Hillsdale kept school open when few elsewhere did the same.
Jack and Jeff wrote yesterday, to mark the five year anniversary of Covid-19, about their memories of pandemic-times. I was a freshman in college when the pandemic hit. For the first few weeks school administrators didn’t know what was going on. But at Hillsdale College we were assured that business would carry on as usual. It did for the most part.
Hillsdale students left school spring semester of 2020 a few weeks before the end of term, unsure if we’d return. I went back in early summer to gather some belongings before spending time in California (briefly) and Montana, where restrictions were present but not draconian. Then Hillsdale resumed classes in the fall.
The school’s return strategy wasn’t perfect. When one student caught Covid in September, I was among the first batch of students to be quarantined (I had hugged “patient zero” at a party), in a nice townhouse Hillsdale usually reserved for guests of the college. We moaned about quarantine, sort of, but no one knew how to manage the pandemic, so we were fine with hanging out in the house for two weeks. Professors let us phone in to class and dropped off assignments at our door. The dean came by with food every day. We ordered to-go margaritas from the local Mexican joint and went on forbidden walks and talked to our boys from second-story windows (I wrote about quarantine for the school newspaper at the time and left those details out).
Masks were required at sorority recruitment and weekly Covid-19 testing was encouraged, too. At one point, the school had to quarantine more people than would fit in the townhouses, so they sent students to a local recreational camp, where they spent time around the lake and fire pits. It wasn’t a particularly enjoyable time period, that one filled with masks, testing, and contact tracing, but the school did the best it could with the information it had, and the inconveniences of the “Covid-era” became for us students inside jokes. Life was not ruined.
Hillsdale kept school open when few elsewhere did the same. Professors and administrators didn’t know what Covid-19 would bring, but they did know that shutting down school would run contrary to the principle of self-governance they taught students. They chose us, the students, over threats from state and federal governments. They did not require Covid-19 vaccines.
It’s heartbreaking to read stories like Jeff’s. His child was failed, at every point, by educators and officials who should have done better (Jeff’s special needs son came home from school one day crying, with a mask tied to his face). It was a luxury to escape the Covid-19 years trauma- and pain-free. Others didn’t get the chance.
Hillsdale’s decision to stay open came at great potential risk to the college. It is not the perfect school. No college is. It is, however, one of the only places in America to successfully, immediately, and forcefully protect its students from the severe and oppressive Covid-19 lockdowns that most other schools were either willing to go along with or unwilling to stand against.