Hillsdale Collegian 3.1.18

Michigan’s oldest college newspaper

Vol. 141 Issue 20 - March 1, 2018

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More than 50 Hillsdale students attend CPAC in D.C. By | Isabella Redjai Collegian Reporter NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Providing 56 Hillsdale College students a glimpse into the world of conservative politics, this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference featured a variety of speakers, including President Donald Trump.

From Feb. 21 to 24, thousands converged upon the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center near Washington, D.C., to hear from White House staff and Trump administration members such as Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, as well as Vice President Mike Pence.

“I’ve never seen Trump in person, and it’s really different than watching him on TV,” freshman Joey Sarno said.

“When I saw him in person, he seemed like real guy, and his rhetoric was actually much better than on television. He really gave the impression that you were a part of something bigger.”

Other guests included political commentator Ben Shapiro, Fox News television host Sean Hannity, and radio talk show host Laura Ingraham.

“My favorite speaker was Shapiro. I’ve seen Trump before, so I think he was most exciting,” sophomore Patrick Farrell said. “I think he did a great job talking about a wide range issues from a conservative perspective. He actually has a really objective take on everything.”

with guests like Ben Shapiro, Rick Harrison, and Gary Johnson.

Other students found opportunities to meet CPAC’s guest speakers by waiting backstage or making acquaintances in the general social areas.

Freshman Carl Miller took photographs with numerous CPAC speakers, including Mark Levin, Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, Nigel Farage, and Rick Harrison.

“During the 2016 election, I tried getting photos with all of the candidates. My experience with that really helped me discover how to be at the right place at the right time,” Sophomore Ben Dietderich had the opportunity to speak with former Libertari- Miller said. “But it really depends an presidential candidate Gary Johnson at CPAC. Ben Dietderich | Courtesy on a lot of luck. ees member, freshman Aidan Students said they felt I really got lucky Wheeler said. “We went out to with a lot of the opportunities even more directly involved lunch, and saw Nigel Farage in the world of D.C. politics to meet some of the guests.” eating. Walking throughwhen noticing the casual Students like Miller arrived out the Gaylord, I saw Ben presence of these celebrity at CPAC not only to grab Shapiro doing an interview at guests as they roamed the unique opportunities to meet halls of the Gaylord Hotel and Radio Free Hillsdale. Later on, conservative celebrities and we saw Nigel Farage again.”

Conference Center, as well as listen to motivational speechCPAC speakers shared surrounding restaurants in es, but to find rebirth in the a special connection with National Harbor. conservative movement, as Radio Free Hillsdale. Hillsdale a large majority of CPAC’s “It was really great seeing students junior Shad Strehle all of these famous politiattendees this year were in fact and sophomore Ben Dietdcians and speakers,” College College Republican students erich conducted interviews Republicans’ Board of Trustfrom across the country.

WRFH hits the airwaves at CPAC for first time By | Brooke Conrad Assistant Editor NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — One of the most exciting moments for sophomore Benjamin Dietderich at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference was when political commentator Ben Shapiro and about 20 fans showed up at the Radio Free Hillsdale WRFH 101.7 FM booth without notice.

“All the sudden, before I had written any of the questions and I was still thinking in my head what exactly I was going to ask him, I just see Ben and his bodyguard walking toward us and a big crowd of people behind them — all the fans, you know” Dietderich said. “They told me, ‘You only have five minutes, so make it count.’ And I got to talk to him for about six or seven, much upsetting his time manager.”

But Ben Shapiro was just one of many high-profile leaders student journalists interviewed. Members of the radio program talked with more than 60 of the conference speakers and members of the media during the radio station’s first trip to CPAC last week. Dietderich and junior

Shadrach Strehle handled most of the interviews, and Ryan Murphy, who is participating in the Washington-Hillsdale Internship Program this semester, took a few interviews, too.

The experience gave students a chance to think on their feet. Before interviewing British politician Nigel Farage, Strehle said he had about 10 minutes to prepare. Often, though, he had to interview people on the spot, even if he did not immediately recognize who the person was.

“You grab their card, just read it, and go,” he said. “I’m not a super politically active person, so it was a challenge.

It’s about asking the proper questions so that you can step away and let them do the interview. A lot of people sit down and really want to talk, so it’s not super hard.”

Dietderich said his favorite interview was one with Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James on how she became a conservative.

“I just thought she had a compelling story,” Dietderich said.

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“Not having been to CPAC before, what really struck me was the amount of young people,” Miller said. “It was really surprising, but really encouraging to see the rising generation.”

Students stayed a five-minute walk away at the AC Hotel on National Harbor. The Hillsdale College Republicans were able to reduce the cost from an estimated $930 per student to $180.

“I think it’s the best it has ever been, because we have been able to streamline,” acting president of College Republicans Rachel Umaña, a junior, said. “Each board had to focus on some aspect of fundraising and building up our bank account to make sure we can provide an event like this and make sure it is affordable. Students aren’t going to come if it’s not affordable.”

Students involved with College Republicans, especially on the club’s executive board, were held responsible for their different committees, each of which served a unique purpose in bringing together the overall trip.

“I joined the board in late December, and the responsibilities I was given for CPAC had to do with fundraising,” said junior Jack McPherson, a Hillsdale College Republicans board member. “I sent letters to donors and participated in a lot of member events.”

After months of fundraising efforts and a proposal to Student Federation for $3,000 — one of the lowest amounts requested in recent years — the College Republicans CPAC trip became a

reality. Fundraising methods included Buffalo Wild Wings, Panera Bread, and Domino’s fundraisers; a GoFundMe campaign, and 4,000 local phone calls on behalf of Michigan College Republicans.

“I helped with fundraising and some of the logistics of the CPAC trip,” said freshman Madeline Peltzer, member of the College Republicans Board of Trustees and Chair of the Connect Committee. “I thought the energy and optimistic, upbeat environment was great. I’ve been wanting to go to CPAC for forever, and it was so great to see all of our efforts come to fruition and really enjoy ourselves.”

Despite a flat tire on the way back from D.C. which kept the group at a rest stop for nearly three hours, College Republicans Chairwoman Natalie Meckel, a junior, said the trip was an overall success.

“Everything came together incredibly well, and Rachel and I were thrilled, especially since the two of us did just about all the planning ourselves,” Meckel said. “Ross, our President, and Kaitlin, our Event Coordinator, are on WHIP this semester in D.C., so we were down to two members of the executive board on campus.”

For students who attended, the feeling was mutual, and many said they had had an overall positive experience.

“It’s a great opportunity to connect with people out of D.C.,” Farrell said. “I definitely recommend going, no matter who you are; anyone can get something out of it.”

Seniors Noah Weinriech and Katie Scheu, the associate editor of The Collegian, were named the king and queen of President’s Ball on Saturday. Matthew Kendrick | Collegian

Women’s track team wins first ever G-MAC championship By | Anna Timmis Assistant Editor The Charger women’s track team won its first championship with the Great Midwestern Athletic Conference by more than 100 points. Walsh University took second place with 98.5 points.

Though they won no events Friday, the Chargers still wrapped up the first day ahead by 40 points thanks to several top finishes. They flew through the second day taking win after win, creating an energy and momentum that pushed the team to the top— winning five event championships, and their first conference championship in 19 years.

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The Hillsdale College women’s track team poses after winning its first G-MAC championship. Todd Lancaster | Courtesy

In a sweep of the top four places, senior Hannah Mcintyre paced her team in the 3000-meter race, taking an au-

to-qualifying first place with a time of 9:33.91. She finished 17 seconds before freshman Maryssa Depies, who finished

second.

Sophomore Arena Lewis and freshman Christina Sawyer took third and fourth place respectively.

McIntyre said her coach told her to make the race uncomfortable as practice for nation-

als.

“I was talking to the girls before, like ‘nobody else deserves top four. Those are our spots,’” McIntyre said. “So we

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were just talking before, that was our goal to get the top four spots and we did and everybody really pulled through and its really impressive.”

She praised the freshmen for fighting for the podium, as well as Lewis, who’s been recovering from injuries.

“It’s always fun to sweep the podium,” McIntyre said.

Senior Chloe Ohlgren won the first championship of the meet, finishing first in the triple jump early on Saturday.

Sophomore Abbie Porter won first place in the 800-meter race, an event she only started training for this year.

“I started doing the 400, that’s what I was best at it in high school,” she said.

Porter said the coaches

noticed that, after finishing the 400 meter, she often had energy left over. They suggested she try the longer race, and she started training for the 800 this year. She didn’t even run the event until her third meet this season.

“Since then I’ve been dropping time every meet,” she said.

Senior Hannah Watts won third place in the 800 meter race, running most of the race beside Porter until an opponent pushed into second place. Watts and Porter also took second place in the distance medley relay with McIntyre and junior Ally Eads.

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Trump speaks on gun control, taxes at CPAC Outstanding seniors to By | Stefan Kleinhenz be announced soon collegian reporter

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Donald Trump’s usual off-the-cuff manner and personability was at its best as he addressed the attendees of the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday.

In the hour and 15 minutes he spoke, Trump rallied the audience around the major victories of his administration thus far, from tax cuts to jobs to the the removal of a record amount of regulations.

“The policy agenda he laid out was really sound, and he humbled himself to give credit to the administration,” senior Razi Lane said. “I appreciated the patriotism in the speech.”

Conference attendees packed the room. They said they were eager to be a part of Trump’s historic visit. Christopher Benton from Jacksonville University arrived at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center at 3 a.m. to ensure a good spot at Trump’s 10 a.m. speech.

“I want to be as close as I can to feel the whole Trump effect,” Benton said.

The biggest take away from the speech was Trump’s masterful ability to navigate the discussions over gun violence. He explicitly expressed alliance with his base over the Second Amendment, saying, “There is nobody that loves the Second Amendment more than I do.” However, he quickly followed with a vow to solve the issue of gun violence in schools, something that had traditionally been seen as a conflict with the rights to guns.

“Every child deserves to grow up in a safe community surrounded by a loving family and to have a future filled with opportunity and with hope,” the president said.

“Reducing violent crime in America is a top priority for my administration. And we

CPAC 2018 drew thousands to the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, Feb 21-24 to see speakers, including President Donald Trump.

Stefan Kleinhenz | Collegian

will do whatever it takes to get it done. No talk. We’re going to do what it takes to get it done.”

He even suggested ideas to arm certain teachers who love their students and will protect them in times of danger.

Trump also encouraged people not to allow the victory of the presidency to take away from the need to defend positions in Congress.

He called people to bring the same energy they showed in 2016 to the upcoming midterm elections in November.

Both Hans Schundler, a freshman at Georgetown University, and Jake Lyons, president of Georgetown College Republicans, shared their enthusiasm of Trump’s successes so far.

“It is essential in this election to mobilize in 2018 because this is a legislative agenda that has momentum,” Schundler said as Lyons excitedly cut him off and began to speak saying, “He is appeasing all Republicans right now, trying to get them together, trying to get that coalition that always dominates the midterms.”

Trump appeared to be very genuine and down to earth,

even joking, saying, “You don’t mind if I go off script, you know it’s kinda boring,” referring to the teleprompter. At the beginning of the speech, he even joked about the “good-looking man” as he noticed himself on the two large screens, and at one point he even recited a poem to highlight his stance on immigration.

Early in the speech, a man was removed from the room, as he shouted “Traitor!”

Schundler and Lyons were seated next to the man before security escorted him from the ballroom.

“He pretended like he was reading a newspaper the whole time,” Lyons said.

“When Trump came out and there was a standing ovation, he used that moment to pass out Russian flags with Trump’s name written on them.”

Despite his lighthearted tone for the majority of the speech, Trump had two serious and heartfelt moments. The first was when he announced that the evangelist Rev. Billy Graham, who spoke at a CCA in 1984, will be placed in the rotunda of the nation’s capital starting Wednesday at 11 a.m. for a

two-day visitation. He is the first person to receive such honors since Rosa Parks in 2005. Trump expressed that only a few people are so honored to be placed there, and Graham is very deserving.

“This week, we lost an incredible leader...We will never forget Billy Graham. As a young man he decided to devote his life to God, and as a result changed our country,” the president said.

Trump concluded with a brief mention of new sanctions on North Korea that were announced today — they will be the heaviest sanction ever placed on North Korea.

Trump’s parting words left the audience with optimism and hope. Freshman Joy Brower was one of many in attendance at CPAC who were impressed and inspired by Trump’s speech.

“I thought Trump connected very well with his audience,” she said. “He was engaging as a speaker and touched on issues that really matter. I saw him connect emotionally and logically with the issues, not allowing the heat of a moment to affect his judgment.”

Sophomore Ben Dietderich interviewed political commentator Ben Shapiro while at CPAC. Ben Dietderich | Courtesy

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“She doesn’t shy away from the fact of how unusual it is to be a conservative, black woman and what that was like growing up, and I respected that a lot.”

While the marketing department had scheduled around 15 to 20 of the interviews before the conference, a lot of the interviews occurred as politicians and media members showed up. After the conference, the radio group compiled a 22-minute “best-ofs” segment to run on the radio station. Most of the interviews are also on Soundcloud, and Dietderich used several of them for his show, “American View,” which runs on Mondays at 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. The group also posted the clips in real time for other radio

stations to use.

Station Manager Scot Bertram also did a couple of interviews, but mostly helped with production of the segments. He said a lot of people who came by the booth, including Shapiro and Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel, didn’t necessarily stop at other places on radio row, as far as he knew.

“The vast majority of the interviews were high quality,” Bertram said. “We didn’t talk to anyone we didn’t want to talk to.”

Strehle said his favorite interview was one with an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, Yaakov Menken, who serves as managing director for Coalition for Jewish Values.

“We talked about the differences between Orthodox Judaism and Reformed Judaism, and how that relates to the Christian tradition. It was

a lot of fun,” Strehle said. “He also talked briefly about how the Judeo-Christian tradition is Jewish in its foundation, so we talked about that foundation and how a lot of people have moved away from it or not put as much value into it as there really is.”

With all of the interviews, there was not a lot of time to sit in on the general session.

“Ben got himself purposefully locked into the Trump room so he could watch,” Strehle said.

Bertram, Dietderich, and Strehle also got a special tour of the White House because of a connection with a former Hillsdale alumnus and marketing employee, Sam Brown, who now works in media at the White House.

They saw the West Wing, which is not usually part of a White House tour.

Strehle said he was im-

was to increase donor and alumni participation,” McGinness said. “Right now we are around 15 percent participation on a given year. Eightyfive percent of donations are not from people who went here. Alumni are not really giving back. We are working in an effort to improve our giving participation, so we have a donor goal instead of a dollar goal.”

The 1844 Society and Alumni office are running the campaign through a unique vendor that acts as a social media platform, making it easier to spread awareness for its cause. At the interactive site, alumni can initiate their own challenges to old classmates, teammates, sorority and fraternity brothers and sisters, and friends, to donate a certain amount. They can also create a match, which is a donation pocket for a specific

facet of Hillsdale life that they enjoyed most, whether that be athletics, academics, or a specific club or organization.

“Most people give money to what matters to them. This campaign was targeted to alumni, and designed to elicit an affinity for the things that matter to them,” McGinnes said. “In an alum’s case, they are going to give to the specific area that they really cared about. Here, alumni can designate their money to whatever area they choose, or they can make a general donation.”

The 1844 Society worked on the student side to create a tradition of giving back to Hillsdale, either through money or time. In this campaign, students were encouraged to contribute by sharing the campaign on their social media to help garner support for the cause.

pressed by the small size of the Oval Office, the “small, tight hallways,” and the press briefing room.

“The reporters are sitting in these bleacher-style seats, crammed together. If you weigh more than 150 pounds, there’s no way you’re not going to be rubbing elbows with the person next to you. The floor is covered with wires, tons of dust, there are all these cameras crammed into this small little space, and the lighting is fluorescent and really oppressive. It’s a dangerous little room.”

Dietderich said he was thankful for the opportunity.

“I am so grateful for the experience we got last weekend. I’m so grateful to everyone who made it happen,” Dietderich said. “I haven’t done anything that compares to it.”

By | Jordyn Pair News Editor The winner of Outstanding Senior Man and Woman will be announced next week, according to Director of Employee Relations John Quint.

Nominations were announced in early February.

“It’s a public acknowledgement of the person who’s a great representation of the senior class,” Quint said.

The male nominations are Aaron Andrews, Razi Lane, Dustin Pletan, and Jackson Ventrella, and the female nominations include Peyton Bowen, Madison Frame, Breana Noble, and Maria Theisen.

“When I found out I was nominated for Outstanding Senior Woman, I was both honored and surprised,” Bowen said in an email. “I remember looking up to the women who have been nominated in previous years as role models, so in that sense

it’s quite an honor that my classmates think I’ve filled a similar role.”

Although there are eight nominations, only one man and one woman are chosen.

These two seniors are then invited to speak to the graduating class at the commencement dinner and during Parents Weekend.

“Every single one of these are guys I admire greatly,” Senior Class President Lane said. “It is just an honor to be considered with them.”

The senior class nominates its candidates, but the final choice is made by faculty.

Having this dual process ensures the nominee is known by both faculty and students.

“It’s more organic than faculty and staff telling everybody who’s outstanding,” Quint said.

The final choice will be announced by a campus-wide email on March 5, according to Quint.

Lamplighters choose new women to lead the way By | Jo Kroeker Features Editor When the men’s leadership honorary Mortar Board declined women’s petitions for membership, Hillsdale’s women decided to start their own in 1949. Seventy years later, Lamplighters remains a body of eight young women in leadership roles on campus.

Last week, the women of Lamplighters chose rising seniors to fill their shoes.

They are: Ellen Friesen, Lucile Townley, Ryan Kelly Murphy, Chloe Kookogey, Abigail Trouwborst, Nour Ben Hmeida, Rosemary Pynes, and Taylor Bennett.

“It’s pretty exciting because we get to survey the next generation of strong, female campus leaders,” senior Allison Deckert said.

The current senior women are President-Vice President Andrea Lee, Secretary-Treasurer Rachel Watson, Breana Noble, Madison Frame, Katelyn Bercaw, Jessie Kopmeyer, and Macy Mount.

Townley, the GOAL Program Coordinator, said that she knows some girls but not others.

“It’s very diverse, there’s women from all over campus,” she said.

Kookogey, the managing editor of the Forum, said she was totally surprised that she was chosen.

“There are a lot of really wonderful girls here and I was definitely not expecting it,” she said.

Bennett, a volleyball player and active member of Intervarsity, said meeting weekly with the new Lamplighters will encourage her to keep pursuing all of her commitments well.

The name comes from a successful 19th century coming-of-age story, written by a woman, Maria S. Cummins, about a young woman, Gertrude Flint. In it, Flint endures

the abuse of a guardian, but with a stroke of fortune, she is rescued and raised into a responsible, virtuous woman.

The Lamplighters volunteer for the Women’s Commissioners Sale in the fall, meet weekly for lunch, honor the outstanding sophomore woman with the highest GPA, and host two teas for prospective members and underclass women with outstanding academic performance.

As a group, the Lamplighters have a monthly lunch and wear their bracelets the first Monday of the month.

The graduating seniors will give each of the new Lamplighters a charm bracelet at the Honors Assembly in the spring. The bracelet has 12 charms, bearing the names and initiation years of the bracelet’s previous wearers. A new charm replaces the oldest charm, this year, 2005, which gets sent to the owner wherever she is, accompanied by a letter.

“Having that charm being sent to you would be a good reminder of your time at Hillsdale and how you played a big role in helping people and the community, as well,” Lee said.

Townley had advice for underclass women, based on her own experience looking up to the women of Lamplighters.

“The biggest thing of going through Hillsdale is finding role models and trying to turn those role models into mentors who will help you grow and learn.”

Lee concluded with advice for the eight new Lamplighters.

“Continue to do what you’re doing now, get to know the other women that were selected, continue to play your role on campus, because the reason why you were selected is for your service to the community,” Lee said. “That’s why we choose you. Just continue being you.”

Love the ’Dale campaign spreads the love, raises more than $150,000 By | Elizabeth Bachmann Collegian Reporter The alumni office recently teamed up with the 1844 Society to show a little love to the school and bring alumni’s hearts and thoughts back to their alma mater. The Love the ’Dale campaign officially began the week of Valentine’s Day, and though all the appeals have been mailed out and the phonathon is long-finished, support from Hillsdale alumni continues to steadily trickle in.

To date, the campaign has raised $157,766 for academics, various sports teams, clubs, committees, and greek organizations. However, according to Colleen McGinness, Director of Strategic Partnership and Student Giving, the Alumni Office set no specific monetary goal for this campaign.

“Our goal for this event

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If interested in placing an advertisement in The Collegian, please contact ad managers Matthew Montgomery mmontgomery@hillsdale.edu or Danny Drummond at ddrummond@hillsdale.edu

Junior Michael Whitman talks with senior Emily Walker about donating to Hillsdale College. Elizabeth Bachmann | Collegian

“The 1844 Society is encouraging students here currently to get into that habit while they are still here at Hillsdale. We aren’t alumnae yet, but we will be next four years. We can start giving

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now. There are already so many things that we have to be thankful for, and that we wouldn’t have been able to experience if other people hadn’t given in the first place,” said senior Shelby Bargen-

quast, President of the 1844 Society. “From the moment you step foot on campus, the schools gives gifts to you. The society is trying to acknowledge that, and then get others to acknowledge that, and get people to give back to what they love.”

Vice President of the 1844 Society senior Emily Walker agrees that the Love the ‘Dale Campaign is not only a way to pay it forward but also a means of staying connected in the Hillsdale community.

“It is a great way to give back to a school that is giving us so much in opportunities and information. Sometimes we don’t recognize all the opportunities we have and we don’t realize that they come from donors,” Walker said.

“Donating is a way to way thank you, and for, alumni, it is a way to stay involved.”

How to: Join The Collegian

If you want to find out more about how to contribute to The Collegian through writing, photography, or videography, please contact Breana Noble at bnoble1@hillsdale.edu.

