native American tribal college in Wisconsin to authorize that state's first Hillsdale College charter - the Lake Country Classical Academy - after all other potential authorizers rejected their application.

Critics noted that the academy didn't serve children of that Native tribe, and that the school's curriculum notably downplays the historical crimes committed against Native Americans.

As Wisconsin Examiner editor-in-chief Ruth Conniff noted in a 2021-12 investigation, there's a financial incentive for groups that authorize charters, since sponsors receive a percentage of all per-pupil funding contributed by the state.

Ruth Conniff also reported that Lake Country benefited from friends in high places, with a Wisconsin state conservative Supreme Court justice - himself the co-founder of a private Christian school that bans LGBTQ teachers or students - attending the charter's open house in 2021-12.

In many states where Hillsdale College has planted a flag, BCSI charters enjoy political connections, but the pattern in Florida is particularly egregious.

Former Collier County School Board member Erika Donalds is one example.

The wife of Florida Representative Byron Donalds - who was a speaker at this year (2022)'s CPAC, where he declared that "the battle for our future" runs through the nation's schools - Erika Donalds helped found an alternative association for conservative Florida school board members, and later served on the educational transition team for Governor Ron DeSantis.

When Erika Donalds left the school board after one term in 2018, Erika Donalds founded a consultancy group called the Optima Foundation, specifically to help launch BCSI charters.

Erika Donalds' website reports she has worked with four such schools in Florida to date.

Sue Woltanski - author of a public-school advocacy blog, and a member of the Monroe County School Board in the Florida Keys - says the political influence runs deep.

"If you look at who opened any of the charter schools in Florida," Sue Woltanski said, "you're going to find either Erika Donalds and the Optima Foundation, or someone who used to be in the Florida legislature." Another example is Anne Corcoran - who is married to Florida education commissioner Richard Corcoran, and who served as both a board member and director of BCSI's Tallahassee Classical School until 2019.

That was when local newspapers noted a conflict of interest, after Richard Corcoran recruited Hillsdale College to help the state draft a new, more "patriotic" civics curriculum.

Richard Corcoran - who has reportedly suggested cutting the public school system by two-thirds, and whose brother has worked as a lobbyist for a charter school management company - spoke at Hillsdale College the same year (2019), telling the school's attendees to view education as the battlefield where Republicans could win the political war.

In that fight, Richard Corcoran said, steady progress toward school privatization was being made.

As Florida Republicans move closer to achieving their stated long-term goal of making 100 percent of the state's students eligible for school vouchers, Richard Corcoran suggested that once the state manages to lure 1.5 million students away from public schools - to get those kids "across that Rubicon," as Richard Corcoran put it - the resultant loss of funding and forced consolidation would alter the educational landscape so radically that not even future Democratic governors could change it back.

Indeed, they might be getting close already, Richard Corcoran said - with almost a third of that number already using vouchers or in charters.

"You can't take those 500,000 kids and bring them back into the public school system.

So you have to keep doing what we're doing, as quickly as we're doing it," Richard Corcoran said.

To illustrate his point, Richard Corcoran turned to the example of Tennessee.

"Dr. Arnn was talking about Tennessee asking for 100 Barney Charter School Initiative charter schools.

That's a game-changer.

Once you have that, and all of a sudden the governor leaves ... and it's a liberal that comes in there, you can't put the animals back in the barn." What that means, explains Amy Frogge - a former member of the Metropolitan Nashville Board of Education in Tennessee, and executive director of the public-school advocacy organization Pastors for Tennessee Children - is that charter expansion on a large scale poses an existential threat to public education.

"As charter schools proliferate, they strip public schools of adequate funding," Amy Frogge said, "and in Tennessee, our schools have been inadequately funded for 30 years.

At the same time, they 'cream' students from traditional schools." What happens then, Amy Frogge continued, is something of a death spiral: "Public schools are left serving increasing numbers of high-needs, high-cost students who are being deprived of the resources they need to succeed.

Bringing charters and voucher schools into the school system is a recipe for failure for the public school system.

Nationally, what we're seeing is a very intentional effort to dismantle public education in this fashion." Describing the charter campaign in Indiana, MaryAnn Ruegger agreed: "If enough of this pushes through here, whether it's Barney (the Barney Charter School Initiative) or other charters, my little hometown will lose its public school," since the same small class sizes that charters advertise as a perk are used as justification to shut down and consolidate public schools.

Almost a year after Richard Corcoran's prediction, that promise is on its way to being fulfilled.

Along with Tennessee Governor Bill Lee's announced partnership with Hillsdale College and an initial funding commitment of $32 million, the Tennessee state legislature is acting to speed up the charter school application process, allowing petitioners to bypass local school boards and apply directly to a state commission with a history of overruling local opposition.

The Tennessee bill also drastically eases the path for authorized charters to expand through purchasing "underutilized" school buildings for a $1 fee, while requiring the public school district to bear the cost of any major repairs or outstanding debts.

