Hill to Hill: Hillsdale meshes with Heritage speakers
Juliana D'Amico
Issue date: 10/25/07 Section: Opinion
My favorite place for studying is amid the grandeur of The Library of Congress. As a matter of fact, I'll have to admit that studying under a 23-karat gold leaf ceiling while surrounded by the purest Italian marble is not that painful. Studying for the LSAT is more palatable in such palatial surroundings.
When I hand the guard my congressional staff ID card and he approves my admittance, I want to say, "Are you kidding-I really I get to study in here?"
Several floors above the silent research area where I sit, tourists from all over the world gaze down at my newly found "study resort."
And soon enough, I become distracted and join them in this pastime. My eyes quickly float from my book of Clausewitz to the breathtaking frescoes on the wall. And even though just being present in the main reading room of the Library of Congress makes me feel smarter, the inscriptions on the wall remind me to return to my books. Both the tourists and I, from our different vantage points, can read them.
One of the eight inscriptions in large gilt letters is from Tennyson's In Memoriam: "One God, one law, one element, and one far-off divine event, to which the whole creation moves."
Although the Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot chose the quotation many years ago, one wonders if the current leadership would make the same selection. The Accuracy in Academia might recommend to the Architect of the Capitol to look to Hillsdale College for an educated selection of quotations today.
Every other week, the Heritage Foundation hosts an intern dinner with a prominent speaker. One particular speaker was not familiar with our Hillsdale reputation. And as too many speakers delight in doing, he admonished his student audience on its ignorance of the great books of humanity. His voice grew louder as he began to spout off names that he believed we could not even pronounce, such as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.
He saw Levi, Nate, and I sitting to his left, but he did not see what was under our section of the white tablecloth. To avoid being rude, we had stuffed away-like airline stewards-our bulky homework readings for our National Security class following the lecture.
And although the speaker wasn't at all funny, the familiar names of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu made us each smile. Suddenly those six hundred pages of reading seemed less dense. We knew that the speaker's eulogy of our generation did not apply to us.
When I hand the guard my congressional staff ID card and he approves my admittance, I want to say, "Are you kidding-I really I get to study in here?"
Several floors above the silent research area where I sit, tourists from all over the world gaze down at my newly found "study resort."
And soon enough, I become distracted and join them in this pastime. My eyes quickly float from my book of Clausewitz to the breathtaking frescoes on the wall. And even though just being present in the main reading room of the Library of Congress makes me feel smarter, the inscriptions on the wall remind me to return to my books. Both the tourists and I, from our different vantage points, can read them.
One of the eight inscriptions in large gilt letters is from Tennyson's In Memoriam: "One God, one law, one element, and one far-off divine event, to which the whole creation moves."
Although the Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot chose the quotation many years ago, one wonders if the current leadership would make the same selection. The Accuracy in Academia might recommend to the Architect of the Capitol to look to Hillsdale College for an educated selection of quotations today.
Every other week, the Heritage Foundation hosts an intern dinner with a prominent speaker. One particular speaker was not familiar with our Hillsdale reputation. And as too many speakers delight in doing, he admonished his student audience on its ignorance of the great books of humanity. His voice grew louder as he began to spout off names that he believed we could not even pronounce, such as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.
He saw Levi, Nate, and I sitting to his left, but he did not see what was under our section of the white tablecloth. To avoid being rude, we had stuffed away-like airline stewards-our bulky homework readings for our National Security class following the lecture.
And although the speaker wasn't at all funny, the familiar names of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu made us each smile. Suddenly those six hundred pages of reading seemed less dense. We knew that the speaker's eulogy of our generation did not apply to us.
Be the first to comment on this story