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Delta Tau Delta wins the ‘Most Improved Chapter’ award

DTD was presented the ‘Most Improved Chapter’ award at the annual Northern Divison Conference By | Katie Dimmer Collegian Freelancer Kappa chapter of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity recently won Most Improved Chapter Award at the annual Delta Tau Delta Northern Division Conference 2018.

Every DTD chapter submits a Fraternity Awards/ Accreditation Report, which evaluates the chapter in several categories such as recruitment, financial excellence, and member education operation. From last year’s

report to this year’s, the Kappa chapter’s scores improved the most of all the chapters in their district.

“We knew that our scores had improved, but we didn’t know they had improved that much,” DTD President junior Christopher Sturges said.

The fraternity received the award at the conference, which was held Feb. 22-25 in Columbus, Ohio. Hillsdale’s chapter sent four members: Sturges, Vice President junior Adam Cieply, Director of Re-

cruitment junior James Burke, and Treasurer senior David Stone. Executive offers and members from 41 chapters in the division attended.

Throughout the weekend, the men attended officer-specific training sessions as well as sessions for the entire delegation. The sessions included brainstorming with other chapters about successful techniques as well as leadership training.

“It was kind of cool to see that our chapter was excel-

ling above most of the other chapters and that we could bring ideas to the table and help them grow,” Stone said.

“We were thrilled. Everyone put in a ton of work over the past year.”

While it was a holistic improvement, one notable accomplishment was Stone’s perfect treasury score. Former fraternity president and senior Josh Brooks attributes this success to setting clear financial expectations.

“David did a great job

holding the chapter accountable,” Brooks said.

All three men said the award served as a “testament” to the work of the present and past senior classes.

“It was an awesome opportunity to see brotherhood in a way that is completely antithetical to the fraternity stereotype,” Stone said.

Sturges agreed: “To see the chapter rally once again, it’s really a testament to how hard the guys have worked, how hard the brotherhood has

worked.”

Stone said he would like to see the chapter build on this success by aiming for the national level of awards, eventually hoping for a top 20 recognition or higher.

Brooks, too, said he is positive about the chapter’s future.

“I want to see them do their best,” he said. “I’m excited to see what the future holds, and this award is a recognition of them working toward that.”

Opinion: ‘Fake’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing

Alpha Tau Omega welcome (left to right back) Alexander Reid, Owen Macaulay, Ben Dietderich, Matt Pfeifer, and Chandler Penn, as well as (left to right front) William Patrick, John Howard, and Bill Philips as their newest pledge class. Marcus Koperski | Courtesy

Fraternities welcome new pledges By | Jordyn Pair News Editor Hillsdale College fraternities finished welcoming their newest pledge classes, with Delta Tau Delta pledging its three-man class on Sunday.

“It’s one of the smaller ones,” said senior Peter O’Rourke, DTD public relations chairman. “For Delts, we’ve always worked better as a smaller group.”

Alpha Tau Omega pledged eight men: six freshmen, one sophomore, and one junior.

Sigma Chi and Delta Sigma Phi both pledged four men, all freshmen and all sophomore respectively. The new recruits are replenishing the fraternity’s numbers and bringing new interests, talents, and skills with them.

Sigma Chi Public Relations chairman freshman Joe Wagner said he is excited about the diversity the newest class will bring to the house.

Members of the new class are involved in mock trial and College Republicans as well

as the shotgun and sailing clubs.

ATO Membership Educator junior Marcus Koperski said he is happy to have several freshmen pledge members.

“In the the past, we’ve had difficulty reaching out into the dorms,” Koperski said.

Although fraternity pledge classes tend to be smaller in the spring semester, all three spokesmen emphasized that it was about who the new pickups are, not how many there are.

“We don’t care if we have a pledge class of 15 or five,” O’Rourke said. “It’s more about the quality guys.”

Wagner agreed: “It’s not about getting more numbers.

It’s about getting the

Delta Tau Delta welcomed (left to right) John Arnold, Andrew Shaffer, and Mitchell Jesse as the newest pledge class. Peter O’Rourke | Courtesy

IFC blood drive sees 77 student volunteer donors By | Nolan Ryan Assistant Editor The Interfraternity Council partnered with the Red Cross last week to hold a blood drive for Hillsdale College students.

On Feb. 19, 77 students gave their time and blood.

According to the Red Cross, one donation could potentially help more than one person.

The drive, however, did not quite meet its goal of 93 bags of blood.

“Sometimes, putting a pint of blood into a bag doesn’t feel satisfying or like it makes a difference, but the only reason hospitals can operate and save individual people’s lives every day is because of millions of healthy individuals who donate at drives like we have at Hillsdale,” said sophomore Celina McGowan, who donated blood to the drive.

“Ultimately, giving blood is a sacrifice, and we as college students — in one of the healthiest times of our lives — should make the sacrifices

necessary to save lives.”

IFC Vice President Joe Spampinato, a junior and Delta Sigma Phi, said 83 students volunteered to give blood, but not all of them were able.

Some students who came to give blood were denied after the screening process because of health concerns or because they had visited a restricted country within the past year.

Spampinato said the flu season was not a major deterrent to donations. A bigger problem, he said, was the “lack of willingness to give.”

“Not a lot of people want to take time out of their day to give blood and deal with the drowsiness and weariness afterward,” he said. “People don’t want to get poked with a needle and sit on a table for giving blood. A lot of people actually just haven’t done it, so they’re afraid to go out and try it. Sitting on a table and bleeding for a whole pint seems a little scary.”

Freshman Joey Sarno, a

member of Sigma Chi, said he understands the hesitation some have when asked to donate blood. Typically, though, donating blood is not dangerous, he said.

“We’re asking people to give something of themselves,” he said. “I didn’t like giving blood. I understand where people are coming from. It’s a tough thing, but the people that do — it’s really appreciated.”

McGowan said donating blood is a little thing she can do to help potentially save someone else’s life. With future career plans for nursing, she said this is something often on her mind.

“Giving blood takes about 40 minutes to an hour from start to finish, and I think that Hillsdale students have so much to do, they don’t feel able to commit that time,” she said in an email. “Time is about priorities, though, and people who are able to give blood should prioritize

donation.”

Her solution, she said, was to read a book while she donated.

Sarno said he thought a good means of increasing donors may be to incentivize volunteers.

“Some people do it out of the goodness of their hearts, but some people need that extra push,” he said. “I think if we had some sort of way to incentivize them to do that, it would make it a lot better.”

Sarno and Spampinato said all four fraternities sent a large number of volunteers. The drive had at least 20 volunteers from each Greek house, working at the pre-registration table in the Grewcock Student Union or helping out at the drive itself.

Sarno said it was good to see the separate Greek houses come together for this cause.

“We are individuals, but it’s good to help out the community at large,” he said.

By | Maria Grinis Collegian Freelancer In the middle of formal recruitment my freshman year, I called home. I wanted to get the heck out. Fuming on the phone to my family that sororities were just an arbitrary social construct prone to the cultivation of facades, my dad interrupted me: “And is there anything wrong with that?”

I didn’t get the heck out.

I stayed. I pledged Kappa.

And I have spent the last three and a half years trying to figure out an answer to that question: Is there anything wrong with that?

We throw the buzz words of authenticity, sincerity, and vulnerability around like they’re the be-all-end-all of social interaction. Nobody can argue that there is a place for them. But we can also agree that answering everyone who asks “How are you?” along the lines of “Well, I am 43 percent OK, 26 percent overwhelmed, 10 percent annoyed at my English professor, and 21 percent hungry,” would be ridiculous and best saved for your best friend or significant other, if that.

This is an absurd exaggeration of a hard reality; in the professional world, limiting your relationships to the real and raw is not an option.

Sometimes, choosing not to associate with certain people is not an option. Upon graduation, most of us will be confronted with incompetent colleagues and abrasive bosses. In suburbia, we will interact with curt teachers, rude neighbors, and soccer moms who make us want to swear like sailors. We cannot merely avoid these relationships — instead, we must navigate them, treating others with friendliness when possible, with deference when required, and with courtesy always. Good manners are nonnegotiable.

Last month, an interviewer for medical school asked me an unexpected question: Who would be your worst nightmare patient?

She chuckled at my answer, saying, “You’ll meet a lot of that kind of patient.” The

details of my response are unimportant. What matters is that regardless of whether someone is my particular Achilles’ heel, I will still have to treat them well. This is not about feigning sincerity. This is about recognizing that the world requires us to fake it; we must often speak and coexist respectfully with people who really, really tick us off.

What does this have to do with the Greek system? The Greek system has been the best microcosm of this reality that I have seen during undergrad. I don’t think any Greek would tell you that interacting with their house is all rainbows and butterflies. But it is precisely because it is not rainbows and butterflies that it is worthwhile. If you stick it out, you will be perpetually provided with opportunities to meet, work (and fight) with students who you never would otherwise — who study different subjects, spend their weekends in different ways, and resolve conflict by different principles. With this comes the chance to open your mind to other perspectives and to learn to compromise. Being Greek is not about faking authenticity. It is about giving unexpected relationships a chance, about giving those relationships another chance, about giving them a third. How else would I have become friends with a wicked-smart economist or forged mutual respect with a confident cheerleader?

And if you practice it for long enough, you get better at it, building habits serviceable for life after Hillsdale.

So the next time you’re tempted to fling “fake” at someone in a sorority or a fraternity or even about to direct that adjective as an insult at the system in general, I would challenge you to think about whether it is inherently a bad thing.

I have been asking that question for three and a half years, and I am inclined to say it is not.

Senior Maria Grinis is a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma.

If you are a member of the Greek system and would like to write for The Collegian’s Greek page, contact Jordyn Pair at jpair@hillsdale.edu.

A4 March 1, 2018

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The Weekly: Binge drinking harms more than the drinker (517) 607-2415

Online: www.hillsdalecollegian.com Editor-in-Chief | Breana Noble Associate and Design Editor | Katie Scheu News Editor | Jordyn Pair City News Editor | Nic Rowan Opinions Editor | Joshua J. Paladino Sports Editor | Stevan Bennett Jr. Culture Editor | Madeline Fry Science & Tech Editor | Madeleine Jepsen Features Editor | Jo Kroeker Web Editor | Chandler Lasch Web Manager | Kolbe Conger Photo Editor | Matthew Kendrick Senior Writers | Brendan Clarey | Michael Lucchese | Hannah Niemeier | Joe Pappalardo Circulation Manager | Regan Meyer Ad Managers | Danny Drummond | Matthew Montgomery Assistant Editors | Cal Abbo | Brooke Conrad | Ben Dietderich | Josephine von Dohlen | S. Nathaniel Grime | Abby Liebing | Scott McClallen | Mark Naida | Nolan Ryan | Crystal Schupbach | Allison Schuster | Anna Timmis Faculty Advisers | John J. Miller | Maria Servold The editors welcome Letters to the Editor but reserve the right to edit submissions for clarity, length, and style. Letters should be 450 words or less and include your name and number. Send submissions to the Opinions Editor at jpaladino@hilldale.edu before Saturday at 3 p.m.

The opinion of The Collegian editorial staff

When campus gathered for President’s Ball last Saturday night, the Searle Center pulsed to XBAND’S beat, glowed with colorful decorations, and sheltered quite a few students who had thrown back far too many drinks.

Director of Student Activities Ashlyn Landherr and Assistant Director of Student Activities Hank Prim said that the Ball showcased tame behavior as compared to previous years. Still, big men stumbled across the room as their buddies hoisted them up under their armpits.

Republicans should embrace legal immigration By | Ellen Sweet Special to The Collegian Most of the recent debate about immigration has focused on illegal immigrants.

Now it turns out that we’re arguing about legal immigration, too.

Everyone has heard about the Dreamers — the undocumented immigrants whose parents brought them to the United States as children. Just a few months ago, President Donald Trump conspicuously didn’t renew Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program created under the Obama administration that granted this group of people work permits and protected them from deportation.

Our problem is even more complicated. According to Trump, we also need to reform the way people get to this country legally. But instead of opening up the question of legal immigration, Congress should take Trump’s immigration reform plan and cut it in half.

In his State of the Union address last month, Trump provided a four-part plan to solve the problem and to move toward what he calls “merit-based” immigration.

1) Create a path to citizenship for 1.8 million Dreamers. According to Trump, this covers almost three times as many people as Obama’s DACA program did. 2) Build the infamous wall, or in other words, “secure the border.” 3) Revoke the Green Card Lottery, also know as the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program. 4) Get rid of chain migration.

The Green Card Lottery is what it sounds like: a program that grants Green Cards at random. The DV Program issues up to 50,000 Green Cards annually to applicants from countries with low numbers of immigrants in the United States.

Chain migration, the second program at stake, refers to the process by which immigrants residing in the U.S. are able to sponsor their family members to join them in America. According to Trump’s State of the Union address, “The fourth and final pillar [of our plan] protects the nuclear family by ending chain migration. Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.”

At this point in the speech, there was audible dissent, rather than the customary punctuation of applause— probably because Trump’s claim isn’t strictly true.

Currently, sponsorships include parents, spouses, siblings, and both minor and adult children. This is hardly “virtually unlimited” relatives,

as it doesn’t extend to aunts, uncles, or grandparents, much less actually distant relatives.

Trump’s plan would limit sponsorships to spouses and children.

Why are we trying to keep these people out? Of course we want good people. Of course we want hard-workers over terrorists and nuclear families over gangs. Merit-based immigration sounds great. But when it comes to legal immigration to the United States, Trump’s plan abolishes old institutions without creating anything new. It simply reduces the number of immigrants allowed to come to our country legally.

Congress should enact the first two steps of Trump’s plan.

It should protect the Dreamers and secure the border.

The point, as Trump himself stated, is compromise: No one gets everything they want. But by implementing the first two parts of Trump’s plan, we address the problem that should be most pressing to us: illegal immigration.

This isn’t just about Trump.

This is about the Republican party. At the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend, liberal journalist Rick Unger spoke on an immigration panel. He claimed that, having spent seven years living in Mexico, he believed that Mexicans have more in common with Republicans than with Democrats. He continued, to protracted booing, “If the Republicans open their arms to these people, the Democrats aren’t going to do so well. And it’s interesting to hear your reaction. Why are you rejecting voters?”

Rick Unger has a point. Republicans should consider that they might have something in common with Mexican immigrants.

It is easy to see how Trump’s reluctance to allow immigrants into our country, legally or otherwise, quickly brands him a racist—whether he is or not. His priority is protecting the interests of American citizens, and that is admirable. By shifting its attention to illegal immigration, Congress could balance the president’s restrictionism while continuing to prioritize the interests of U.S. citizens.

We should take pride in being a country that people come to with their hopes and dreams. We should take pride on being seen as a place of opportunity and refuge.

America was built on immigrants — flawed, idealistic, dangerous, hardworking immigrants. Immigration is our heritage; it is only fitting that it also be our legacy.

Ellen Sweet is a senior studying English.

Young ladies wearing their prettiest dresses slumped on the velvety staircase. Rowdier partiers flailed violently as Student Activities Board staffers pressed them back to clear a space for the king and queen’s dance with President Larry Arnn and Mrs. Arnn.

Someone even vomited right on the dance floor.

Even if Hillsdale cleaned up its act overall this President’s Ball, the improvement doesn’t excuse the many who obviously over-indulged.

Binge drinking is dangerous, but the short- and long-term

physical ramifications may not persuade someone ready to let loose and drink up. A more convincing point is that binge drinking is simply selfish. One crazy night might be fun for the girl seven shots into a bottle of Absolut, but the aftermath won’t make a good time for the loyal friend or caretaker holding back her hair or driving her to the hospital.

When it comes time for Hillsdale students to get ready for the next fun weekend, another big party, or even Centralhallapalooza, everyone planning to have a good

time should make sure a good time is had by everyone. A couple drinks before a night out dancing can be enjoyed by all can be a bit of harmless fun. But when two beers turn into a six-pack plus more than a couple shots of cheap rum mixed with Coke, things can only end badly, or at least unpleasantly. College is about community, which operates on responsibility and trust.

Don’t forget that the next time you pop a bottle for weekend shenanigans.

Americans can’t trust the state to take citizens’ guns By | Allison Schuster Collegian reporter

A mass shooting devastated the heart of America, claiming the lives of 17 students in Parkland, Florida.

People filled with grief and despair reacted by demanding tighter gun laws.

Gun ownership doesn’t explain the rise in mass shootings — the moral decay of our society does. The senseless tragedy motivated Florida students and politicians to mobilize for more gun control. Ignoring the true issue at hand amd distracted by the students’ deaths, many jumped to the conclusion that stricter gun control will save the nation and protect us from future shootings. But banning assault rifles is not the answer.

It wasn’t until the early 1990s that school shootings began to commonly occur.

Before the Columbine shooting, which left 15 students dead, the number of deaths from mass shootings was signifcantly lower.

While progressives believe that easy access to guns has caused the uptick in mass shootings, that cannot be the case. The Bill of Rights has guaranteed the Second Amendment right to keep and bears arms since it passed in 1791. Guns were prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet there were only three or four mass shootings, all involving less than 10 deaths.

American has changed since then. The fact that we have designated gun-free zones is certainly worth noting. These zones openly invite shooters who seek to kill. Gun-free zones make it

easier for shooters to commit atrocities because they know victims cannot defend themselves.

In a time of such suffering, it’s simple to blame the weapon used. Banning guns and enacting restrictive gun laws will not make events like these less likely. When someone is killed in a drunk driving accident does the government take away the car? No. The state charges the driver. Banning guns will only escalate gun violence.

Criminals will always aquire a gun regardless of what the law permits. Chicago is a perfect example. It boasts some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, but people still get shot and killed there every day. Just last week, one of Chicago’s finest was killed at 2 p.m. in the busiest part of downtown Chicago. If that’s strict gun control, I object.

Another contributing factor to the increase in mass school shootings is the stark decline in human interaction.

Any school bus stop in America will show a much different image than even ten years ago. Instead of kids laughing and talking with one another, they constantly stare, heads pointed downward, at their cell phones.

President Donald Trump noticed the issue. While grieving with heartbroken parents and family members of Parkland victims he said there is no “connectedness” anymore.

How is anyone able to feel they belong if no one reaches out to that person? Our society is dangerously isolated, and for a young adult that can be lethal. Where will someone lonely, with no friends, turn

for comfort? People on the internet prey on individuals who feel isolated.

The government didn’t give the proper response, either.

The FBI investigated him but didn’t take any further action.

The former Parkland student that committed the shooting has a mental illness. Parents and students informed authorities about his behavior. The police visited him 31 times, according to Fox News, yet they did nothing.

Before people accuse the National Rifle Association of having blood on its hands, people need to think twice.

The government was incredibly ineffective despite every sign and opportunity needed to stop this slaughter.

Reports noted that as soon as the shooting began, the security guard ran over to the scene but then turned back.

Such an act of cowardice from someone whose job is to serve and protect is another detail that somehow got overlooked.

The government failed miserably at every level that day.

If we blame guns for the shooting instead of the person responsible, then we must blame the gun for the lack of shooting from the security guard. If the media can blame the gun regarding the bad guy’s actions then it makes sense to blame failure of the good guy on the gun.

As our government proves itself corrupt and inadequate at almost every turn, we need to protect our individual freedoms more than ever.

The slightest appearance of criminality at the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the State Department is startling enough without the government infringing on our

Second Amendment.

In 1938, Germany established gun control that prohibited all Jewish citizens from owning a gun. One year later, the government began to gather 6 million Jews, killing them over a six year period.

The government shouldn’t decide who can own guns.

If the U.S. government takes away the right to keep and bear arms, we will have nothing to protect ourselves from an entity that grows more dishonorable and unethical each day. The Founding Fathers experienced a corrupt government that chose to assert power over its citizens.

That’s why they wisely chose to include the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights — to secure that American citizens would always have the ability to protect themselves from a tyrannical government.

Should the government ever choose to take away our guns, law-abiding citizens would have to give their guns up while those who do not follow the law (people who commit mass school shootings fall under this category) would still have theirs. Progressives speak of restricting firearm purchases; however, this makes it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to purchase them.

Rhetoric in the left-wing media and the misplaced call for action by outraged students is just a confused response to a tragic event.

Guns are not the problem, and, in many cases, they are the solution.

stems from moral concerns and a desire for change, we should condemn China, too.

As the Olympics ended this weekend, China recommended abolishing the two-term limit for President Xi Jinping, moving to solidify a regime that Xi has built since coming to power in 2012, and particularly since announcing a “new era” for China last October.

Viewed at first as a westernized hope for the communist country, Xi has made military and international infrastructure advances as he tries to expand China’s presence as a global power. Meanwhile, his citizens suffer as the government increases censorship, detains and tortures dissidents, and clamps down on religious groups.

Chinese authorities have shut down churches and imprisoned religious leaders.

The Falun Gong presents an egregious example of China’s abuses: 933 members of the innocuous spiritual-exercise group were sentenced to as many as 12 years in prison between 2013 and 2016, Freedom House reported. The government has detained and tortured Falun Gong members, and substantial evidence exists that it harvests their organs as well.

Moreover, China doesn’t help North Korean citizens; it complained about a 2014 U.N. report that criticized North Korea’s human-rights record and tried to prevent U.N. Security Council sessions that intended to discuss the issue.

A decade ago, China constructed a barbed-wire fence to keep North Korean refugees away and has detained and deported many of those who made it in.

Perhaps these actions aren’t surprising since China is also North Korea’s largest trading partner — and though it has increased sanctions under international pressure, its commitment to following through is dubious, a report from the Council on Foreign Relations noted.

Ignoring China, then, isn’t just philosophically or morally inconsistent with a harsh stance on North Korea — it’s practically inconsistent, too.

If we’re serious about helping victims of the North Korean regime, we start by demanding better behavior from China.

One North Korean refugee, Hyeonseo Lee, defected to China as a 17-year-old. There, she faced a brief arrest and eventually fled the country, making her a refugee from

what she thought would be a refuge.