"The privatization push is very well-developed by public relations firms," said Amy Frogge.

"It's a billionaire's movement, and I believe that all the controversy about critical race theory and those issues are being stirred up in order to drive a 'failing schools' narrative." In many small towns - Amy Frogge continued, where schools are the linchpin of the community - that's a difficult task.

"Most communities love their local public schools.

They have high school football games, and their friends and family members teach at the schools.

The only way the privatization movement can gain ground is to create controversy and distrust of the public school system." "That's what all of this," Amy Frogge said - meaning the book bans, the CRT (critical race theory) panic, the attacks on teachers and school staff - "is about." *** On 2022-02-02 at the (California) Orange County Board of Education (OCBE) meeting, Jeff Barke's bid to begin opening new Orange County Classical Academy (OCCA) campuses around the county passed by a 3-1 vote, with Mari Barke abstaining.

(Legal questions around the petition could not be addressed by the OCBE's regular general counsel - a guest contributor to the California Policy Center who's helped the board fight the county superintendent - who also had to recuse himself because he also works with OCCA.) A particularly painful moment arrived when Beckie Gomez - the lone board member outside the OCBE's conservative majority, as well as its sole trustee of color - objected to Mari Barke remaining on the dais during the debate.

When Beckie Gomez suggested that her presence could still influence the proceedings, from the audience, OCCA parents who had come to support the expansion plan burst out laughing, prompting an exasperated plea from Beckie Gomez that everybody try to "be kind." When the board member acting in Mari Barke's stead put the question to a vote - joking that he wasn't married to Mari Barke, and she couldn't influence him - everyone but Beckie Gomez voted to allow Mari Barke to remain.

Less than an hour later, the board approved OCCA's unconditional expansion and the room broke into cheers.

Watching a livestream of the meeting from home, Briana Walker - a local mother who's been drawn into activism around OCCA - logged off in disgust at the seeming inevitability of the outcome.

"I don't think people realize what this entails," Briana Walker said.

Once these kinds of schools are approved, "there's almost no way to get them unapproved.

It's never going to happen.

They're going to be able to run amok in our county." Just last month (2022-01 ?) - Briana Walker noted - came news that an OCCA board member will run against Orange County's incumbent superintendent, potentially increasing their influence even more.

Kathleen Oropeza agreed, warning that "by the time a Barney Charter School Initiative (BCSI) school is in your community," a lot of groundwork has already been laid to secure its success.

Kathleen Oropeza compared the situation to the proliferation of model bills written by corporate interests and then enacted by Republican lawmakers in state legislatures around the country: "You put it together, and it's impossible for people who learn about this plan a year or two later to fight the momentum these people have created for themselves." The long-term goal of the entire Hillsdale College-driven educational universe - as Sue Woltanski of Florida's Monroe County School Board sees it - is no mystery: moving a critical mass of children out of the public schools, as a means of destabilizing and then destroying them.

"I think - like Richard Corcoran said - the battle for America will be won in education," Sue Woltanski said.

"There are so many wins for conservatives by privatizing education.

They get to control the message, decrease taxes and get access to the hearts and minds of all the children in America.

They get to kill the teachers' union - that one can't be stressed enough.

They basically allow for segregation academies.

They're allowed to fund their own Christian views.

All of these things are connected." And it's happening on multiple levels, Kathleen Oropeza says - federal, state and local.

"They're going to keep plugging away because they have the resources, they have the connections and they have the vision.

They're playing the long game, and while Hillsdale College might not seem important now, with their 53 schools, all they have to do is get a few states to adopt their standards, and the game changes." That game-changing moment may have arrived last month (2022-02).

But unlike previous Barney Charter School Initiative (BCSI) charter efforts, which have largely gone unnoticed outside affected local communities - and, as journalist Jeff Bryant (a journalist with the Independent Media Institute, who covered a Hillsdale College charter fight in Colorado seven years ago) notes, have drawn little protest from Democrats - Governor Bill Lee's grandiose plans for Tennessee have sparked substantial pushback.

State Democratic leaders have criticized the plan as academically unnecessary, an attack on public education and, in the words of Democratic state Senator Raumesh Akbari, the retailing of a "warped version of history." Local journalists have accused Bill Lee of seeking to create "a network of publicly-funded, private Christian schools" and Hillsdale College of a backdoor form of money-laundering.

On 2022-02-28 the ACLU of Tennessee filed an open records request seeking all records related to Tennessee Governor Bill Lee's partnership with Hillsdale College.

To Amy Frogge, this is a heartening wake-up call.

"I've been advocating for public education for 10 years, and the last couple of years have been extremely difficult," Amy Frogge said.

"It seems sort of hopeless, and like everything is just rolling through the legislature." This time, things seem different: "Perhaps it's the overreach, but I think it has awakened a lot of people to what the privatization movement is all about, which is not the well-being of students."