“China should repeal its policy on repatriating defectors and distance itself from such a brutal regime,” Lee wrote in The New York Times in 2016. “This would send a positive message to the international community and a stern warning to North Korea that liberalization and other domestic reforms are needed to resolve the refugee crisis.”

Maybe we’re scared to condemn China because it’s our largest trading partner and lender — a nation that doesn’t threaten us with nuclear weapons but whose products are integral to our daily lives.

Still, China’s persistent human rights abuses against its own citizens and its friendliness with Pyongyang contradict the United States’ efforts to condemn, and eventually end, North Korea’s oppressive regime.

There are more masks of good will and normalcy at international events like the Olympics than we’d like to admit. But let’s be consistent with our support for human rights and acknowledge the offenses of our trade partners.

Allison Schuster is a freshman studying the liberal arts.

Not just North Korea: China has an atrocious human rights record, too By | Nicole Ault D.C. Correspondent

As critics rightly scathed North Korea for masking human-rights atrocities with a red-clad female cheer squad during the Pyeongchang Olympics last month, another high-profile human-rights abuser at the games escaped such negative attention — as it usually does.

China’s human-rights offenses and tepid friendliness with North Korea are widely reported. Yet the country — a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council — is set to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. China evades much of the condemnation readily cast upon the more notorious Pyongyang regime.

Though ramping up rhetoric on North Korea (and announcing further sanctions against the regime at CPAC last week), the Trump administration has criticized China’s trade tactics and intellectual-property abuses but largely avoided discussion of its human-rights record.

Silence toward China’s human-rights record and increasingly oppressive regime is hypocritical. If our condemnation of North Korea truly

Nicole Ault is a junior studying economics.

Opinions

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March 1, 2018 A5

CPAC caused me to leave the GOP By | Joshua Liebhauser Special To The Collegian

After two days of the “Conservative” Political Action Conference, it became abundantly clear: The Republican Party is no longer the place for me.

I don’t know what I expected, honestly. I knew that the Grand Old Party was now the party of President Donald Trump, that traditional conservatives such as Sens.

Ben Sasse, R-Nebraska, and Marco Rubio, R-Florida, were now an unwelcome fringe and that stirrings of populism and nationalism were making the rounds throughout a changing party.

Trump’s nomination dealt a massive blow to my political optimism, but for some reason, I still held onto the belief that the GOP remained a net good and that Trump’s “winning” outweighed the white nationalist element of the party that keeps rearing its ugly head. Plus, my Hillsdale bubble kept me immersed in real conservatism.

After the first two days of CPAC speeches, panels, and interviews, my optimism vanished. European populists, Fox News pundits, and Trump sycophants filled the speaking lineup. Nearly every speaker, with the exception of political commentator Ben Shapiro and columnist Mona Char-

en, stayed safely entrenched behind talking points that Trump’s avid supporters were sure to enjoy, including the wall, national pride, and immigration reform.

Conspicuously absent was actual conservatism, discussion of the Constitution or the Judeo-Christian tradition, or speakers like Sasse, who at CPAC 2016 said he desired to “breathe passion into our children about a constitutional recovery.”

Educators such as Hillsdale College’s own President Larry Arnn, who habitually addresses the history and tradition of conservatism, were relegated to interviewing White House staffers about policy decisions.

Instead, former leader of the UK Independence Party Nigel Farage gave an awkward, poorly prepared speech that pandered to the anti-European Union sentiment of Trump’s base and praised his own endorsement of the “wildly successful” president.

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a controversial French politician, spoke broadly about the importance of family and national heritage. Supposed conservatives wildly applauded Maréchal-Le Pen, who claims to be the “political heir” of her disgraced grandfather, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Although Marion may not espouse the radical Holocaust denial that got Jean-Marie Le Pen booted from his own party, the question still remains:

why would the American Conservative Union welcome a speaker shouting “Vive le Nationalisme!”? Figures like these do nothing to advance conservative causes in America. They serve only to ostracize true conservatives who wish to avoid association with these unpalatable individuals.

The shallow nationalism peddled by most CPAC speakers left much to be desired, but the audience’s response jarred me the most. It’s hard to ascertain from CNN soundbytes, but the electric current in the air was unmistakable.

CPAC reeked of ebullient optimism and a sense of triumph. Trump kicked the Democrats in the teeth and melted the snowflakes; Republicans of all ages flooded into the Gaylord Convention Center to claim their victory.

None of this shocked me, but the sentiments that these individuals chose to cheer and boo were unhappily reminiscent of the the 2016 election’s negative tone.

The Washington Examiner’s Phillip Wegmann, a 2015 Hillsdale alumnus, reported via Twitter that a “speaker talking about the beauty of naturalization ceremonies draws loud, sustained booing.”

In an interview with Hillsdale sophomore Ben Dietderich on CPAC’s Radio Row, conservative firebrand Ben Shapiro pointed out that the conservative position is not anti-legal immigration. Keeping out

skilled legal immigrants just to “artificially boost wages” is neither beneficial from a free market standpoint nor the traditional position of the GOP. Chants of “lock her up” resonated frequently throughout the hall. Various reports noted attendees wildly booing a panel member’s remonstrances against the use of eminent domain to build Trump’s border wall, yelling “build that wall!” to drown him out. Wegmann further reported that speaker Rick Ungar asked an angry audience why they rejected these legal Mexican immigrant voters, who aligned with them on so many issues. He was met with more disapproving shouts and boos.

In Hillsdale’s radio interview, Shapiro addressed the two pillars of conservatism: “limited government and God-given rights.” Until I listened to that interview after the fact, I hadn’t heard any mention of these principles in the various speeches at the conference. Panels or smaller lectures may have referenced the higher things of conservatism, but major speeches given by Le Pen and Farage, as well as the addresses from Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, did not contain traditional conservative themes.

Forget the Aristotelian Good or Judeo-Christian values. Where were the free-market crusaders railing against the national deficit? Sen.

Rand Paul, R-Kentucky; his father, former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas; and their enthusiastic libertarian followers were nowhere to be found. The party has actually consolidated post-Trump, marginalizing free-marketers and intellectual conservatives in favor of Trumpites supporting tariffs, protectionist policies, and expediency in politics.

The final straw came toward the end of the conference, when Ethics and Public Policy Center Senior Fellow Mona Charen sat on a panel addressing the #MeToo movement and called out the hypocrisy of the GOP on sexual abuse-related issues.

“I’m disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women who are in our party, who are sitting in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women,” Charen said.

She also slammed the GOP for its support of accused child molester Roy Moore: “You cannot claim that you stand for women and put up with that.”

The crowd went berserk.

Attendees shouted “not true!” and booed loudly. A protective security detail later escorted Charen from the convention center. The GOP has angered and disheartened conservatives such as Charen and myself by turning a blind eye to Trump’s extramarital

dalliances and boasts about sexual assault. When Trump and Farage endorsed Moore, it further reinforced the idea that the GOP was no longer the party of decency and moral character. CPAC attendees, and the GOP at large, seem content abandoning morality in pursuit of victory.

I hung on, for as long as I could. I pinched my nose and shrugged, as the president’s Twitter tirades spewed ignorant divisiveness across the political landscape. After all, he gave us a decent Supreme Court justice and some tax cuts, so I could keep my conscience quiet for a little while.

But the despicable behavior of my fellow CPAC attendees, as well as the populist voices that now represent the Grand Old Party, has become too much.

I cannot associate with a party so disinterested in actual conservatism. “Winning” is not a good enough reason to abandon principles of decency, small government, property rights, and respect for women. I did not leave the Republican Party; the Republican Party left me. I hold hope for a conservative revival in America, whether through GOP reformation or the insurgence of a viable third party. Until then, I’m on my own.

Joshua Liebhauser is a senior studying marketing.

I spent two days My house flooded without my phone over winter break By | Aaron Andrews Special To The Collegian The average iPhone user looks at his phone about 80 times per day, according to Apple. That’s nearly 30,000 times a year. In The Wall Street Journal, novelist Nicholas Court wondered whether these devices “hijack our minds.”

This got me thinking: How often do I look at my phone?

Why do I look so constantly? Is there any truth to this business about hijacking our minds?

So I put my phone in a cupboard for two days.

Friday at 6 p.m., I set my phone in an empty cabinet above my stove, with the determination not to touch it until the following Sunday evening, 48 hours later. The moment I put my phone down, it got caught in a Facebook group chat. The whole cabinet started vibrating. I made it about five whole minutes before I asked my girlfriend, Ellen, to reach in and turn it off.

Then I was able to forget about it — that is, until I tried to tell the time. Over the next two days, I probably reached for my phone 10 times to check the time.

Phonelessness brought tension to my Friday night.

While I had planned to go to a jazz concert in Howard Music Hall, my girlfriend, Ellen, wanted to take my car to party with her friends downtown.

After handing over the keys and realizing that I now had neither a phone nor a car, I asked to borrow her watch.

We set up a time for her to pick me up after the concert.

I held her hand and gave her a look of such sincere anxiety that she felt genuine pity.

“Please don’t forget me,” I said.

She didn’t forget, but the concert ended sooner than I had expected, and so I stood around on the curb, waiting for my ride. Passers-by gave me funny glances. That’s when I realized that standing around without a phone looks weird. It felt weird too. I just stood there like an idiot, looking around the dark parking lot and clutching my girlfriend’s watch like a lifeline.

The next morning, I got out of the shower to find that I did not have Siri to give me a weather forecast. I stood naked in front of my dresser, scratching my head and wondering what to wear. Eventually, I realized that I could just look out the window and guess.

That day I took Ellen to Ann Arbor. Though I tried to navigate by memory, eventually she had to whip open iMaps on her phone. I was struck again that day by how many times I reached for my phone to check the time, but aside from that, I didn’t miss it much. I’m not sure how we would have gotten around without Ellen’s phone though.

On Sunday evening, I retrieved my phone from the cupboard. After a full 48 hours, I figured that I would

have around ten texts from people wondering where I had gone. But when I checked iMessage, all I found was a middle finger emoji from my dad.

No, I’m not making that up. He had just discovered emojis over the weekend and decided to try out a few.

All middle finger emojis aside, my experiment was inconclusive. I had hoped it would teach me something groundbreaking about myself and my device, either revealing my absolute dependence on my phone or showing me the glory of imagination unhindered by the shackles of modern technology.

My conclusion is that life without a phone is about the same, if slightly more inconvenient.

While I’m not convinced that my phone has “hijacked my mind,” I do have a better understanding of its benefits.

I recommend this experiment to anyone who is wondering what their phone is really good for. In my experience, the things that you really miss are actually important. While I didn’t waste a thought on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter, I missed being able to text people to coordinate meetings, I missed the daily weather forecast, I missed Spotify, and most of all, I missed knowing what time it was.

Hey Siri, remind me to buy a watch.

Aaron Andrews is a senior studying English.

By | Joe Pappalardo Senior Writer As the lady on the phone explained to me last week, at some point on Jan. 10 over 40,000 gallons of water poured into my little college house, raising the basement sea level at least an inch, and slapping me and my fellow residents – all men of great character and poor finances – with a bill the size of an iPhone repair (or a rusty pickup if that’s more your thing).

Because I’m terrible at reading people, I didn’t realize until the end of our conversation that the Hillsdale Board of Public Utilities employee was patiently waiting for me to explain whether the basement had drains. It turns out that while water itself is expensive, those holes in the ground are where the utilities bill actually soaks up paychecks. As the house was built centuries ago with no basement drains, it had simply shoved 40,000 gallons of water into the ground, earning itself a senior discount on the drainage bill.

To review, it all begins with the furnace. A clogged furnace filter inadvertently let several pipes and a toilet tank freeze, resulting in the largest BPU baptism this year. Fortunately for me, it happened at the dear old West Bank, my humble abode across from the local radio station. Had this incident occurred instead at one of the neighboring

residences, I might not have had the privilege of anxiously sitting in my living room while a few plumbers solemnly carried the remains of the veteran toilet out the door.

When in college, one does not consider that every appliance in the house is primed to destroy its peers before they get the chance. Since students began living in it, the West Bank has been the site of a home appliance battle royale.

“Since students began living in it, the West Bank has been the site of a home appliance battle royale.”

Last semester the toilet, may it rest in peace, attempted to drown the washing machine with its own drainage pipe.

My clothes, and all parties involved, haven’t been the same since.

Apparently, there’s a gadget that prevents homeowners’ hair and bad breath from hurting their furnaces. When this thing becomes clogged, the little heat factory in the

basement can’t keep winter from going bull-in-a-chinashop on the helpless water pipes. A filter constructed from cotton paper has the power to destroy everything plumbers hold dear.

The most frustrating part of this incident is that it isn’t unique. At least two other houses experienced similar problems over winter break.

Because they have not disclosed the depth or volume of their respective pipe explosions, we must conclude that the West Bank was at one point the only man-made basement waterpark in the city of Hillsdale. With the recent flooding, the naturally-occurring category is sure to have some outstanding entrants.

Since I have yet to break my nose and regain my sense of smell this year, I can neither confirm nor deny that my basement is now a thriving mold colony.

In times like these, as winter begins to wrap up, it’s important to keep a close eye on anything with pipes coming out of it. Leave no leaky sink uninspected. Let no random basement pipe go unchecked.

And, most of all, do not assume the furnace is “taking a break” or “just doesn’t work in that room.”

If columns like these are any indicator, Spring Break is going to be brutal.

Joe Pappalardo is a senior studying marketing.

The government can’t eradicate evil with new laws By | Sterling Wertanzl Special to The Collegian The tragic shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School has caused protests and walkouts, while calls for gun control flooded local and national media.

I attended Cypress Bay High School, which is less than 12 minutes south of Stoneman Douglas. I knew students there, attended its debate tournaments, and knew teachers and administrators. I walked those halls, sat in those classrooms, and saw the faces of those students and families.

Given my past experiences and emotional connection, many assumed this tragedy

convinced me of the need for stricter gun control. But alas, this painful event has led me to believe the opposite.

Professor of Economics Ivan Pongracic said people expect the government to work miracles, as if the abstract conception of the state can solve all our problems, in this case school shootings. Mass shootings cause people to have a “not my problem” mentality about social problems, as if it is the government’s job to intervene, as if it is capable of working miracles like this.

Since when is the government really capable of doing more than what we can do as citizens? Contrary to popular belief, government action is human action, which means that it’s liable to the same faults, misjudgments, and

evils as individual action. We cannot expect moral superiority from a state composed of depraved people. We cannot just tell the government to “do something” about things that we cannot control; sometimes humanity’s capacity for evil will be too great for us to comprehend, especially considering those who govern us are humans too.

It is easy to believe that humanity is inherently good: that because we have structural governance there should always be an answer, a solution, a reason. In actuality, we live in a world that is flooded with uncertainty.

And unfortunately, we really don’t know how to solve this heartbreaking issue.

We might think we do, but making something illegal will

not fix the fact that evil people exist.

As the saying goes: where there’s a will, there’s a way.

We see this notion in action almost every day with drugs, underage drinking, hit and runs, tax evasion, etc. No matter how much regulation the government imposes, an underground economy, teeming with what the government officials have deemed illegal, will always exist.

Defense of gun rights is not about keeping guns to shoot squirrels in the backyard. This is an issue about submitting power to the government where it doesn’t exist.

The 17 individuals who lost their lives that day were my neighbors. The fear that surged through my body when I received the news felt

indescribable — knowing that these people lived in my home county and state. That said, gun control is just a Band-Aid to many long-term problems.

Authorities knew that the perpetrator of the shooting was high-risk, and that’s where the first problem lies: People are too afraid to report a possible tragedy when they see it because they are afraid of offending someone. This mentality practically forces us to think that someone’s feelings were more valuable than 17 innocent individuals.

Claiming that guns kill people and pushing action on a government that can barely function is far from a logical solution.

The real problem is people.

Indeed, it is questionable that a 19-year-old high-risk indi-

vidual could acquire a highly-destructive assault weapon that easily, but because this individual had the will to kill, he would relentlessly find a way to do it, regardless of the weapon.

I wish there was a feasible solution to the madness we are all living in after this event. I wish I could tell my younger brother, who is still a student at Cypress Bay, that he will always be safe no matter where he goes.

But as long as evil exists, we cannot expect the government to “do something” until we “do something” about the type of people this nation creates.

Sterling Wertanzl is a freshman studying the liberal arts.

www.hillsdalecollegian.com

A6 March 1, 2018

The Palace Cafe is closed on weekend nights indefinitely. Nic Rowan | Collegian

Palace Cafe closed on weekend nights until further notice By | Aaron Andrews Collegian Freelancer To the dismay of nighthawks, The Palace Cafe has locked its doors the past three weeks for the night shift on both Friday and Saturday nights.

Dan and Kim Brunette have retired after five years working the night shift that has become so familiar to Hillsdale students. Without the Brunettes, Palace owner Leslie Meredith has struggled to keep the night shift open.

“It’s weird to go during the

day. You have to go at night,” junior Lauren Schlientz said.

“The only time I crave waffles is at 2:00 a.m.”

Dan Brunette said he was sad to leave the Palace and is already missing the late night regulars.

“Thanks to each and everyone of you for stopping in and sharing your stories and lives with us over the past five years up at the Palace on midnights,” Dan Brunette said.

“We have met some of the most interesting people in our lives among you college kids.

Through your eyes, we’ve been

able to see places from all over the world. We have shared a lot of laughs, and made some great memories. If you see us out and about in the ’dale, give us a holler.”

The Brunettes’ retirement is only one of a slew of recent employee departures. Meredith said seven employees have quit in the last two weeks. This was no organized exodus, she said. The workers left for a variety of reasons, including relocation, job opportunities, and personal and family crises, according to Meredith.

Meredith said she is having trouble finding help.

“The workforce is unbelievable,” Meredith said. “There is no one.”

Last month, Meredith spent nearly three hours at a local employment center. She only spoke to two potential employees. She ascribes this dearth of workers to the community’s stagnation.

“This town is too full of welfare,” Meredith said. “People would rather lie around doing nothing than work for an honest wage. They’re content with that kind of life,

BPU in need of more funding to complete road project

By | Abby Liebing Assistant Editor The plethora of potholes on Hillsdale’s roads may finally be addressed since Hillsdale’s Board of Public Utilities has recently been granted about $1.9 million from the Michigan Strategic Fund for an Infrastructure Capacity Enhancement. But in the Feb. 19 city council meeting, City Manager David Mackie said he is not confident this will be enough for the project that the city is pursuing.

With the new funds, the city and the BPU are looking to repair Garden Street, Vine Street, Meade Street, and Rippon Street. The construction bids that came in for the project last week, however, were much higher than Mackie and Public Service Department Director Jake Hammel were expecting, and now they are looking for more money in order to proceed with the planned repairs.

“These bids unfortunately

“These bids came in substantially higher than the engineer’s construction estimate.” cut back the project, scale that back to get closer to the original budget in a couple different areas or ways, or consider the alternatives of coming up with a lot of addi-

tional funding.”

Mackie laid out how much the whole project would cost if the city goes ahead with it as planned.

“If we did the full project with a 5 percent contingency, and including the engineering costs, on top of the grant of almost $1.9 million, we would be looking at our share being about $1.2 million,” Mackie said in the city council meeting. “If you put that in budget terms, that’s about two years of what we’re working to set aside annually for road repair.”

Mackie said he believes that if the project were scaled back significantly, the city could still repair Meade Street, Garden Street, and Vine Street, but Rippon Street might be out of the question.

The repair for Rippon Street was the main focus of the whole project since the sewer lines running behind the road has caused flooding in the houses. The goal was to move the sewer lines from the behind the houses on Rippon

By | Breana Noble & Nic Rowan Editor-in-Chief & City News Editor Hillsdale County Road Commission crew members are at it this week, filling in potholes that have dried out from last week’s heavy rains.

Several roadways became impassable, as rainfall and snowmelt flooded streets and some basements, according to City Police Chief Scott Hephner. Now three patch crews are working to fill the spots that the water’s freezing and thawing have left behind.

“They’ve had crews out,” Hephner said. “They were waiting until the roads dried up a little bit, because the holes were full of water. I think they’ve had better luck

filling them this week.”

Fortunately, there were no vehicles accidents as a result of water on the roads, Hephner said.

Fisher Road in Branch County, which turns into Bankers Road in Hillsdale County, faced the brunt of the changing weather, as heavy rains took out a culvert and left nothing underneath the asphalt, which collapsed. The closed off section reopened on Tuesday, according to The Daily Reporter in Coldwater.

Hillsdale College students traveling into Branch County said they had to find new ways to avoid the washout.

“It gave you a chance to see some new scenery, which is always good,” said junior Tess Patton, who attends Pine Ridge Bible Church in Quincy, Michigan.

Patton said her return to campus on Sunday was challenged after stopping at a friend’s home after church.

“We thought since we weren’t coming straight from Pine Ridge that we wouldn’t have to worry about the closure, but we went to turn onto this on road, and it was closed,” Patton said. “We ended up going on this long exhibition down this horrible dirt road.”

In the City of Hillsdale, flooding shut down West Hallett Road at the railroad viaduct for several days. The city also closed Division Street between Summit Street and Hillsdale Street for three days.

Cassandra Champion, a House of Pizza and BBQ employee, said Division Street has been flooding like since as

came in substantially higher than the engineer’s construction estimate,” Hammel said in the Feb. 19 city council meeting. “Now we’re faced with the situation to either

with not going anywhere.

The people just don’t want to work.”

Further, she blames the millennial mindset.

“I know I’m generalizing, but millennials expect a ton of money to start,” Meredith said. “They don’t understand that you have to work your way up. They expect $11 an hour to wash dishes. That’s not worth it for me.”

Still, on Saturday night after President’s Ball, hungry college students were disappointed when they showed up to find The Palace closed.

County forecloses condemned building

By | Joshua J. Paladino Opinions Editor Street to the front, in the road.

“Rippon Street, which was The Hillsdale County always the intention, was to Circuit Court foreclosed the do the project to the culvert property on 23 and 25 N. from the north end, because Broad St. on Wednesday. there are sewer mains on the The business that owns backs of those houses that the property, Mortgage when the creek rises, like the Management LLC, did not water now and they’re calling appear in court to defend the for flooding, the water backs foreclosure. The owners still up into the basements,” Mack- have time, however, to retain ie said. ownership of the property.

Along with flooding in the “April 2 is the last day houses on Rippon Street, the someone can pay to prevent BPU recently has also been foreclosure,” said Stephebusy dealing with sewage nie Kyser, Hillsdale County backups in the manholes treasurer. “If they have a lot around the city. The BPU of older years, I’m requiring needs all the help it can get that they pay older years first. to keep sewage backups and But to prevent the foreclosure, floodings to a minimum only the 2015 taxes would around the city and getting technically have to be paid.” the repairs on Rippon Street Although the properunderway would help. ty owners owe more than The BPU have been dealing $50,000, the foreclosure with the backups as quickly notice requires a payment as they can and trying to get of $3,566.23 to redeem the them cleaned up. property — at least for the “We do the best we can,” time being. said Chris McArthur, interim After April 2, the county director of Hillsdale BPU. will take possession of the property, if the owner still does not pay the taxes. In that case, the county may try to sell the land at a public auction.

“We always hold it in long she can remember.

September, usually the middle “I grew up here and that of September,” Kyser said. road is always flooded,” she said. “People have just learned “Whatever doesn’t sell in September, we have a second to get around it.”

Champion added that even auction toward the end of October, first of November.” though the flooding was an The first auction requires inconvenience to people getting in and out of the parking a minimum bid equal to the amount of back property taxes lot, it did not seem to inhibit owed to the county. In this business.

“We actually had more business during the flash flood than we were having before — maybe people just couldn’t get around us,” she said.

Steve Blossom, a Division Street resident said although he finds the flooding difficult, he’s learned to get around the water.

“We just deal with it. This happens all the time,” he said.

“You just have to learn how to get around these things.”

Road repair crew at work after floods

“It’s too bad. We would have gone after President’s Ball,” said junior Rosemary Pynes. “Now there’s no place open at night.”

Meredith said she loves Hillsdale students and would love to serve them breakfast at 2 a.m. But until she can find help, students are left to waffle-less weekends.

“I just want to eat an Empire Bowl at 2:30 in the morning, and I’m confused why I can’t,” said senior Zoe Harness.

case, that’s more than $50,000.

The second auction requires a minimum bid of $25. If the property sells at neither auction, then the county will retain ownership. There’s a chance, however, that the City of Hillsdale takes the property first.

“I have to offer it to the city, as well, before I have the auction,” Kyser said. “They have a right of first refusal.”

Kyser said she plans to talk to Hillsdale’s city manager to gauge their interest. The city, however, would have to pay back taxes to the county.

Last week, The Collegian reported that city officials did not want to buy the propert.y.

“The city will not take it, because he has 10 years of back taxes on the property, and it’s also mortgaged,” Planning and Zoning Administrator Alan Beeker said. “Unless the bank is willing to sign over the property, the city is not going to take on the property and all the debt, as well.”

Jeff Fazekas, co-owner of Mortgage Management LLC, said the city won’t take the property.

“The city is going to push it back onto the county, and they’re going to try to force the county to spend money so the city doesn’t have to,” Fazekas said. “Whoever buys the property the city will pound to get the work done.”

Fazekas estimated that the property could cost upward of $1 million to repair before the city will give an occupancy permit, making it a difficult sell for future buyers.

City News

www.hillsdalecollegian.com

March 1, 2018 A7

House of Pizza and BBQ owned by nonprofit By | Calli Townsend Collegian Freelancer Tucked away on Hillsdale Street is a small brick building with an orange awning called the House of Pizza and BBQ. Most people go for its Ultimate Barbecue Pizza, but for others, it is a place for gaining new skills and new opportunities.

“It’s just packed with the barbecue taste,” Hillsdale sophomore Nick Uram said after his first bite of this popular pizza. “The pulled pork sold me for sure. That on a pizza, what more could you want?”

Uram and his friend sophomore Isaac Johnson, were there celebrating Johnson’s birthday. People often go to House of Pizza and BBQ for birthday celebrations, including one of Hillsdale’s admissions counselors, according to Johnson.

“I like the ambiance. It has a culture of its own,” Johnson said.

But this restaurant is known for more than just its ambiance and pizza. They are

not open on Mondays because several individuals from Key Opportunities, a local nonprofit dedicated to helping citizens “with handicapping conditions or other disadvantages”, spend the day acquiring new skills.

“Key Opportunities actually owns the restaurant,” Cassandra Champion, House of

By | Alexis Nestor Collegian Reporter For years, Hillsdale drivers have experienced the strange intersections crisscrossing the City of Hillsdale.

Carleton Road and Broad Street, Broad Street and North Street, Bacon Street and Carlton Road are just a few of these intersecting roads.

In 2006, the Michigan Department of Transportation completed a construction project on M-99. Their goal was to quickly direct traffic through small towns like Hillsdale by increasing speed limits and maximizing the amount of lanes per street.

This move, however, diverts traffic away from Hillsdale businesses — the reason why the roads were built in the first place.

“As far as Bacon is concerned, it became a major

cross because of the location of Stock’s Mill,” City Zoning Director Alan Beeker said.

“Stock’s Mill has always been the big business downtown because Stock had control of the water source.”

Though Beeker has sketches of potential new plans for downtown, most funding for roads goes toward fixing potholes rather than reconstructing intersections. The sketches, however, include increased green space and parking for the downtown area as well as more, safer crosswalks. For this space, MDOT would have to change its focus from increasing lanes to a “road diet,” which, according to Beeker, would include reducing the four downtown lanes to one northbound and one southbound lane.

Beeker said he does not yet have a date for the ground-

By | Brooke Conrad Assistant Editor Sheriff Scott Israel of Broward County, Florida, has received a great deal of scrutiny in the aftermath of the Valentine’s Day school shooting, prompting Hillsdale County Sheriff Tim Parker to send an email to his staff.

“I am sure we were all sickened and dismayed when we heard the news regarding the Broward County Deputy who was on scene at the

Florida school shooting and stayed outside as the shooting rampage occurred,” Parker wrote on Feb. 26. “I want to be clear on my expectations.

If we arrive on a similar scene our job is to go in without delay, locate, and neutralize the active shooter. I will either go in first, by your side or on your six depending on our arrival times. Regardless, I will be going IN!” The Broward County deputy who was on the scene, Scot Peterson, quickly resigned af-

ter a video showed him waiting outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for four minutes while the shooting occurred. Israel publicly denounced Peterson’s actions, while Peterson’s lawyer said he had followed the protocol for what he had believed was an outdoor shooting, according to USA Today.

Records obtained by CNN showed the Broward County Sheriff ’s Office received 45 calls related to the shooter or his brother between 2008 and

2017, while the sheriff ’s office maintains it only received 23 calls.

In one of the instances, a neighbor warned the sheriff ’s office about an Instagram post that said the student “planned to shoot up the school,” according to CNN. Another time, a caller from Massachusetts warned that Cruz was collecting guns and knives and “could be a school shooter in the making.”

Parker told his staff members this is not the time to

By | Stefan Kleinhenz Collegian Reporter Hendrik Meijer hails from Grand Rapids, Mich. and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1973.

Meijer’s grandfather founded the supermarket chain Meijer in 1934. Meijer is currently the executive chairman of the Meijer Corporation, which will open a store in the Hillsdale area soon. Meijer is also the author of a biography on Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg titled, “The Man in the Middle of the American Century.” Meijer was invited by the Dow Journalism program at Hillsdale College to speak on campus about Vandenberg’s career on Feb. 27.

When did you first learn about Vandenberg and what characteristics attracted you to him? Why is he worth studying?

He was a name who had always been on the edges of my awareness, but he was so long forgotten that I wondered about him. After college as I was doing some reading in foreign policy and American diplomatic history, and his name kept showing up.

Here he was from my home town, and nobody knew who he was.

Can you talk a little bit about how you got interested in writing Vandenberg’s biography?

There had never been a

complete biography of him and that seemed like one of these little voids in history. It’s not often that you’re able to say to yourself as a would-be historian, “this is a story that has not been told and needs to be.” That was irresistible.

How has your work on the life and legacy of Vandenberg influenced your own life?

It’s consumed a great deal of my life. Whenever you spend a long time living in the past, trying to imagine what life was like in another era, it puts time in perspective for you and makes you conscious that you are part of continuing story. Maybe it’s a little humbling that way. Doing a biography is really good for the ego because you imbue yourself in somebody else’s life. It’s also humbling because you also know that you can spend years trying to understand someone and realize there is always more to learn and you never have all the answers. You realize how history is not a fixed-in-stone idea; our understanding of history is always evolving. You hope you’re contributing to it, but you also recognize how limited any of our perspectives are.

How do you think Vandenberg’s background as a reporter and journalist influenced and affected his role in public office? Would you like to see more journalists enter politics?

I think journalism helps

equip people to ask questions and to challenge assumptions and those are both good things for politicians to do.

Politicians should have the ingredients that make a good journalist. Somebody that has the open mindedness that a journalist has to bring to a story is going to be a politician who is better able to adapt to changes.

What do you think Vandenberg would say of the both the state of the Union today and the state of the Republican party?

I don’t know if there is any Republican who wouldn’t be dismayed by the state of the Republican party. Almost regardless of what your ideological makeup is, you would say, “this is a party that really isn’t sure about itself.” The party was certainly a much bigger tent when he was in it and it would worry him, as it worries a lot of Republicans who wish to see their majority maintained or have an electoral future. Vandenberg would wonder if the party is broad enough and if its reach is viable. He was not a populist, he was deeply suspicious of populism. Populism tended to pop up more on the Democratic side of the aisle than the Republican in his career.

Vandenberg didn’t trust that sort of playing to the crowds quality that he saw in populism.

To the extent that our current president is very much a

populist, Vandenberg would have been the kind of establishment figure who would have struggled with that. He was one of the people that was responsible for creating the world order that has prevailed since World War II. With America’s dominant and engaged role in the world, American leadership in international organizations, American military superiority reinforced by NATO as crucial to our security, he would see all those things in a unsettled state right now that worry him.

If you could boil it down in a short summary, what is it about Vandenberg that made him so special, how did he shape America and why does his legacy deserve to be cemented in American history?

He was in the right place at the right time. When he was the leading Republican voice on foreign policy and the the Democrats were in the White House, and in foreign policy so much of what is done is done by treaty and you need two thirds of the Senate. So, even as Republican ranks were decimated you generally needed bipartisan support to approve a treaty. His voice was crucial to that. He was in the right place at the right time in terms of that power balance between Republicans and Democrats and then he was in the right place at the right time, chairing the Senate

“An entry level job in Hillsdale is often in the food industry.”

Pizza and BBQ general manager, explained. “They bought it in July of 2016 to use as a training ground for some of their clients. So on Monday’s

when we’re closed, they bring their clients down and they learn food safety, cleanliness, and portions. It gives them a broader span of skills.”

The previous owner, Greg Mauldon, opened the House of Pizza and BBQ in April of 2013, but later sold it to Key Opportunities due to his busy schedule as an owner of a construction business. Now the nonprofit uses this restaurant to serve the community with delicious food and by providing an opportunity for individuals with any disability to gain new skills and better their lives.

Executive Director of Key Opportunities, Julie Boyce explained in a phone interview that previously they were only training their clients on manufacturing work such as sorting parts and equipment.

They wanted to find a way to broaden their clients’ vocational skills, and House of Pizza and BBQ fit the bill.

“An entry level job in Hillsdale is often in the food industry,” Boyce said. “And manufacturing isn’t for everyone.”

Inadequate funding prevents city from redesigning roads

Clients of Key Opportunities gain real-life experience in the food industry by working at House of Pizza and BBQ. Boyce said they even sometimes partner with St. Paul’s Ability Resource Center (SPARC).

Skills learned from working at the House of Pizza and BBQ, along with training Sophomores Nick Uram and Isaac Johnson celebrate at House of Pizza and BBQ. Calli Townsend | Collegian at Key Opcertification to work in the employed and enjoy the food portunities food industry. While some industry work,” Boyce said. were applied when they cater “Several are working on their for the Winter Snowball dance go on to work at the House of certifications. They like to hosted by SPARC on February Pizza and BBQ, others have the option to work at other have the option for something 24. restaurants. other than manufacturing As a result of these train“There have been a variwork.” ings, clients are able to earn ety of results. A couple are

breaking or completion of these projects.

According to volunteers at the Mitchell Resource Center Debra Reister and Lori Zeiler, North, South, West, Short, and Broad Streets initially bound the developing village of Hillsdale. Later roads, such as Bacon Road, Broad Street, and Carlton Road, were built in the 1830s and 1840s as more settlers and their businesses moved to Hillsdale.

These roads were built for the traffic patterns at the time.

M-99, then called Railroad Street, connected Hillsdale to Allen and Jonesville Townships. Bacon Road connected downtown Hillsdale and Stock’s Mill.

These roads and their intersections were built widely to fit horses and wagons — not cars.

City plans look to change N. Howell Street into green space. City of Hillsdale | Courtesy

Sheriff Parker reacts to Parkland shooting, tells deputies ‘I stand with you’ question whether or not they have chosen the right job as law enforcement officers.

“There are many ways people can help other people in this world, but if they are not up to the demands of the moment they need to find other ways to make a difference and leave Law Enforcement NOW!” he wrote.

Parker emphasized that law enforcement’s job is not getting any easier and that his staff should be willing to stand up to any threat.

“We stand on that thin blue line together and face those threats head-on,” Parker wrote. “In these moments, we must not only be the best trained and best equipped, but unwavering in our willingness to face any threat. Keep our community Safe, be Vigilant and be Ready to Act. I stand with you.”

Chronicling Vandenberg: Q&A with Hendrik Meijer

Meijer Inc. executive chairman Hendrick Meijer just wrote a biography on former Michigan Sen. Arthur Vandenberg.

Hendrik Meijer | Courtesy

Foreign Relations Committee. Therefore presiding over legislation at a time after World War II when the United States was taking the lead in deciding what the world would look like. He was in a pivotal role and that gave him outsized influence on how the world was going to come together after World War II. Would you be able to briefly comment on the new Meijer location that will be coming to Hillsdale in 2019?

First of all, at a purely pragmatic level, when Walmart is serving the community, the damage is already done in a sense by the retailer coming in. There is no question that in competition we are all

vying for the same business, realistically we expect that more of our business is likely to come from the existing chain stores, from Kroger and Walmart, then from anyone else. Philosophically, we don’t set out to undercut everyone else’s prices. By our competing with Walmart, that’s going to be another lower priced alternative that will put pressure on some businesses. But it hasn’t been our experience that if you are running a good shop and know your customers that you go out of business when we come in. The impact on local businesses is likely to be less than when those guys first came to town.

A8 March 1, 2018

www.hillsdalecollegian.com

Follow @HDaleSports for live updates and news

Women’s Basketball

Men’s Basketball Saturday,

feb.

Upcoming

24

Thursday, march 1 vs Alderson Broaddus 2:30 PM

Hillsdale

61

Saturday,

Findlay

88

Stats

Stedman Lowry Ryan Badowski Austen Yarian Nick Czarnowski

Feb. 23-24 G-MAC Championships

Tennis Men’s Results Feb. 24 Hillsdale - 9 Edinboro - 0

Upcoming

24

Thursday, march 1 vs. Ursuline 8:30 PM

Hillsdale

55

Stats

Brittany Gray Allie Dewire Makenna Ott Maddy Reed

21 pts, 3 reb, 1 ast 20 pts, 6 reb, 1 ast 10 pts, 2 reb, 2 stl 8 pts, 3 reb, 3 ast

Men’s Track and Field Results

feb.

Findlay

81

11 pts, 6 reb. 1 ast 10 pts, 6 reb, 1 ast 8 pts, 1 reb, 2 ast 6 pts, 2 reb, 1 ast

Women’s Track and Field

1st: Findlay - 154 2nd: Hillsdale - 135 3rd: Malone - 122

Women’s Results Feb. 24 Hillsdale - 8 Ferris State - 1

Results

Feb. 23-24 G-MAC Chapionships

1st: Findlay - 199 2nd: Walsh - 98.5 3rd: Ursuline - 89

Baseball

Results

Feb. 25 Hillsdale - 6 Southern Indiana - 7 Hillsdale - 6 Southern Indiana - 7

Feb. 26 Hillsdale - 3 Missouri S&T - 5 Hillsdale - 3 Grand Valley State - 19

Women’s basketball Softball picked to take third in G-MAC drops G-MAC finale Team will face Ursuline Thursday in first round of G-MAC tournament By | S. Nathaniel Grime Assistant Editor The Hillsdale College Chargers fell 81-55 on the road against the University of Findlay in their final tune-up for the G-MAC tournament on Saturday.

The Chargers finish the regular season 16-10 and 14-8 in the conference.

Hillsdale enters the G-MAC tournament as the No. 5 seed. The tournament begins Thursday and goes through Saturday.

The regular season finale was a forgettable one for Hillsdale. The Chargers turned the ball over 24 times and failed to get any sustained momentum going throughout the game.

“We were hurried and rushed, and we’re not a team that should play like that,” head coach Matt Fritsche said. “It wasn’t lack of effort; it wasn’t lack of focus. It was just one of those days.”

Findlay enjoyed a huge advantage not only in turnover margin but at the free throw line, where they made 18 free throws to the Chargers’ one. The disparity in free throws resulted partially from fouls. Hillsdale committed 18 fouls whereas the Oilers committed only eight.

“I think we need to do more to draw fouls, and Findlay’s a tough place to play,” Fritsche said. “We can play more downhill. We’ll draw more fouls that way.”

Junior forward Brittany Gray paced the offense with 11 points and six rebounds.

She also sunk three of five three-pointers to lead the team. She pointed to the team’s motion offense as key to getting open shots beyond the arc.

“We do have some set plays that help me get open for threes, but with our motion offense, we like to do down-screens and flairscreens and our team is really good at reading defenders,” Gray said. “We’ve also practiced it a lot, so we pride ourselves on our motion offense with lots of screens and getting open.”

Gray noted that despite getting some open looks, the motion offense wasn’t working as well against Findlay as it normally does.

“I just think we were a lot more stagnant,” Gray said.

“The ball wasn’t moving as well, and we weren’t cutting as well as we normally do.

The offense that we usually run that helps us win just wasn’t the offense that we saw out there.”

Junior guard Allie Dewire scored 10 points and added six rebounds. She said playing on the road for Findlay’s Senior Day was tough, but not anything the team isn’t capable of overcoming.

“I like those environments where it’s exciting and there’s a lot of energy,” Dewire said.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think we transferred that energy well into the game.”

Dewire said the Oilers’ full-court pressure led to the Chargers’ boatload of turnovers, something that has been uncharacteristic for Hillsdale the second half of the season.

“They got us sped up and we were making turnovers that aren’t very characteristic for us,” Dewire said. “We can’t let that happen. They controlled the pace and the speed of the game. If we can maintain our poise and play our own speed, there’s no way we should have that many turnovers.”

With the G-MAC tournament on deck, Dewire said while the loss at Findlay isn’t the ideal way to be heading into the tournament, the recent stretch of success the Chargers have enjoyed along with the bitter taste of a tough road loss will motivate the team heading into the postseason. Before Saturday’s loss, Hillsdale had won nine of its previous 12 games.

“We didn’t play our best ball against Findlay, but we know what we’re capable of,” Dewire said. “We also know that we don’t want to have that feeling again like we did at Findlay. That will be good fuel going into the tournament.”

Junior forward Makenna Ott scored eight points but went 0-for-3 from threepoint range. Ott is second to Gray on the team in threepoint shooting this year. Ott does, however, finish the regular season as the team’s leading scorer, averaging 14.2 points per game.

Ott also led the Chargers

to plenty of scoring opportunities during the regular season, serving up a teamhigh 84 assists, an average of 3.2 per game. Dewire is second to Ott with 3.0 assists per game.

Hillsdale boasts four players who average double-digit scoring in Ott, Gray, Dewire, and senior center Allie Dittmer.

“We are so democratic.

We share the ball; we share the responsibilities,” Fritsche said. “Each night of the tournament we could have a different kid have a great matchup that night.”

Dittmer finishes the regular season as the team’s leading rebounder and ranks fourth overall in the conference with 8.7 rebounds per game. Nearly four of those each contest come on the offensive end of the court, second-best in the G-MAC. The Oilers held Dittmer to just one point and six rebounds. Her lone point was the only free throw the Chargers would make all game.

Dittmer was on the floor for only 17 minutes.

“She was having a hard time finishing plays, and she had been banged up,” Fritsche said. “It got to the point toward the fourth quarter where we felt like it wasn’t going anywhere. She was really prepared and ready; it was just one of those days for all of us.”

The quiet game from Dittmer was abnormal for the Chargers. Dittmer has played exceptionally in her senior season, leading the team with seven double-doubles, ranking second in the G-MAC with a 60.2 percent shooting rate, and eclipsing 1,000 career points last month.

Hillsdale will need Dittmer, along with its other scorers and impact players, to be firing on all cylinders right away in the tournament in a tough first-round contest.

The Chargers play No. 4 seed Ursuline College (19-9, 16-6 G-MAC) in the first round of the tournament on March 1 at 8:30 p.m. Hillsdale split the season series against Ursuline, defeating the Arrows on the road Jan. 4, 84-68 and falling at home on Feb. 8, 85-84.

By | Madeleine Jepsen Science & Tech Editor

A young but experienced softball team will start the spring season with 12 games in Florida over spring break before beginning G-MAC play on March 24.

“We’re still young, because we’re mostly sophomores and freshmen, but we’re still fairly experienced because a lot of the sophomores got playing time last year,” head coach Joe Abraham said. “Even though we’re young, inexperience is not an issue for our team. We fully expect to go out and have a great season.”

The team gained nine freshmen this season, while only three seniors graduated at the end of last season, including Bekah Kastning ’17, the only player in school history to earn NCAA Division II all-region accolades twice in her career.

The Chargers’ pitching staff and six additional starters will return from last year, including senior third base-

Tennis from A10

stopped from there,” Matthews said.

Completing the Chargers’ uncommon singles sweep, Cimpeanu won 6-3, 6-4 at No. 2 and junior Corinne Prost won 6-1, 6-3. Sophomore Katie Bell alone faced a tie-breaking round at No. 1, eventually defeating her opponent 6-4, 3-6, 6-4.

The Bulldogs’ took their lone point from Bell and Prost at No. 1 doubles in a close 8-6 match.

The players said the team maintained their high energy throughout the game and avoided adapting to Ferris State’s slower gameplay.

“You have your own game you like to play, but your opponents are going to be playing different games,” Matthew said. “I think we did

Men’s from A10

leave it in the past.

“I just told the guys to move on and forget about it,” Turner said.

Mirkovic said the courts made the match frustrating.

“It was a shame because we’ve beaten Wayne State before,” Mirkovic said. “And we really have a good chance of beating them anywhere but their courts because their courts are a whole different surface. It’s like going from hard court to clay court and we didn’t have enough time to get used to the surface. All of us were late on hits because

man Kelsey Gockman, junior outfielder Katie Kish, junior second baseman Amanda Marra, sophomore pitcher Dana Weidinger, sophomore shortstop Sam Catron, and sophomore catcher Sydney San Juan, who received all-conference accolades last season.

“We’re pretty close as a team to begin with because we have a lot of returning players,” Weidinger said. “I feel like the freshmen fit in so well with the rest of our team, and we have a couple new big bats on the team, which is awesome.”

The team finished last year 25-23 in the GLIAC, and will compete against some familiar opponents and new teams in the G-MAC. Abraham said mental focus will be especially important this season.

“We need to make sure that we’re not having mental letdowns on any particular days,” he said. “When you know you’re going to play a Grand Valley or a Wayne State or a Saginaw, you know you’re

in for two very difficult games, so because the G-MAC is not as strong as the GLIAC, it could be easy for a team predicted near the top to have a mental letdown here or there.

We have to guard against that by taking everyone seriously.”

Gockman said the Florida games over break will help the team prepare for the conference season.

“We definitely think we can be a very dominant team,” Gockman said.

Abraham said the team needs to get the season off to a strong start in Florida, especially since the team will likely have freshmen making significant contributions to the team at the pitching and catching positions.

“These games in Florida count, so we’re looking to win games,” Abraham said.

“The working has been going on since last fall. These aren’t scrimmages or for easing our way into the season. This counts. You’re always looking to work on things, but we’re looking to win.”

a really good job of staying level-headed and not stirring too far away from our own games.”

Coming off the historic win, the women are taking a lighter week of training heading into spring break.

Walbright said she is looking stretch the women during the week away from classes, as they compete against some stiff D-II competition absent in the Midwest, including Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, the No. 1 ranked team in D-II athletics. The Chargers also will face Keiser University as well as Broward College in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

“Spring break is definitely an opportunity to go get exposure and compete at a really high level,” Walbright said. “It’s kind of fun knowing

we get to see what we strive for and learn our best from that.”

Walbright said even though Hillsdale is ranked No. 1 in the conference by G-MAC head coaches, that is just another reason to work even harder.

“We’re really excited that we have been given the platform, but there’s kind of a pressure, because we definitely want to live up to it,” Walbright said. “It gives us some confidence in being recognized that we’re a strong time, but to further our goals, we’re working extra hard.”

The Ferris State win is just an early recognition of that, she said.

“It’s a result of how hard the girls are working,” Walbright said, “and what is to come.”

the surface made the ball about 20 percent faster than it should be.”

Katz said the team hopes to get another shot at Wayne State.

“Their courts are ridiculously fast and they’re used to them. We’re not,” Katz said.

“I shouldn’t say that’s why we lost, but it played a role in it.

They were still mostly close matches. It’s definitely a team we can beat if we play them again later.”

The Chargers are 3-3 on the season and will face Grand Valley State at the Biermann Athletic Center on March 2.

“Grand Valley is ranked No. 4. We are No. 10,” Katz said. “So they obviously have a good team. Last year they beat us twice, but I think we can beat them if we play well.”

Mirkovic concurred.

“Grand Valley is basically one of the best teams out there,” Mirkovic said. “It’s gonna be tough to beat them, but honestly we have a pretty good chance regardless, because our team is solid. If everything goes as planned, we can be extremely dangerous.”

Turner said he hoped Friday’s match would help the team’s regional ranking.

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March 1, 2018 A9

Baseball drops four tough games to top competitors By | Stevan Bennett Jr. Sports Editor Assistant Hillsdale College baseball coach Gordie Theisen likes to quote Vince Gill to his players, win or lose: “There ain’t no future in the past.”

After dropping four games to top teams in the region and nation last weekend — three losses coming by a combined four runs — the Chargers have set their sights on next weekend’s series against Bellarmine.

“We’re disappointed we didn’t win the games we had a chance to win,” Theisen said.

“It’s nice to have a chance to win those games against some of the top teams in the country, but there are no moral victories. The team mindset is on Bellarmine.”

Two of the games Hillsdale had a late chance to win came against the Southern Indiana Screaming Eagles on Sunday after rain pushed the Chargers to Sunday and Monday for the second straight weekend.

In game one the Chargers opened up a 2-0 lead by the end of the fourth, thanks to RBIs from junior infielder Colin Boerst and freshman first baseman James Krick.

By the start of the bottom of the ninth Hillsdale’s lead had grown to 6-0, with RBIs from sophomore outfielder Dante Toppi, senior infielder Alex Walts, and senior captain outfielder Ryan O’Hearn. Then, the machine broke down.

The Screaming Eagles combined three hits, five walks — one intentional — and two hit batters to push across seven runs in the bottom half of the frame to steal a 7-6 victory from the Chargers.

In a tough loss for Hillsdale, however, there were bright spots. Most notably the starting pitching performance from senior captain Will Kruse. Kruse struck out four over 5 1/3 innings, while allowing no runs on seven hits.

“I was able to finally get some things working and get some weak contact,” Kruse said. “Then the guys were just able to make plays behind me and strand some runner in key situations.”

Track from A1 “It was really fun running with my teammate, Hannah Watts,” Porter said.

Porter also helped win the 4x400 relay, alongside freshman Zoe Eby, and seniors Victoria Wichman and Ashlee Moran. Eby, finishing second in the 60-meter dash, placed in the top five for winning individual points at the meet. She also landed 2018 G-MAC Freshman of the Meet.

Porter credited the whole team for the Chargers’ success, saying it took the efforts of every athlete in the

Freshman David Toth also threw two strong innings in relief before allowing a couple of hits in the bottom of the ninth.

After the heartbreaker, the Chargers offense started game two with a flurry, scoring five runs before the Screaming Eagles even got a chance to bat. Krick drove in two in the inning, while an O’Hearn’s walk, a wild-pitch, and a double from junior catcher Steven Ring each added one more.

The potent Screaming Eagles offense responded, however, taking a 6-5 lead by

“If you dwell on it, that’s just going to hinder you in the future.” the end of the third inning.

A Krick double in the fifth tied the game, but a Southern Indiana run in the bottom of the sixth ended the scoring of the seven-inning game, sealing the second 7-6 loss for the Chargers on the day.

“It does give us confidence to know that we can play with teams like that, but it does suck,” Kruse said. “We have to look at ourselves, see what we can do, and take how crappy this feels and try to not let it happen again.”

On Monday the Chargers squared off against Missouri S&T in game one, falling 5-3.

The Miners jumped to a 3-0 lead in the second innings, but RBIs from junior infielder Dylan Lottinville and Krick in the second and third innings, respectively, brought the Chargers to 3-2.

“Krick looks like he’s seeing the ball really well,” O’Hearn said. “He barreled up a lot of balls. I’m really excited to see what he will bring to the table for the rest of the season and for the rest of his career.”

A run in each of the fifth and sixth clinched the game for the Miners, despite a late RBI from Boerst.

Sophomore starter Anspectrum of events. Senior captain Rachael Tolsma took second place in the weight throw. Sophomore Kathryn Bassett finished second on the pole vault in 3.47 meters and was joined in the event by sophomores Alyssa Viola and Sheridan Michaud.

“It was so cool because we were the three who came in last year, so even though they had rough seasons last year, they were able to finally put up some showings in the championship,” she said...

We all came in together, but they’ve just had to battle some injuries. So it was really special for the three of us to finally be able to compete

drew Verbrugge had a strong outing in the game, tossing all nine innings, while only allowing three earned runs on eight hits. He was efficient in the start, throwing only 95 pitches.

“He threw a great game,” O’Hearn said. “Seeing that from him, that was awesome.

I wish we could’ve had his back more with our offense, but he threw very well.”

In the weekend finale the Chargers met former-GLIAC foe Grand Valley St., dropping the game 19-3.

The game, however, was tight until the bottom of the sixth inning, when a 10-run Grand Valley inning blew the doors off of it. Lottinville, junior infielder Kevin Monson, and redshirt freshman Rob Zurawski all had an RBI in the game.

Walts caught the game for the Chargers, as well as the first game against Southern Indiana. Theisen said Walts was happy to fill the need, which is characteristic of him as a player.

“He is the ultimate utility man,” he said. “And the ultimate team man. He is willing to do anything, anywhere, anytime, no complaints.

When you have seniors like that, it goes a long, long way to making the team better.”

Senior Phil Carey got the start, allowing four runs — only two earned — on four hits and no walks over 3 2/3 innings of work.

“Obviously you want to learn from this weekend,” O’Hearn said. “But we’re not going to dwell on it. If you dwell on it, that’s just going to hinder you in the future. So we’re just going to learn from the mistakes we made.”

The road doesn’t get easier for the Chargers, who head to Louisville, Kentucky, this weekend to face Bellarmine University, which didn’t graduate a single player from its team last season.

“Everybody that we’re playing can pitch,” Theisen said. “That is what makes these teams that are the best in the country and the region, the best in the country and the region: they can pitch... we’ve got to be ready to go.”

together at championship.”

McIntyre also noted the supportive environment, saying that hosting the event gave the Chargers an advantage.

“Everybody was really focused in a way that I think isn’t always the case at meets.

There was an energy there for sure about just doing well,” she said. “People were getting really excited for everybody, and that’s always helpful.”

The Chargers will travel to Kansas to compete in the NCAA championships hosted by Pittsburg State University.

Redshirt freshman Davis Larson puts up a layup in a game against Ohio Valley earlier this season Gabe Prieur | Courtesy

Men’s basketball draws Alderson Broaddus for G-MAC tournament By | Mark Naida Assistant Editor The Hillsdale College men’s basketball team headed into the locker room with a spring in its step and a 9-point lead, after its senior captains put on an offensive show in the first half against the University of Findlay on Saturday.

Head coach John Tharp said during the halftime the team was excited about their first-half performance and that the only adjustment made by the coaching staff was to insist a commitment to rebounding.

But over the first five minutes of the second half, the Charger lead evaporated as the Oilers refused to miss resulting in an 88-61 Findlay victory in the last game of the regular season.

Stedman Lowry was locked in, scoring 19 points on 8-10 shooting in the first half with 3 triples and some crafty mid-range jumpers.

Ryan Badowski was just as efficient garnering 13 points on 5-7 shooting with 3 three-pointers.

“They made plays that showed their great ability,” Tharp said. “You need your seniors, your most experienced guys, to play well at this time of the season.”

The Charger’s first half — arguably their best half of the entire season — boasted 63 percent shooting from the field and 50 percent from be-

yond the arc which sparked a defensive effort that limited the Oilers to 35 percent from the floor for the half.

But after the break, it looked as if someone had poured cold water over the entire Charger team, and lit a fire underneath the Oilers.

In the second half, Findlay senior guard Elijah Kahlig scored 12 of his 20 points going a perfect 4-4 from beyond the arc. He also pulled down 8 rebound in the contest.

“Findlay can get themselves going. Everybody started banging shots on us,” Tharp said.

The Oilers’ two All-Americans performed well in their last regular season home game. Senior forward Taren Sullivan had 12 points, 10 assists, 5 rebounds, and 2 blocks while senior guard Martyce Kimbrough, despite tough defense by Hillsdale guard Nate Neveau, scored 14 points.

The Chargers scored a season-low 21 points in the second half while making a single triple in 12 attempts.

Lax defense and shoddy rebounding efforts allowed Findlay to score 17 second-chance points off of 12 offensive rebounds. Findlay outrebounded the Chargers 44-27, which Tharp said is a concern for the team moving forward.

“We aren’t rebounding collectively,” Tharp said. “Our guards need to do a better

job of rebounding the basketball. It needs to be a group effort.”

Freshman forward Austen Yarian, forced into action due to a leg injury to junior forward Nick Czarnowski, continued to serve as an offensive threat off of the bench as he scored 10 points in 21 minutes of action while adding 2 rebounds, 2 assists, and 2 steals.

Hillsdale finishes regular season third in the G-MAC behind Walsh University and Findlay University, who is ranked 11th nationally.

Tharp said the Chargers might be in a decent position for a bid to the DII national men’s basketball tournament.

For each region, the top four teams have locks for the tournament. In the Midwest region, the Chargers sit in 5th position.

But before the Chargers turn their attention to the national tournament, they will play next in the G-MAC basketball tournament at 2:30 p.m. on March 1 against Alderson Broaddus University.

Tharp described the Battlers as “really talented, uber talented.” If the Chargers win, they will continue to play through March 3.

“This is the best time of year, and we need to focus and execute on the smallest of details,” Tharp said. “We need to bring tremendous energy and passion.”

Charger Chatter: Jaycie Burger Do you have any pre-game rituals?

I normally just listen to music and then, as a team, we like do a dance before we go out and play so we calm down our nerves.

Does your family come out to games?

Oh yeah. They come to all my home games, because I live 15 minutes from here. And then they try to come to a lot of my away games on weekends, too.

Charger Athletics | Courtesy

Jaycie Burger is a freshman from Pittsford, Michigan.

She is a guard on the women’s basketball team.

Do you get nervous with them in the stands?

I like my family coming. It’s really nice. They’ve been coming to my games all my life.

What is your favorite thing about playing basketball?

Did you ever compete in other sports?

I like the competition and I like my teammates a lot. They definitely make Hillsdale basketball really special.

I played volleyball and ran track in high school. I really liked volleyball a lot. It was kind of my chill sport. I didn’t like track, but I was good at it. I stopped after two

years.

ing towards a science though.

What is the most enjoyable part of a basketball game?

What is your favorite place on campus?

When people make like, not like good shots, but they make like a hustle play. Like someone takes a charge right when you really need it, or they get a steal, or they make an extra shot that’s really sweet.

What is your favorite thing about Hillsdale College?

My favorite thing personally is the basketball team. That’s definitely why I came here. Other than basketball, I like that the professors are actually excited about what they’re teaching, which I think is cool.

Who is your favorite professor?

Mardi Billman. She’s my chemistry professor.

Do you know your major yet?

I don’t know for sure. I’m lean-

The Heritage Room!

Do you have thoughts on Dr. Arnn?

I’ve talked to him a few times.

He seems pretty cool. He sat at our table once and checked up on us to see if we’re doing well, so I like that.

What does it mean to you to be a competitor?

It means you want to do your best no matter what challenge is in front of you. You want to make sure you do your best no matter what.

What’s your favorite food in the world?

Fried pickles.

What’s your favorite place at Hillsdale to eat?

Saucy Dogs.

What is your favorite place to go to in Hillsdale County?

I like to go to Baw Beese. I swim, walk my dog. My friends went out on the ice the other day; I’ve never done that, but it might be fun.

What’s your favorite flower?

Lilacs. We have a couple of bushes growing around my house and they’re pretty. I like the smell.

And they’re purple.

What’s the first thing you’d do if you won the lottery?

I’d put a new roof on my house at home. A metal roof, because we have a tar roof right now, cause the house is really old. I’d probably put it away and pay for my school and my brother’s school and just use it when I need it. Not like go crazy.

-Compiled by Rowan Macwan

Charger Charger Chatter Freshman Jaycie Burger talks about playing college basketball 15 minutes away from home, her favorite things about Hillsdale, and what she’d do if she won the lottery. A9

MARCH 1, 2018

Softball The Hillsdale College softball team opens its season on Saturday with a doubleheader. The team was picked to finish third in the G-MAC, according to a coaches poll. A8

Basketball Both the men’s and women’s teams finished up regular season play and will compete in the G-MAC tournament this week.

Men’s A9 Women’s A8

MEN’S TRACK TAKES SECOND AT G-MAC CHAMPIONSHIPS

Sophomore Joey Humes wins G-MAC Track Athlete of the Week By | Regan Meyer Collegian Reporter The Chargers took second place in their first ever G-MAC Indoor Championships.

Staying neck and neck with the University of Findlay all weekend, the Charger men were in the lead when it came to the shot put on Saturday afternoon.

“It came right down to the end,” head coach Andrew Towne said. “We were up by two or so with just the shot put left and then the 4x4.

We scored like five points in the shot, and Findlay scored 20-something. Then it was over.”

The team put up a strong showing, one which Towne said was something he had been looking for from the guys all year.

“The guys competed much better than they have all year.

We came up just short. It came right down to the last couple events. Really close but that’s the type of effort that we need

moving forward.”

Findlay ended up taking home the crown Saturday afternoon, edging the Chargers with a score of 154.

“The difference was we’re a little bit stronger in the distance events than they are and they’re a little bit stronger in the field events than we are,” Towne said. “We couldn’t outdo them enough in the distance events to offset how much they outdid us in the field events.”

Though the team didn’t take a collective championship title, quite a few individuals walked out of Biermann having taken the number one slot in the conference. Sophomore Joey Humes won the mile and 3000-meter runs, as well as anchoring the Champion DMR team. Humes was also named the G-MAC Men’s Track Athlete of the Week.

“He was a good example of what we need from our guys going out there and giving their best effort whether it feels great or not, whether it’s easy

or not,” Towne said. “I thought he was really good this weekend in terms of competing and laying it out there.”

Though he is the only member of the men’s team to qualify for NCAAs, Humes had nothing but praise for his teammates.

“Everyone did so well,” Humes said. “I can’t think of one person who didn’t step up.

Literally everybody was stepping up. I think the problem was we didn’t have the depth for it. Findlay’s got depth.”

Other notable performances included senior David Chase, senior Jared Schipper, and freshman Ryan Thomsen in a Charger sweep of the heptathlon podium. Schipper also took the conference title in the pole vault.

“I got first, which was awesome,” Schipper said. “I didn’t jump quite as high as I wanted to, but that’s okay. Pole vault is one of those things where you kind of just compete against yourself and you have your own goals to reach. You don’t

worry about the competition too much.”

For everyone but Humes, the indoor season is over. The team will take a few days off

and then jump into training for the outdoor season.

“This week we’re taking a couple of days off just to let our bodies recover,” Schipper

said. “And then we’ll probably get right into it next week. It’ll just be tons of practice and will probably be the hardest weeks of the semester.”

Senior David Chase, senior Jared Schipper, and freshman Ryan Thomson took first, second, and third, in the heptathlon, respectively, at the G-MAC Championships. Todd Lancaster | Courtesy

Women’s tennis tops Ferris State By | Breana Noble Editor-in-Chief For the first time ever, Hillsdale College defeated Ferris State University in women’s tennis on Saturday.

For six years in the GLIAC, the Chargers were unable to overcome the Bulldogs.

But in their first year in the G-MAC, which ranked them No. 1, the Chargers stepped up their game in Big Rapids, Michigan, with an 8-1 win in the nonconference game, as the women swept their singles matches. Hillsdale is now 2-2 this season.

“Specifically, we knew they were going to be tough,” head coach Nikki Walbright told The Collegian. “We didn’t walk over them. It was a very difficult match, and it didn’t feel like an 8-1 victory. We’ve been working really hard, and it’s nice to see that work pay off.”

With Hillsdale making history, it’s no surprise then that the G-MAC named a Charger woman the Player of the Week for the second week in a row.

Junior Halle Hyman received

the honor Tuesday afternoon from the conference office.

“It’s very exciting to see Hillsdale’s program beat an opponent it is so familiar with — for the first time in six years,” Ben Schlesselman, the G-MAC’s assistant commissioner for strategic communication, said in an email. “There were a number of student-athletes deserving of weekly conference honors, but Halle’s strong track record the past two seasons as GLIAC Freshman of the Year and an all-conference honoree have validated her as among the league’s best already in 201718.”

A top player since stepping on campus, Hyman is off to a strong start her third year in college. On Friday, the undefeated doubles player this season picked up her fourth straight win at No. 2 8-4 with freshman Hannah Cimpeanu, who was last week’s G-MAC honoree.

“I am very happy with our win against Ferris,” Hyman said in an email. “Everyone played so well, and it was nice to see all of our hard work

come together to earn a great win.”

Hyman also conquered at No. 3 singles, winning 7-6, 6-4 against junior Nicole Meylor.

The victories give her a 15-8 record in singles for the past two seasons, marking her as one reason Hillsdale ranks No. 1, according to Schlesselman.

While Hyman is showing an impressive year thus far, Walbright said all her players had strong performances on Saturday.

“Everybody had a great win,” Walbright said. “They were all really supportive, and we had a great vibe. You could just feel the energy on the court.”

Sophomore Kamryn Matthews swept all of her matches. Teamed with junior Madeline Bissett at No. 2 doubles, the women won 8-0.

Matthews kept the streak going at No. 5 singles, winning 6-0, 6-0. Bissett almost twinned her teammates’ sweep, winning 6-0, 6-1 at No. 6 singles.

“Mads and I got on a role, and we just never really

See Tennis A8

Senior Delp earns conference honors in men’s tennis victory By | Scott McClallen Assistant Editor The Hillsdale College men’s tennis team shut out Edinboro University on Saturday, ranked No. 4 in the Atlantic region, 9-0 in their first faceoff in history. The Chargers, however, were shut out by Wayne State 0-9 on Sunday.

Sophomore Milan Mirkovic dispatched of the nation’s No. 13 player Vitor Albanese 6-3, 6-4 in straight sets to snatch No. 1 singles. Mirkovic teamed with sophomore Julien Clouette to seize a No. 3 doubles win 8-3. Sophomore Charlie Adams won at No. 2 singles 7-6, 8-6, 6-1. Adams joined junior Justin Hyman to win No. 1 doubles 8-6, and Hyman claimed a No. 3 singles win 6-3, 6-3. Junior John Ciraci won at No. 4 singles 6-3, 6-0 and joined senior captain Dugan Delp for a 9-7 No. 2 doubles win.

Delp was named G-MAC Player of the Week on Tuesday. Delp seized a No. 5 singles win 6-3, 6-2. He is 4-2 in doubles play and 3-3 in singles play on the season.

Freshman Gabe Katz shut out No. 6 singles 6-0, 6-0.

“It was our overall best match of the year,” head coach Keith Turner said. “Everyone played quite well, and Edinboro is ranked No. 4 in the Atlantic region, so to beat them 9-0 showed when we’re playing to our potential how good of a team we are.”

Turner said the six consecutive match comeback in No. 2 doubles was impressive.

“All three of our doubles teams played well,” Turner said. “No. 2 doubles was down 7-3 and came back to win 9-7. Gabe Katz also played well and won 6-0 6-0 in No. 6 singles.”

Katz said their performance set the tone for the rest

of the match.

“The fact we swept Edinboro is incredible because they are a regionally-ranked team,” Mirkovic said. “So that was a great win for us.”

The Chargers fell to Wayne State 8-1 on Sunday.

Delp swiped Hillsdale’s single point from the Warriors in an incredible No. 5 singles win 6-3, 0-6, 10-8 in which he came back from a shutout.

“It was just a forgettable day,” Turner said. “Their tennis courts aren’t even real tennis courts. It’s true; they have a multi-surface facility.

It’s unfortunate because it really was an important match.

But let’s just say we’ve already agreed to never play on that surface again and we’re always gonna play matches at a neutral site going forward when we play Wayne State.”

Turner told his team to

See Men’s A8

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‘Dunkirk’

“Dunkirk,” “Lady Bird,” and “Get Out” are nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. Margot Robbie in “I, Tonya” is nominated for Best Actress. IMDB

‘Get Out’

By | Brendan Clarey Senior Writer

As the Oscars draw near, so come musings about which film will win the Best Picture award, and this year nine movies are looking to claim the coveted gold man.

And while “Dunkirk” is about bringing men home, it shouldn’t bring home an Oscar for Best Picture. It lacks the character development and backbone that elevates good movies to great ones.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved “Dunkirk” when I saw it in theaters with my girlfriend, and I have to admit (because she will always hold it over me) that I cried just a sniffle. I think it was after the British commander, played

by Kenneth Branagh, sees all of the English boats coming to save the soldiers in an amazing display of patriotism. He turns to another officer and says with perhaps the first smile of the film, “It’s home.”

In case you missed it, the movie follows the stories of three different men involved in the evacuation: First, a common soldier in the water at Dunkirk trying to escape to England. Second, an elderly British man crossing the channel on his own boat, and third, a Royal Air Force pilot in a Spitfire shooting German dive bombers.

The valor and the courage of each of these characters overwhelmed me, along with the swelling music and the heart- See Dunkirk B2

‘Lady Bird’ By | Kayla Stetzel D.C. Correspondent

While wholly novel in its approach, director Greta Gerwig’s coming-of-age debut “Lady Bird” seems so well-known, personal, and honest that it’s considered an instant classic. “Lady Bird” is an era-defining story — in the same category as the “The Graduate,” “The Breakfast Club,” and “Garden State” — that will have a similarly enduring impact on those who grew up in the early 2000s. This film’s raw simplicity and distinctly feminine perspective have endeared it to the hearts of many and allow it to be considered a masterwork.

The Oscar-nominated film follows the bold Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, a defiant young woman who is determined to break free of the confines of suburban Sacramento and plunge into the metropolitan by attending college out East “where writers live in the woods.”

She feels limited See Lady B2

B1 March 1, 2018

By | Joshua J. Paladino Opinions Editor

Director Jordan Peele’s debut film, “Get Out,” a thriller-comedy with elements of psychological horror, challenges and expands the traditional American definition of racism, leaving audiences much to contemplate but little to act upon.

“Get Out” is nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and although Peele deserves recognition for the movie’s original commentary on race in America combined with a refreshing reinterpretation of the thriller genre, the historical scope of candidates like “Dunkirk” and “The Darkest Hour” dwarfs the thriller-comedy.

In its attempt to show white Americans as oblivious, privileged, and subtly bigoted, See Out B2

‘I, Tonya’ By | Brigette Hall Special to the Collegian

In review: The Academy Awards By | Patrick Lucas Special to the Collegian

If you don’t know what movies to watch over spring break, catch the Oscars on Sunday at 8 p.m. on ABC. Besides offering suggestions for your cinematic watchlist, it can be fun to see your celebrity crushes in fancy — or weird — evening wear, to hate yourself because you’re not talented enough to deserve a golden statue, and to participate in the conversation about American culture that takes place at the Academy Awards. I like to think of myself as a movie buff, and each year I watch more of the nominees. Wondering what’s the best of the best?

Here’s my analysis of the top categories.

Best Supporting Actress The top candidates for best supporting actress play fierce mothers. As Laurie Metcalf plays Lady Bird’s mother, the scenes with her daughter are charged and waiting to snap. At one moment she and her daughter are getting along, and the next moment suddenly screaming at each Graphic: Katherine Scheu | Collegian

other. They work together to express the bipolar nature of the relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter.

On the other hand, Allison Janney’s performance as Tonya Harding’s cruel and demanding mother matches Metcalf ’s performance. The sobering aura of “I, Tonya” is partially founded on the intensity and conflict between Janney’s character and Margot Robbie’s Tonya (who’s also nominated for lead actress).

Best Actress Though all the nominees for best actress in a leading role deserve the nomination, Frances McDormand stands out for her performance in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, a strong-willed and darkly comic woman seeking justice for her daughter who was raped and burned alive. She rents three billboards for a year to call out the police chief by name for neglecting her daughter’s case. Through her mix of comedy and intensity, McDormand plays a vital role in heightening the

complex script that explores the relationship between citizens and the police department of a small town (kind of like Hillsdale).

Saoirse Ronan would also be fit to win this category for capturing the complex life of a high-school girl in “Lady Bird.” This warm, funny, and authentic movie definitely stands on Ronan’s performance.

Best Supporting Actor The two top candidates for best supporting actor come from “Three Billboards.” Sam Rockwell plays Jason Dixon, the “bad cop” and arch nemesis of McDormand’s character. The complexity and depth of the movie’s treatment of law enforcement and justice stand on Rockwell’s — again — darkly comic portrayal of a racist and hot-tempered cop.

Woody Harrelson earns second best for his portrayal of the police chief. Though McDormand directs public blame on Harrelson’s character, he is the mediator between Mildred and Dixon’s rage, and he balances Dixon by playing the “good cop.”

These See Awards B2

A man with absurd ’90s glasses sits in a living room.

He responds to an interviewer: “Everyone remembers The Incident differently and that’s a fact. Some people honest-to-god remember Tonya whacking Nancy herself.”

The scene flashes to a woman in a pink figure-skating costume bringing down a baseball bat on a fallen figure.

The woman in pink is Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding. The woman under the baseball bat is her competitor Nancy Kerrigan. This is The Incident: the attack on Kerrigan in 1994 and the subject of the film “I, Tonya.”

Conflicting accounts define the 1994 scandal, accounts the movie’s film editor Tatiana S. Riegel and its leading lady Margot Robbie — both nominated for Oscars — must wade through in their undertaking of Tonya’s story. They must untangle confusion and contradiction in an attempt to create a narrative. And they do, flawlessly and hilariously.

The above version of The Incident — “Tonya whacking Nancy herself ” — is only one version. And it’s just plain sensationalized. The facts are not as easy as Tonya Harding at the Ice Rink with the Baseball Bat. The only fact is that nobody agrees. Memory confuses fact. Sensationalism replaces memory. This is the movie’s challenge.

But here’s the verdict most sober people accept: In 1994, less than two months before the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, Kerrigan left her See Tonya B2

Orchestra concert to feature student soloists Thursday By | S. Nathaniel Grime Assistant Editor

Featuring two winners of the annual Concerto/ Aria Competition, the Hillsdale College Symphony Orchestra will perform its first concert of the semester on Thursday.

The concert will begin at 8 p.m. in Markel Auditorium. Ticket reser-

vations should be made by contacting the Sage Center Box Office either by phone or email.

The program includes Bedřich Smetana’s “Die Moldau,” Aram Khachaturian’s “Concerto for Flute and Orchestra,” Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, op. 28,” and Paul Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis

of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber.”

Junior Clara Fishlock, who will perform a flute solo during Khachaturian’s concerto, said even students who don’t typically listen to classical music can enjoy the concert.

“The program is beautiful, engaging, and very accessible even to people who are not familiar with

classical music,” Fishlock said. “The Hindemith ‘Symphonic Metamorphosis’ doesn’t necessarily have the same type of melodic thematic material as the other pieces on the program, but is still enjoyable and certainly interesting to listen to.”

Junior Tova Forman, who will perform a violin solo during Saint-Saëns’ piece, said the orches-

tra began working on the concert set at the beginning of the spring semester, making it an “extremely short rehearsal cycle.”

Despite its quick pace, Forman said, playing in the orchestra has been an opportunity for her to reach others and exhibit artistic beauty.

“God gave me a love for playing for people,

trying to soothe and inspire them by showing them attributes of him through music,” Forman said. “An orchestra performance displays beauty, order, and creativity, which are things we should get used to in art as well as academics.”

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Culture B2 March 1, 2018

Lady from B1

by her hometown, her overbearing mother, and her Catholic high school, which she lovingly dubs “Sacred Fart.”

Yet, as she prepares to graduate, Lady Bird explores her relationship with her family and hometown with a realism and vulnerability rarely seen on film.

“Lady Bird” moves at the pace of life. All at once it seems as if nothing is happening, yet things are whirling by — each moment is captivating and seems to blur into the next. As she navigates her senior year, Lady Bird deals with first loves and losses. She battles insecurity and comes to terms with who she is. Audiences watch as a young girl crawls her way into adulthood, holding on to much of her past as she moves forward.

As much as Lady Bird dismisses her hometown with the ferocity of a restless teenager who’s aching to experience life, her groundswell of love for the town and those in it becomes apparent throughout the film. She walks through neighborhoods and carefully selects her dream home. She stops to catch the views of the freeways when she can.

With two strong women at its center, and another strong woman helping the film, the perspective of “Lady Bird” is achingly relat-

Out from B1

“Get Out” obscures actual racism. But what the movie lacked in a social commentary, it made up for with its patiently drawn-out plot line.

Most thrillers can’t seem to make it 15 minutes past the opening scene before the villain’s revealed, the protagonists start dying, and the writers abandon all semblance of plot in exchange for a predictable sequence of unearned jump scares.

Not “Get Out.” Although it’s pretty clear from the beginning that white people are bad and black people are good, it isn’t revealed who’s in on the conspiracy or what it is until three-quarters of the way through. The movie’s patience leaves viewers in a state of anxiety and uncertainty, the best emotions for a thriller.

And while it doesn’t parallel the most serious forms of oppression in modern America, “Get Out” does give a unique interpretation of liberal or left-wing racism.

For a Fox News-watching, white, deplorable American, the message of “Get Out” feels clear: Whiteness bad, blackness good. And it’s hard not to feel this when (spoiler alert) the white people in

Tonya from B1

practice rink in Detroit and was clubbed on the knee with a retractable police baton by a hit-man, whom the FBI later connected to Harding and her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly (the ’90s glasses guy).

It’s speculation over the extent of Harding’s knowledge of and involvement in the attack that maddened the America of the 1990s.

“I, Tonya” undertakes the challenge to capture and comprehend the disparate events leading up to The Incident and its subsequent fallout by re-enacting and fitting together — as the opening text frame specifies — “irony

able to anyone who has been a 17-year-old girl or a mother. Despite how she and her mother nag each other, the film opens on them sharing a bed together. The pair are later seen weeping with one another over a cassette audiobook of “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Though there is much vitriol between them at times, it is the underlying tenderness between them that heightens the bitter moments. This film dives into this complexity without exploiting it for drama.

What makes Lady Bird so special is how it treats its characters. The performances within this film are so raw and subtle, the characters feel like complete human beings. Each character within the film has a voice and distinct purpose, no matter how minor the role. We meet a depressed priest, a humorous nun, and a handful of charming minor characters — each with his or her own message.

Life is examined so eloquently and tenderly in this film that “Lady Bird” hits nearly every emotion you can feel.

“Lady Bird” will make you laugh, cry, feel nostalgic, and long for home. It’s an incredibly original and realistic film that poignantly paints what it feels like to be seventeen.

“Get Out” hunt black people, alter their brains, and turn them into slaves. It’s a heavy-handed narrative, though not one without justification.

In the film, Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) brings home her boyfriend, a black man, to meet her family. Armitage’s family acts affectionately toward Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), while making subtle references to his race but never addressing it outright.

In the first conversation between Armitage’s father and Washington, the father says, “By the way, I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could.”

With awkward comments like this, the movie addresses the fascination that white American liberals have with praising the culture, traditions, and faculties of black Americans, all the while disrespecting white culture as oppressive, irrational, and overly religious.

Those who defend the racially charged message of “Get Out” argue that it presents racism through the lense of a horror film, making the message more palatable for people not inclined to believe the narrative. But the racial bias is so thinly veiled, and with so little tact, that it turns away white

free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly.”

A film with so many narrators can look like a Picasso portrait in its variety and disarray: a face with two noses and three eyes. But this isn’t a horror flick, so the movie shouldn’t look like Victor Frankenstein’s Creature.

The final product is comprehensive, if not cohesive — and in execution, a really charming Picasso portrait.

While tackling her master-artist job of stitching together a narrative through film frames, Riegel does not merely recognise divergences between interviews’ accounts, but celebrates — even

Awards from B1

because of the characters’ silence. Each line is three actors deserve to vitally important, yet the win for their joint sucscript’s brilliance is as cess in playing off each much due to the words other’s brilliance. held back as the words Best Actor spoken. The father’s final It is a different chalmonologue oozes with lenge for an actor to grace, poetry, and wisresemble a historical fig- dom as it appropriately ure credibly than it is to concludes the movie. create a character from Best Original Score the words in a script, “Phantom Thread” and Gary Oldman miris the only nominee I rors Winston Churchill haven’t seen, but I’m flawlessly in “Darkest hoping it wins best origHour.” But I’m rooting inal score; its contenders for Timothee Chalamet don’t measure up. The for his performance in music of “Star Wars” is “Call Me by Your Name” barely original, “Three because of his youth and Billboards” is unexcharisma: Only 22 years traordinary, “Dunkirk” old, he charmingly and sounds like the rest of thoughtfully graces the Hans Zimmer’s work, screen. Chalamet’s role and “The Shape of Wais extremely demanding ter” is monotonous and because of its portraythematically deceptive al of sexuality and its because of its Parisian role in communicating feel. Junior Nic Rowan, the script’s drama with who reviewed “Phantom co-star Armie Hammer Thread” for the Collethrough silence, subtlegian, said the film’s comties, and body language. poser Jonny Greenwood Best Adapted Screen- “understands that the play visual elements and the “Call Me by Your aural elements have to Name” deserves best work together so much adapted screenplay for that you don’t even noits delicacy. The script tice that there was ever has so much weight a division between the

two.” I’ll take his word on it.

Best Costume Design Costume design could appropriately be awarded to “Phantom Thread,” a movie about a veteran fashion designer in 1950s London, but the award could also go to “Beauty and the Beast” for its fantastical magnificence and its reflection of the original animation’s costumes.

Best Production Design “Beauty and the Beast” could also earn best production design for similar reasons, though it is rightfully up against “Darkest Hour” for its details of historical architecture. The sets of “The Shape of Water” express the spirit of Cold War America; and the main character’s apartment, the creature’s containment room, and the bad-guy boss’s office are cinematic motifs in themselves.

Best Editing Best editing is a tossup between “Baby Driver,” “Dunkirk,” and “I, Tonya.” Editing in “Baby Driver” synchronizes the soundtrack with action.

“Dunkirk” expresses the timeliness and suspense of the historical event.

The editing in “I, Tonya” delightfully connects the testimonials given by the characters in present day with the true events of the ’90s, and it also allows the characters to jump in and out of the fourth wall between the actors and the audience.

Best Picture “Three Billboards” deserves to win. Though the sensitive viewer may find it distasteful, it’s a story that needs to be told and to be absorbed

by Americans in particular. “Call Me by Your Name” and “Lady Bird” also deserve the award for their insight into adolescence and what it means to come of age.

All three films are artful and insightful.

For those of you returning to Hillsdale next year, Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor shows the Oscar nominees for shorts and documentaries. Take advantage of this resource. If you love movies, see the nominees and make your own judgements.

Dunkirk from B1

Americans who may have connected with its premises if they were presented on less hostile terms.

The original take shows the shift racism has undergone in American culture. The image of racists as white men wearing hooded white robes is all but dead in the United States. Peele doesn’t attack Neo-Nazis, either. The new racist is the white liberal, what some movie reviewers have referred to as the “negrophile.”

And this agenda leads to uncomfortable, even cringeworthy, moments in the movie, especially when 60-plus-year-old white people make insensitive comments.

At one point, a white man is praising Washington’s superior “frame and genetic make-up,” eventually concluding that “black is in fashion.”

In an interview with NPR, Peele said he wanted the audience to feel the irritation that comes from the “sort of lame reaching out to make a connection.”

This reaching out is rarely to understand black culture, making it banal and disrespectful.

“So it was important to me to, first of all, put the entire audience on the same page of what it feels like to be aware of these little subtle interactions and the sort of underly-

flaunts — them.

But not every scene is as dramatic as the one I describe above.

Some of her cuts are more subtle.

After Tonya first hears about Nancy’s attack, she gets in the car with Jeff and his friend Shawn Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser), to hear, with puzzlement, their fragmented squabble about their guilt in the attack of Kerrigan. As the conversation goes on and the two men speak more explicitly about The Incident, Tonya becomes less and less vocal, until the camera fails to even show her face.

In the next scene with Tonya and Jeff in a hotel room, Tonya acts ignorant, as though she had never witnessed Jeff and

ing racism that is sort of just being even slightly distracted or to be made aware of your own race in a normal conversation,” Peele said.

Liberal racism will never be this obvious, but maybe the film’s writers thought Americans needed an overbearing presentation of it to realize the absurdity of these sorts of statements. But there’s a danger to this, too: By presenting racism as a series of microaggressions, in which elderly people from different generations unwittingly make uncomfortable comments, “Get Out” could neglect the harsher realities of poverty, crime, and discrimination about life as an African American, realities hardly imaginable to most middle-class Americans.

Racism isn’t a plot that can be uncovered.

Rather, marginalization of the black community is propagated by a series of decades-long government policies, including state-sanctioned abortion, anti-family welfare policies, and a racially motivated War on Drugs that has unjustly incarcerated generations of black men.

There’s no evil lair in the basement of a rich, white family, where elites gather to oppress poor, black people. The oppression is in front of our eyes.

Shawn’s suspicious exchange. How can she be present yet not hear what is said? Riegel presents us with a glaring silence. At this point in the narrative, accounts fail to line up, narratives clash, and Tonya silently bows out.

Riegel’s isn’t the only Oscar-worthy skill. As the trailers and advertisements promised, Robbie’s performance proved a masterpiece. She pouted, fought back, and skated and spun and fell till she bruised.

Yet when I first heard of the casting, Robbie struck me as an unusual — almost idealistic — choice for the role of Harding; her tall stature, imposing cheekbones, and wide-set almond

great. There has to be more than great victory warming shots of men to win an Oscar for Best in boats with Union Picture. There ought to be Jacks flying high behind reflections or insights into them. Indeed, the bravery human nature along with depicted in the film is a captivating story. inspiring in any age, and For this, you need well worth remembering character development, in our own. but in the movie we aren’t The movie focuses on even given any characters’ the emotions of war and names. There’s no one you the military miracle that can really look back at and occurred at Dunkirk rath- say, “I identified with that er than the specific people; character.” it provides a broad scope Interpersonally, it falls rather than the gritty flat compared to films interpersonal drama that like “Saving Private Ryan” often dominates the silver and “The Hurt Locker.” screen, especially the Both war movies achieve award-winning films. a sense of victory and But we see ourselves national pride for milimore in the small conflicts tary heroes, yet they do it between people than in through characters with large conflicts such as whom the audience symwar. Most of us have had pathizes. a fight with someone or “Dunkirk” fails to felt wronged emotionally achieve an entire end of or left devastated by the drama which is, as Arisfailings of another. Few of totle says in his “Poetics,” us, however, have had the connecting the audiexperience of battling a ence with the characters nameless, faceless enemy. through sympathy. The So while “Dunkirk” relationship the audience does a good job of bringhas with the protagonist in ing you into the moment his struggles and successes of desperation, it doesn’t is paramount in the effect really say anything about of the film. people, about who we are, Unfortunately, the though it does speak volbird’s-eye-view that diumes for the men in that rector Christopher Nolan time and their heroism uses doesn’t allow for a and freedom. real bond between the Their heroism is what viewer and the heroes. kept Britain from falling Moments in the film to the Nazis, and the film border on relatability, but captures that: Never in only in the sense of duty my life have I wanted to or patriotism, and these be British or respected the are few and far between.

British people as much as In sum, these moments I did during the movie. don’t add up to a great The depictions of war and movie, despite all the the hopelessness of the swells of emotion and situation create a massive sound and stormy waves sense of relief upon the of the English Channel. success of the operation.

They add up to a good But there has to be movie, one that depicts more than heroism and only a military operation, emotional impact for a not the workings of the movie to become truly human heart.

eyes differ from Harding’s small yet powerful body, soft face, and eyes that strive toward the bridge of her upturned nose à la Amy Adams.

Soon after I learned of the ’90s scandal (through the Sufjan Stevens’ song “Tonya Harding”), I asked my mom, who saw all unfold as it played across televisions everywhere, what she thought of Harding.

“She was a hard woman,” she said.

When I compared Harding’s cute features to those of Amy Adams, my mom scoffed: How could I compare such a feminine actress with the figure skater she remembered as “hard”?

With her model body and her past role as Harley Quinn, the

DC Comics diabolical darling, Robbie certainly brings sex-appeal to Harding’s story. But the casting choice also lines up with public-memory: Robbie’s razor-blade cheekbones cut ice and knees.

Baseball bat or no baseball bat, Harding stands, as Stevens says, “America’s sweetheart with a dark twist.” She rises, rags to riches, in her triple-axel marvel to the American Dream, only to fall again in scandal. Robbie captures this grotesque tragedy perfectly: Tonya sits before a mirror in her silent dressing room moments before her Olympic Free Skate performance, smears lipstick and blush over all her public

and personal tragedy, and gives the mirror a gruesome smile through tears and a rattling exhale. She’s ready for her final show.

The film has lots of accounts to answer to — Harding’s story, Kerrigan’s pain, hard copy’s hot take, your grandmother’s eager opinion — and Riegel and Robbie undertake the burden and accept it in all its difficulty and depth.

“I, Tonya” wrestles with truth, a struggle Tonya herself understands all too well: “And the haters always say, ‘Tonya, tell the truth.’ But there’s no such thing as truth.

I mean it’s bulls—.

Everyone has their own truth. And life just does whatever the f— it wants.”

March 1, 2018 B3

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Science & Tech

Student builds molecular library of quinolines

Physics department chairman Ken Hayes monitored humidity levels in some of the physics lecture rooms. Brooke Conrad | Collegian

Research suggests healthy humidity slows spread of flu By | Brooke Conrad Assistant Editor

People rarely talk about low humidity as a contributing factor in the spread of influenza, but the low humidity levels in the U.S. this year may be one of the reasons for the tough flu season.

Research over the past decade shows increased humidity can help prevent the spread of influenza. Assistant Professor of Biology Silas Johnson said he thinks 40 percent relative humidity is generally accepted as the level above which one can greatly inhibit the spread of the flu.

Aware of this phenomenon, physics department chairman Ken Hayes has been checking the humidity levels on the environmental monitors in a couple of physics lecture rooms.

He said the relative humidity levels, the percentage of water vapor in the air out of the maximum amount needed for saturation at that temperature, has remained at or below 10 percent since the beginning of the semester — significantly lower than the minimum 40 percent researchers would recommend.

While the humidity levels in the rooms have been somewhat consistent this semester, Hayes noted a variation which occured on Feb. 15, a particularly rainy day.

“I could feel the much higher humidity in the Physics department hallway this morning, and the humidity today in the two lecture rooms was measuring 32 percent,” Hayes said in an email that day.

According to Johnson, when a person with influenza coughs or sneezes, he or she generates respiratory aerosol droplets that carry the flu.

With lower humidity, some of the water in the droplets will evaporate, making the droplets smaller and allowing them to hang longer in the air.

“They can be there for a number of hours,” Johnson

The Download ...

Science in the News

-Compiled by Madeleine Jepsen

said. “If somebody sneezes in an 8 a.m. class and then somebody in a 9 a.m. class comes in, they may get sick because there is still influenza in the tiny little aerosol droplets hanging out in the air.”

With increased humidity, the aerosol droplets are bigger, and it is easier for them to aggregate and settle onto surfaces. Humidity also causes the virus itself to change; higher humidity can destabilize a virus, while lower humidity increases its stability, Johnson said.

Visiting Lecturer of Biology Angie Pytel said she uses a

“On the humidity question, most of that research has come across maybe in the last 10 years or so. There is an association that people see, but the actual mechanism of how that works is still kind of unclear.” small humidifier in her office in the Dow Science Buildingdue to the “chronically dry” air. She said this has helped reduce her frequency of nosebleeds, and that this problem is not new.

The study of atmospheric moisture in relation to the flu is particularly relevant this year. According to an article written for Weather Underground by Bob Henson, this is because the U.S. is currently experiencing “one of its worst winters of flu in years” and also its driest winter in more than 30 years.

Even if the relative humidity outside is rather high, it

takes less moisture to saturate cold air than warm air, according to the article. So on an extremely cold day, it is not difficult to have a high relative humidity and then have this relative humidity drop once the air is heated inside.

Johnson agreed the humidity might be a factor in the particularly bad flu season this year, but he also noted that the strain of flu this year was particularly bad, and the flu vaccine was also not as effective as it has been in past years.

Recent studies show, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, that when flu viruses are well-matched to a flu vaccine, the vaccine can reduce the risk of illness by 40 to 60 percent. This winter, in contrast, the CDC estimated that the total vaccine effectiveness between Nov. 2 and Feb. 3 was about 36 percent.

“On the humidity question, most of that research has come across maybe in the last 10 years or so,” Johnson said. “There is not a ton of research out there. Maybe a handful of published scientific papers. There is an association that people see, but the actual mechanism of how that works is still kind of unclear.”

Nevertheless, Johnson says the easiest way to inhibit the spread of the flu, even when dealing with low humidity levels, is for people to wash their hands and cover their mouths while sneezing.

“If they are sick, don’t come to class,” Johnson said. “These things will probably do more than raising the humidity levels will.”

Hayes said it would be helpful to start raising awareness on campus about the importance of healthy humidity levels.

“Students should be aware of this issue and should pay attention to the relative humidity in their living quarters,” he said. “Inexpensive relative humidity meters are available at stores in town.”

By | Madeleine Jepsen Science & Tech Editor Synthesizing a group of molecules and testing their biological applications can be difficult to accomplish in a six-week span, according to senior biochemistry major Katelyn Bercaw. To help future researchers, Bercaw spent part of her summer synthesizing several types of quinolines, a group of molecules known to have medicinal applications.

The quinoline library she constructed with Assistant Professor of Chemistry Courtney Meyet, her research adviser, will allow future research projects to focus on testing the quinolines’ effects on bacterial growth.

“The reason we were synthesizing them in the lab was twofold: Dr. Meyet worked on these during graduate school, so she knows about them and how to synthesize them, and also because of their medicinal applications,” Bercaw said.

Her project was a continuation of previous research projects involving quinolines.

Last year, Stevan Lukich ’17 synthesized several quinolines and then worked with biology department chair Frank Steiner and applied them to bacteria.

“He found that they have the ability to kill MRSA, methicillin-resistant bacteria, which is cool because we’re always looking for ways to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” Bercaw said.

Lukich and Naomi Virnelson ’16 both worked with quinolines to see which specific quinoline compounds would have the most impact against bacteria.

“Naomi had actually found the compound that had the

most activity,” Meyet said.

“Stevan also synthesized that and found it to be the case as well. What we were trying to do was to take that quinoline and synthesize quinolines like it that could increase their activity.”

Quinoline molecules consist of two connected ring structures, and the group of quinolines Bercaw worked to synthesize also have additional components that branch off from certain parts of the ring structures.

Within the quinolines’ ring structures, alternating single and double bonds contribute to the molecules’ antibacterial properties, Bercaw said. The positions of the single and double bonds cause the quinoline’s electrons to become excited when exposed to ultraviolet light, and the energy they release after exposure to ultraviolet light allows them to kill bacterial cells.

To make these specific quinolines, Bercaw used a method called one-pot synthesis, a system Meyet worked with while still in graduate school.

“She used a method that I had previously published on, so I was confident that the method would work very well,” Meyet said. “There were some compounds that she was synthesizing that I don’t believe had been tried in that combination.”

The one-pot synthesis involves adding the chemical precursors for each quinoline — in this case, an amine, aldehyde, and alkyne — to a single test tube. Under certain conditions, the molecules will react to form a quinoline with specific groups attached to the quinoline ring.

Once the reaction occurs, Bercaw used several tech-

niques, including column chromatography, to separate the quinoline molecules from the other compounds present in the test tube.

“It’s a fairly simple process,” Bercaw said. “Getting the column to run is probably the most challenging step because you have to get a feel for how the different materials separate.”

Bercaw said she was able to successfully make nine different quinolines for future researchers to use in their own projects. She initially struggled to isolate pure quinolines, and found that other unwanted compounds were mixed in with her product.

Meyet said they were able to identify the problem about halfway through the project: a stabilizing compound that was mixed in with one of the chemicals they used in the synthesis.

“At least we have that issue worked out, so when it’s time for others to go and synthesize, we hopefully won’t run into that same issue,” Meyet said.

Junior Rosemary Pynes said she will be continuing Bercaw’s work in some capacity next summer, either by synthesizing additional quinolines using the same method as Bercaw or by testing the quinolines Bercaw synthesized to see how they will impact bacteria.

Bercaw, who plans to attend pharmacy school next year, said she enjoyed working on the project this past summer.

“It was fun to work with Dr. Meyet and just be dedicated to one thing in a way that we aren’t able to when we’re doing labs for classes,” Bercaw said.

Senior Katelyn Bercaw synthesized nine quinoline compounds (left), as a part of her synthetic chemistry research (setup pictured at right). Katelyn Bercaw | Courtesy

Researchers discover large, protein-assembling viruses

Research uncovers ‘significant’ toxic metals in some e-cigarettes

Single quantum particle can be used for two-way communication

Chemists present potential solution for nighttime solar power

Two new viruses discovered by researchers have the ability to synthesize 20 amino acids when in a host cell — the most extensive capacity for protein assembly of all the known viruses, according to a report in Nature Communications. The viruses belong to a group known as Tupanvirus and are as large as 2.3 micrometers in length, or roughly 23 times as long as an HIV particle, according to the report. The viruses were found in extreme environments and can infect host such as amoebas and protists. The researchers said the viruses are not a health threat to humans. Some experts said the Tupanviruses obtained their extra genes from hosts, while others said their discovery adds complexity to how to classify these viruses.

A new study examining e-cigarettes and the aerosol components they emit found that a significant number of devices give off potentially unsafe levels of chromium, lead, manganese, or nickel. E-cigarettes, widely considered to be a safer alternative to smoking, use a battery-powered electric current to heat a metal coil, which helps produces a mix of vaporized liquids inhaled by the user. The new study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, monitored 56 e-cigarette users and found the e-liquids exposed to the heating coils contained metals that, when chronically inhaled, are linked to lung, liver, immune, cardiovascular, and brain damage, as well as certain cancers. The researchers said their findings could contribute to future regulation of e-cigarettes by the Food and Drug Administration.

Two papers have demonstrated the possibility and theory that a single quantum particle can be used for twoway communication. This feat is possible through the principle of superposition, through which a single particle can occupy two places simultaneously.

A theoretical paper describing this phenomenon was published earlier this month in Physical Review Letters, and a paper demonstrating the procedure was published through arXiv. The communication is made possible by changing the phase of the photon’s electromagnetic wave. According to the researchers, the studies identify a new version of this technique, contributing to potential for quantum communication in the future. The field of quantum communication could provide users with a more secure way of sending information.

An international team of researchers have successfully tested CONTISOL, a solar reactor that runs on air and can produce solar-based fuels during the day or night, according to test results published in Applied Thermal Engineering. Solar reactors power processes such as hydrogen splitting as an alternative to burning fossil fuels, which contribute to carbon emissions in the environment. The CONTISOL reactor uses concentrated solar power to run during the night, and during testing, it achieved the required temperatures needed to rearrange the molecules found in most solar fuels, according to the study. The new system uses air to transfer heat, allowing for efficient storage and a safer energy-gathering process.

Features

B4 March 1, 2018

www.hillsdalecollegian.com

Chocolate chip: Hillsdale’s favorite cookie By | Katarzyna Ignatik Collegian Reporter

Brandan Hadlock; his wife, Christine; and their six children. They moved to Hillsdale so that Brandan could attend the Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship. Brandan Hadlock | Courtesy

Mission-minded Mormons seek truth, discussion By | Hannah Niemeier Senior Writer The name tag, with its letters in blazing white on a black background, says it all, announcing its wearer’s identity, setting, and reason for ringing your doorbell: “Elder ____ : The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” Although the picture of the Mormon on a mission characterizes, and perhaps caricatures, the life of young members of the LDS church, their message extends beyond the mission field, into positions as students and professors at Hillsdale College.

Four of Hillsdale’s young Mormons — a professor, an alumna, a graduate student, and the college’s only current practicing undergraduate — have found Hillsdale College and its small LDS branch in Jonesville a welcome place to study and exercise the freedom of religion. And with First Amendment debates growing ever more shrill around the nation, assistant professor of Spanish Todd Mack is starting simple by taking LDS out to lunch.

Tuesday morning, he led a Lyceum talk to answer questions students may have about a religion that has a practicing campus membership currently in the single digits.

“I wonder if anyone has given a talk at Hillsdale about Mormonism,” Mack said. “In conversations with people, it seems like people are interested. Not like ‘I wanna get baptized,’ but like, ‘I’m curious about this church.’”

Mack, who joined the faculty in the fall of 2017, has plenty of experience sharing his faith after a two-year mission in Spain that led him to his current academic discipline. The obstacles to conversations about faith in Spain’s a-religious society are different than those at Hillsdale, where Mack finds interested peers who don’t always know what or how to ask about Mormonism.

But that curiosity about other religions is Mack’s starting point: “As a Mormon on campus at Hillsdale College, I feel so comfortable working with students and other faculty and people of other religions. I feel like there’s so much that brings us together; way more than what separates us in doctrine or lifestyle.”

He hopes, in the future, to talk theology and church history, but for now, he said the conversation will likely center around the practical elements of LDS doctrine: What is it like to go on a mission?

What is it like to be one of the few Mormons on Hillsdale’s campus? What is the Book of Mormon all about?

The number of practicing Mormons currently lies in the single digits, but in the past decade, undergraduates and graduate students have answered those questions in Bible studies, in inquiry groups, and in conversations with friends.

Hannah Schaff, a junior history major, is the most active of the LDS undergraduates. An Orange County, California native, she took a year

off for a mission in Arizona and New Mexico, teaching to the Navajo and other Native American groups.

Though the yearlong mission is not required for LDS women, Schaff found the experience formed her faith and informs her student life.

“I look back on [my mission] a lot when I’m struggling, when I have questions.

I know that I had a strong faith then, a strong enough faith that I was able to share it with other people, so it helps me remember my testimony,” Schaff said. “It’s hard because you can’t do the same type of mission work in your everyday life. You can’t just go up to someone and be like, ‘Do you want to become Mormon?’”

And Schaff said she can’t ask other Mormons about questions that arise in formative classes. A course on the Reformation, for example, showed her that she had a lot

her freshman year.

“It was hard not having a community, but it forced me to stand on my own testimony. But we knew community was important, so the other LDS student and I decided to try to build an LDS community, as small as that might be.

We created an Institute class and brought in an instructor from Lansing,” Hatch said.

“Sometimes it was just the two of us, but we invited friends, and eventually there were eight of us.”

They invited Russ Tibbits, an accredited LDS teacher (which is unusual for LDS leaders, as most are laymen without special study outside their personal studies — their current president is an exheart surgeon), to lead the class. The eight inquirers read the Book of Mormon, the Old and New Testaments, and the Institutes in order to explore the overlapping beliefs among

“In the daily habits, that’s one of the most important things I’ve learned — to read my Scriptures every day because I want that light that it brings into my life.” to learn, but she would have loved triangulating that with the opinions of Mormons her age who were asking the same questions.

“I think it’s harder here.

I think it’s harder with my friends and acquaintances, talking about it,” Schaff said.

“Then it was what we did and who we represented, and I didn’t know all the people.

Here, there are people whom I highly respect, who are intelligent, who know a lot about their faith, and they’re kind of intimidating. And also people here have so much light. So they aren’t as lost. They don’t seem like they have as much need.”

The lessons learned on a mission, then, are at first personal: “In the daily habits, that’s one of the most important things I’ve learned — to read my Scriptures every day because I want that light that it brings into my life,” Schaff said.

But they are also communal: Schaff, Mack and the members of their congregation spend three hours every Sunday morning at their worship meeting. Church members visit one another in what the LDS calls Home Teaching; each man and woman is assigned to a certain number of families, whom they visit once a month to take care of personal and private concerns; Mack and his wife, Betty, visit Schaff and invite her over to their house to spend time with their four children.

For Amanda Hatch ’16 and Schaff, this means they have a little “light” to share back on campus; Hatch started a Scripture study on campus with the one other undergraduate LDS student at the college during

their faiths.

Because of their view of the Trinity, Schaff said, people often question whether Mormons are truly Christian. But since “the Mormon faith is all about coming closer to Jesus Christ,” Schaff said she believes Mormons simply have a different view of the ways God works through his prophets throughout time.

“A big thing that we disagree on is the Trinity. We believe in the Godhead, so we believe that the three are separate and that they aren’t literally one person. They’re one person in that they’re united in mission. So that’s a big one, and that’s why people don’t consider us Christians a lot of times,” Schaff said. “We also believe in modern-day revelation, both personal and through a prophet. We believe in baptisms and ordinances for the dead, for people who have passed away.”

That modern-day revelation is the Book of Mormon, which the LDS considers an extension of the Old and New Testaments published

by Joseph Smith in the 1820s, and those ordinances are ceremonies that take place in temples, the closest of which, for southern Michiganders, is in Detroit.

Schaff said LDS members are encouraged to attend “regularly,” and she travels with LDS professors around once a month to the temple, where sealings (Mormon weddings), baptisms, and other ceremonies take place. Although this view of the sacraments seems foreign to many she talks to, Schaff said it is centered on the LDS’s view of family.

“We research our ancestors and then we do work

for them, so that everyone can be baptized and receive ordinances that are essential,” Schaff said. “It’s very much like mission work on the other side of the veil.”

For Mack, Hillsdale’s emphasis on family is part of what makes him feel at home in a small college and a church of around 100 active members.

“Family — dedication to those around us — is so essential to everything we do,” Mack said.

And it explains the welcome the Jonesville LDS branch gives to other families, like graduate student Brandan Hadlock, his wife, Christine, and his six children, who moved to Hillsdale in December 2016.

“When we drove out to church the first Sunday, before we even got in the building, they said, ‘You must be the Hadlocks,’ and they invited my wife to play the organ for church that day,” Hadlock said. “We’ve found a wonderful community here. It’s smaller than what we’re used to, but it’s incredible.”

In Hadlock’s politics classes, the topic doesn’t come up as much as it does for Schaff: “There’s not a lot of in-depth spiritual discussion, so there might be something more missing if I were single. But I have my wife and children, and I’m active in the church here. There’s not a large group of LDS members on campus, but I’m very involved with people of my age group.”

But like Mack, the protection of freedom keeps conversations open.

“One thing I appreciate about the college is their openness for being whatever religion they are,” Hadlock said. “At graduate school events, we pray over meals together. The people here are open and not looked down on for acknowledging their faith.”

For Hadlock, the politics of religious freedom can bring religions and denominations together: “There’s a big push for people to be involved in politics … Right now, there’s a big focus on protection of religious freedom in my church, just like Hillsdale.

Here in Michigan, we hosted a non-denominational joint conference in conjunction with the Catholic diocese.”

Hatch, now a third-grade teacher in Phoenix, Arizona, said that LDS and academic discussions dovetail.

“There’s a verse in our Scriptures that says, ‘Seek ye out of the best books truth and words of wisdom,’” Hatch said. “That’s been the emphasis at church and school: pursue knowledge and truth in the ways we live. Hillsdale and my faith went hand in hand in that way.”

For Schaff, mission, family, and study helps her to appreciate for the people around her.

“I like what Hillsdale stands for,” Schaff said. “I like the people. You don’t have to believe the specifics of what I believe to be the kind of person I appreciate.”

They’re easily one of the most common snacks in America. A staple, not a specialty, as sophomore Grace Leonard, a baker for Bon Appétit Management Company, said.

There aren’t too many good stories about baking cookies, according to sophomore Madeleine Brylski.

She said there are more exciting bakery stories about non-cookie-related things, like exploding air compression hoses. The cookies are the “easiest part of the job,” she said.

Nevertheless, there’s a universal appeal to the standard chocolate chip. Business Insider estimated that Americans eat more than 7 billion chocolate chip cookies a year.

Is it a surprise that Hillsdale’s Bon Appétit can bake 600 cookies one day and have them gone in three days?

William Persson, marketing manager for Bon Appétit, says that chocolate chip cookies are “definitely the most popular among students.”

Students eat so many chocolate chip cookies, in fact, that cookies are one of the only desserts for which Bon Appétit has to buy dough from an outside provider instead of making it from scratch in the kitchen.

Persson said there simply isn’t time for house-made chocolate chip cookies for every 1,000-student lunch hour.

While the quantity of cookies consumed in the dining hall does depend on the amount of visitors to on-campus events, Leonard laughed when thinking about how many cookies she has to bake on Thursdays.

Leonard described the industrial kitchen: hard steely corners, enormous mixing vats, and massive stacked ovens that dwarf the baker and can hold racks on racks of cookies in one batch.

Five sheets to an oven, four-by-six pans, two dozen cookies a sheet — Leonard rattled off the details like someone who’s done this several times before. She said the ovens aren’t terribly precise, so she has to make mental adjustments, turn the cookies halfway, et cetera.

“After baking the cookies, I never want to see one again,” she said.

But Leonard doesn’t actually hate baking. She bakes a lot at home: cakes, pretzels, bars, bread, and more.

Sophomore Madeleine Brylski doesn’t bake for the college, but she works over breaks at a bakery called the Great Harvest Bread Co. Cookie baking is a major part of her work there.

“They’re really big, pancakey, chewy,” she said, adding that they’re made that way because that’s the way the boss, Karl, likes them.

Karl has also got the cookie recipes down to perfection.

Brylski said their cookies are “maxed out” on butter and brown sugar. Any more butter, and the cookies would be “too squishy.” But Karl and Brylski both know that a ton of butter makes for a really good cookie.

Butter is pretty important in cookie baking. Leonard knows that too.

“Start with soft butter,” she advised. “Take it out

the night before. And don’t microwave it.”

The foundational materials for cookies are important, but so are any extras you may care to include.

Persson said he often sees students experimenting with chocolate chip cookie desserts in the dining hall.

“They heat them up with ice cream, put them together with bars, do weird stuff with other desserts,” he said.

“Once somebody made a cookie milkshake. It’s fun to watch, and a personalized dessert is a great idea.”

Baking for the public is more quality-controlled, though, as Leonard knows from her careful watch over the racks in the sometimes persnickety ovens. Cookies made by the Great Harvest Bread Co. are discarded or given over for employee consumption if they get fingerprints on them or aren’t baked well enough.

Some people do put a lot of thought into their chocolate chip cookie experience, like sophomore Daniel Henreckson, who denied the title of cookie expert but still gave a detailed discourse on the chocolate chip cookie.

“The best cookies must be soft,” he said in an email.

“This is especially true for chocolate chip cookies. There needs to be a danger that the cookies are so gooey that you’ll get chocolate smears on your fingers.”

The cookies Bon Appétit offers are pretty good, Henreckson said. He said they have a surprisingly good consistency.

“They strike a pretty decent balance between gooey and crunchy with a nice, even, soft texture,” he said. “They could certainly be more flavorful, but at least they feel good to eat.”

To be fair, some weeks are better than others for Bon Appétit cookies. A couple weeks ago, the cookies were close to ideal: puffy, soft, and round, with the chocolate chips still melty. Another week, however, the cookies came out browner and more crackable.

Persson said that the Bon Appétit staff doesn’t usually get comments about cookies because they’re such a standard dessert. However, when they do, the comments are often focused on individual preferences.

“Usually the cookies aren’t cooked as much because that’s what students like,” Persson said, “but sometimes somebody says, ‘I wish they were darker brown, that’s how I like my cookies.’

It’s interesting because the feedback reflects how people all generally like different levels of how their cookie is cooked.”

At any rate, the Hillsdale student has a normal American affection for this particular kind of cookie. In fact, Brylski thinks they’re the only kind of cookie she’s ever eaten here at Hillsdale. And Leonard said she often watches college boys “put six on a plate and go away happy.”

Though Henreckson has other favorite cookie types, he agreed that the importance of chocolate chip cookies is extensive.

He said, “It can’t be denied that they are unique, both in their important place in society and their flavor.”

Hillsdale students eat through 600 chocolate chip cookies every three days. Pexels

Features

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March 1, 2018 B5

How evangelist Billy Graham influenced Hillsdale

By | Breana Noble Editor-in-Chief Billy Graham, who died last week, was scheduled to speak at a Center for Constructive Alternatives seminar to discuss “Is God Dead?” and to debate an Eastern thinker, The Collegian reported on April 1, 1984. April Fools.

Although the article was satirical, it shows the influence the evangelical pastor had on Hillsdale College’s campus community. The writer placed his name beside other “bigwigs” noted in the fake piece, including author C.S. Lewis and the pope.

Graham died on Feb. 21 at his home in Montreat, North Carolina, at the age of 99, after years of health problems.

Known for his oratorical abilities and command of the stage, Graham traveled the world, spreading the message of the gospel in sold-out stadium events he called crusades and taking advantage of opportunities in radio and television. He also reinvigorated a Protestant social movement that encouraged Christianity be brought into the public square.

“This is not mass evangelism, but personal evangelism on a mass scale,” he often said.

Professor of History Tom Conner saw Graham speak four or five times at the pulpit of Duke University Chapel and during a lecture series in the 1980s in Chapel Hill at the University of North Carolina.

“I never have heard a preacher with his forcefulness and genuineness, and I doubt that the world will see anyone like him again,” Conner said in an email. “I knew this moment was going to come, but Graham’s death is a true

marker. He was one of the great and dominant figures of the 20th century, in my opinion. Very sad that he is gone.”

Graham’s crusades actually began about two hours from Hillsdale in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in October 1947.

Although he never addressed an audience in Hillsdale, students did attend his crusades on trips organized through clubs and local churches in the ’70s and ’80s.

The college also has a personal connection to Graham through Professor of English John Somerville. The reverend married Ruth Bell, the sister of Somerville’s mother, after meeting her at Wheaton College in Illinois.

Somerville grew up in Korea with missionary parents, so he said he did not see his uncle often. Somerville’s father, sister, and brother now live in the same small town in which Graham called home. Somerville said he and his family would travel there a few times a year, though health issues prevented Graham from having visitors recently.

Somerville recalled visiting his uncle’s house and seeing Christmas cards from wellknown people such as presidents and the United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, which he said he found particularly impressive. To John and his siblings, though, he was just Uncle Bill.

“I didn’t know him well at all, but my memory is of a very kind man, gentle, even perhaps a little shy when he had the chance to be,” Somerville said in an email. “Though many people — world leaders, celebrities, famous athletes — knew him, he was just himself when we visited.”

He said Graham had a particular fondness for his daughter, Katherine, who has cerebral palsy. When visiting the Mayo Clinic one time with her, Somerville said they saw Graham touring the facility.

“He saw her and recognized her right away,” Somerville told The Collegian. “It was a pretty great moment.”

The English professor said he did attend one of Graham’s

and savior,” Burke said in an email. “We had been nominal Christians all our lives, attended church and Sunday School (my sister and I), but did not really understand the Gospel. That Christ died for me personally and that ‘salvation’ was a free gift received by faith when one ‘accepted Christ’ was a message I had never heard. Till then, I just figured if your good works

“Graham’s popularization of evangelism brought about an influential political movement today.” crusades in the seventh grade.

He and his brother “went forward,” as Graham requested his audience members to do at the end of each meeting to commit their lives to Christ.

Somerville, though, said his uncle did not have a significant influence on his own spiritual life.

Graham, however, did transform the direction of religion and philosophy department chairman Tom Burke’s future. Impressed by Graham’s message and oratorical skills after hearing him speak, Burke’s father had his children watch a few television broadcasts and then brought them to see him speak at New York City’s Madison Square Gardens in 1957. Burke credits this event for his conversion.

“At the conclusion, we all went forward to receive Christ as our personal Lord

outweighed your bad, you’d make it into heaven; if not, bad news.”

A year after the crusade, Burke’s family began attending an evangelical Reformed Church. There, Burke said he became interested in understanding the Bible and going into ministry.

“At first, becoming a Graham-type evangelist was my goal, but in time it became evident that was not my gift, by a long shot,” he said.

Burke attended Nyack Missionary College (now just Nyack College) in New York and later Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois, where he became interested in going into academics to understand and defend Christian faith. Eventually he became the pastor of College Baptist Church in Hillsdale and was hired to start the Christian

studies program at the college.

“My conversion under Graham led to my direction in life, my education, and to my wife who attended a church in Milwaukee where I was assistant pastor while in seminary and grad school,” he said.

Graham may have influenced some people on Hillsdale College’s campus, but at least one former Hillsdale student influenced his early preaching. Judson Wheeler van DeVenter, who attended Hillsdale from 1874 to 1876 and wrote the popular hymn “I Surrender All,” met him when Graham attended Florida Bible Institute (now Trinity Bible College). Van DeVenter had retired from the institute as a professor of hymnology, but frequently had the students in his home for fellowship and singing.

Graham would often sit with Van DeVenter and helped take care of the old man.

Graham was present at Van DeVenter’s death in 1939 and carried on his ministry by popularizing “I Surrender All” at his revivals. Today, the hymn still is sung in many churches and its lyrics used in contemporary worship songs.

“I used to know a man by the name of J. W. Van DeVenter, and he wrote a song, ‘I Surrender All,’” Graham said on Sept. 3, 1992, in Atlanta.

“And that’s what Jesus is calling you to do tonight: Surrender all to him, and let his blood cleanse your sins, and come to the cross, and then realize that there’s a resurrection.”

Professor of History Daryl Hart, author of “From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism,” said Graham’s popularization of

evangelism brought about an influential political movement today.

Graham was not necessarily conservative politically, but he was somewhat conservative in Protestant circles, according to Hart. He was part of a religiously conservative Protestant movement that sought to distinguish itself from the Scopes Trial fundamentalists.

In the 1940s, these conservatives adopted the term “evangelical” instead.

“Evangelicals didn’t want to be angry or sectarian,” Hart said in an email. “They wanted to present Christianity in a more positive and culturally engaged way.”

Although not explicitly political like the moral majority or Christian coalition, Graham’s movement and the attention it received was implicitly political, giving rise to the religious right of activist-minded pastors such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson later, Hart said.

“Trying to gain a place at the table, to speak to important matters in national life from an evangelical perspective,” he said, “was an attitude that was essential to later political conservatives who identified as evangelical.”

Despite this, in his later years, Graham isolated himself from politics and said he did not want to alienize groups of people from the Bible’s message he aimed to share.

In 2005 before his final crusade in New York City, he stated his mission: “I’m just promoting the gospel.”

Working wonders with wacky materials

Sophomore Jordan Monnin turns odds and ends into jewelry. Jordan Monnin | Courtesy

CPAC from B6

is over. That there is no such thing as your truth; there is only The Truth. Just some slogans dressed up with rhetorical flourishes and broad appeals to the Founders, common sense, and conservatism.

We have seen this before.

As Shapiro wraps up his speech, I rush from the convention hall to the hallway behind the stage. A door marked “Stars Only” divides me and several other journalists banging away on their laptops from Shapiro and his security entourage on the other side.

I call Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer for a live update on another speaker, French far-right politician Marion Maréchal-Le Pen. Le Pen had told the crowd how she wanted to free France from the matter-of-fact globalism under the European Union, which she said she believes is “without a people, without roots, and without civilization.”

I need Spencer’s take on Le Pen, because CPAC officials tossed him out of the conference for expressing similar — albeit incredibly racist — versions of the same opinions. As I’m compiling his quotes, Shapiro emerges from the “Stars Only” door, and a passing gaggle of young conservatives spot him.

“Mr. Shapiro!” a George Washington University student in a red tie calls out.

I try to focus on my notes.

Spencer is lecturing on the

difference between European and American white nationalism. He tells me it’s odd that CPAC would invite a French nationalist like Le Pen, but exclude an American like himself.

“It’s a bit of a double standard, sure,” he says.

“Mr. Shapiro, may I take a picture with you?” a student behind me asks Shapiro.

“Obviously, the core ideology of the National Front is nationalism, and that means the French nation; ultimately, that means race,” Spencer says.

“Sure, sure,” Shapiro is taking selfies with students.

“Facts don’t care about your feelings,” he says for someone’s Snapchat story.

“And Marion’s grandfather is an Alt-Right icon, though, of course, one from a different generation.”

“Mr. Shapiro! Autograph?”

“The difference between Marion and me is that the National Front became a mainstream political party,” Spencer says. “Conservatives will attack people who are closer to them geographically, while being more open to people abroad, who don’t challenge their claim to determining what is right and what is not right in America.”

“Will you speak at G.W.?” the student with the red tie asks Shapiro.

“I’m happy CPAC invited her,” Spencer says. “I wouldn’t be happy, however, if this means that Le Pen and the National Front are becoming more like American ‘conser-

By | Jordyn Pair News Editor What do violin strings, paint can lids, and deer antlers all have in common? Sophomore Jordan Monnin can turn them into jewelry.

Monnin started making jewelry five years ago after being inspired by some handmade jewelry at a fair. Although he works primarily with steel, he has also used bone, paint can lids, deer antlers, violin strings, and discarded glass bottles to make earrings, necklaces, and bracelets.

“I really love seeing something and picking it up,” Monnin said. “I’ll see something that I like and then make something out of it.”

Pieces can take anywhere from two to 12 hours to make, depending on the material and complexity.

“The most complicated pieces

vatives.’”

“Yeah, sure.” Now Shapiro is trying to leave the hallway, past all these students.

“One of the fundamental problems with American conservatives is that they define themselves and America

I’ve done have taken about 15 hours,” Monnin said.

One such complicated piece was a matching set of a bracelet, a necklace, and a pair earrings made from violin strings. Monnin also incorporated gold and black beads, as well as pendants on the bracelet and the earrings.

Because he only had four strings to work with, Monnin said he had to be extra conscious with the unfamiliar material.

“It’s a lot of trial and error with stuff like that,” Monnin said.

“It was a lot of tweaking and trying to make sure I didn’t damage the actual strings.”

Monnin often gives pieces he has made as gifts for birthdays or other special occasions. He gave his sister, Sarah Monnin, a pair of earrings.

“He’s really talented with it,” Sarah said. “His pieces have more of a handmade look to them. The designs are different from what you might see on the

be based in people and civilization — ‘roots’ — as Le Pen says.”

“Facts do not care about your feelings.”

It’s too much. A mob has formed around Shapiro, and now his security guards are

Hillary Clinton bobble heads have been half off for a year. Nic Rowan | Collegian

abstractly.”

Shapiro wants to keep it neat: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”

But that’s just Spencer’s problem with conservatism.

“American conservatism is based in economics and confronting the Soviet Union, with some vague ‘values’ thrown into the mix,” he says.

“Facts don’t care about your feelings.”

“A true conservatism must

propelling him from the building. Spencer is done. I’m done, too. I run into the bathroom and confine myself to a stall where I can be without red noise.

It’s odd how shoes profess profundity when viewed from a toilet’s vantage. The sole and the heel ground the foot to the floor. The tongue and the lace bind the shoe to the foot. The cuff and the counter connect the tongue to the heel. The

quarter and the welt cover the rest of the foot. And of course there are the tacky — but entirely necessary — addons: eyelets to thread the lace through and aglets to prevent the ends of the laces from fraying after too much use.

Shoes are unified; these facts make sense.

Outside my stall, I overhear an interaction between an older and a younger CPAC attendee.

“Watch out for that soap dispenser: It’s like Niagara Falls,” the younger one says.

“Oh, thank you sir,” the older one says. “Is there any way we can fix it?”

“No. It’s useless.”

It’s too much again. I rush from the building.

But I’m not alone. The day is ending, and everyone is leaving the convention, eager to hit the bars and talk that political talk. Tomorrow Trump will deliver a long and incoherent address in which he will play with his combover and read a poem about a snake in front of the biggest crowd CPAC has ever seen.

The attending mob will do the same things it did today. It will shout “Lock her up!” and “USA! USA!” I will despair and curl up in the fetal position on the floor, using my blazer as a blanket until The Weekly Standard’s Andrew Egger ’17 saves me with a lunch invitation.

But for now, it’s time to leave CPAC and roll into the streets of National Harbor. As the droves spew themselves out the doors and fill the

store shelf.”

Monnin also gave junior Clara Fishlock a pair of earrings.

“He makes them very personalized for people,” Fishlock said. “Jewelry is something very personal; it’s more meaningful.”

Monnin’s craft can take some by surprise. Standing tall at 6’ 3” and sporting a thick beard, he doesn’t seem the type to work with delicate wire.

“Just seeing him, you wouldn’t expect him to make beautiful jewelry,” Fishlock said.

Although Monnin doesn’t run a business outright, he does occasionally sell his pieces. Pricing depends on the piece and the materials used.

“I’m hoping this can eventually be a long-term money-making side hobby,” he said. “It just kind of makes me happy to see things coming together and putting things together.”

shops of this post-apocalyptic Coney Island, the whachuck of Jonny Greenwood’s guitar cuts through the drizzle from a bar’s overhead loudspeaker.

Thom Yorke’s whining growl pierces the misty air: “I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo.

What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.”

I take refuge in the AMERICA! store. This is the sort of shop you would find in an airport, offering flags, coloring books, and mugs. Hillary Clinton bobbleheads are on sale — half price. I ask the guy behind the counter if this is in honor of CPAC. “No, it’s not for that Republican thing,” he says. “Hillary’s always on sale. Well…since about this time last year.”

This time last year. This time last year I was here, in National Harbor, standing on the beach, staring out at the water. If only the swamp could rise over the riprap and overwhelm us all, I thought, we would be cleansed from every fact in this disunified convention.

But now when I head down to the water, all I can see is John Seward Johnson II’s sculpture, The Awakening, which depicts a giant attempting to free himself from the earth. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve feared The Awakening. The giant looks up to the sky and with a pained cry acknowledges his defeat. He will always be bound to this mess — only he’s just now old enough to understand what that means.

B6 March 1, 2018 John Seward Johnson II’s sculpture, The Awakening, in National Harbor, Maryland, depicts a giant attempting to free himself from the earth.

Nic Rowan | Collegian

A crowd of red noise: feeling the facts at CPAC 2018 By | Nic Rowan City News Editor

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — “No, I’ve got nothing against him. But those hats.

Red doesn’t look good on anyone’s head,” the woman in the red elephant-printed Lilly Pulitzer mini skirt says to me.

I don’t know her, but we’ve become lobby friends, trapped in a growing mob of young conservatives locked outside the revolving doors of the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center. Vice President Mike Pence is about to deliver the first keynote speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. To keep the hoi polloi out, Secret Service has locked all of the doors and posted heavily armed police officers around the whole building until the vice president finishes his address.

Well, around most of the building. I’ve been to enough events and fundraisers at the Gaylord or the Ritz or the Or-

Inside

ganization of American States to know that here, the guns in the hotel lobby are more of a drama staged for CPAC attendees’ benefit than an actual protective measure designed for the vice president’s safety.

I bid goodbye to my momentary friend and walk down the hill through the light rain to try the back doors. And of course they are unguarded, unlocked.

A couple of other journalists have also discovered my neat trick. Together we trickle up to the main convention hall and through the metal detectors that don’t set off when metal passes through them. The vice president is about to speak.

But like his security force, Pence is only here for show.

CPAC is designed to hype up crowds of mostly college-aged people about conservatism, a movement pushing back against American progressive liberal ideology (which conservatives believe has been tyrannizing the nation since

the mid-20th century). It is not, however, an academic symposium where professorial types present papers with solutions to problems such as an over-extended federal government or the enormity of the Supreme Court’s power.

CPAC belongs to the crowd — a univocal body of fervent believers inspired by a great hope and fear for the future of the United States.

Pence attests to both feelings. He begins his speech by expressing his grief for the victims of the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, saying that no child should ever fear that sort of danger: The Trump administration’s first priority is the safety of America’s youth.

“We pray for God’s wisdom that all of us in positions of authority may come together with American solutions to confront and end this evil in our time,” he says.

The crowd cheers in agreement.

Billy Graham has a legacy at Hillsdale College Mormons find a tight-knit community in town Sophomore crafts jewelry with odd and ends

But once he’s done his duty there, Pence switches to a more hopeful topic. He recounts how, in the past year, the Trump administration has racked up a terrific track record of promises made and promises kept. According to Pence, 2017 was the most consequential year in the history of conservatism. These are the facts: Trump appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Trump signed an amazing bill cutting taxes for middle class Americans. Trump’s federal deregulation efforts have been off the rails, reinvigorating American industry.

“Oh, and make no mistake about it: We’re gonna build that wall!” Pence says.

The crowd goes wild. A chant of “USA! USA! USA!” fills the windowless convention hall and some people throw their red “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” hats up in the air. Pence pauses a beat — as if reading a screenplay — to let the mob exercise its vocal chords a bit.

But when everyone pours from the convention hall after his speech, several college students in attendance dissociate themselves from that faceless concourse cheering in the dark room.

“We shut down the government twice over the promise to build that wall,” says Jordan

Kalinowski, a College Republican from Pennsylvania State University. “Even though this was a cornerstone of Trump’s campaign, unless Republicans and Democrats can reach an agreement, we’re not going to increase border security.”

Kalinowski adds that he does not have faith in Trump’s efforts; lawmakers will not be able to reach any sort of security agreement.

“Personally, I don’t think we’ll ever get a wall,” he says.

Robert Whitehead, a Tufts University College Republican, says he’s a “huge skeptic” of the wall, even if that is an unpopular opinion among Trump supporters.

“I think a security fence would do just as well in most places,” he says.

According to Whitehead, there are better ways to strengthen border security, such as more effectively regulating people who have overstayed their green card limits.

“The wall is a big applause line Trump people pull out a lot,” he says. “But it won’t accomplish anything.”

Before he can continue, clapping coming from the radio booths behind us interrupts Whitehead’s skepticism.

Political commentator Ben Shapiro has stepped onto The Heritage Foundation’s raised platform to give a radio

interview. CPAC attendees recognized his bold eyebrows, and now a crowd of fans is forming around the Heritage booth. Die-hards demand autographs and selfies.

Cool.

When Shapiro actually speaks in the convention hall, he draws an even larger crowd than the vice president did. In the past two years, the internet pundit has risen from just another squawker in the conservative ghetto to the voice whose timbre sets the tone for the partisan echo chamber. Shapiro has amassed a devoted cult following because he’s a young, smart, and (thank God, at last) culturally hip conservative.

“President Trump has brought us one really fantastic thing. Hillary Clinton is not and never will be president of the United States,” he says.

The crowd takes the bait.

“Lock her up! Lock her up!

Lock her up!”

“Why bother?” Shapiro laughs. “She’s already in a jail of her own making somewhere in the woods of upstate New York.”

But those are just the jokes, even a year after Trump’s inauguration. Shapiro’s main point is that facts don’t care about your feelings. That the age of political correctness

See CPAC B5

CPAC Chic

Ryan Kelly Murphy By | Nicole Ault

Are patriotic colors a must at CPAC?

If you call yourself an American.

Who’s your political crush?

I plead the Fifth.

Junior Ryan Kelly Murphy.

Who are your political style icons?

Ivanka Trump and Dana Perino. Who doesn’t love a first daughter fashionista and a former White House press secretary turned stylish Fox News anchor?

Do you dress to impress or just be profesh?

Both. The best fashion advice I’ve ever received is “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.”