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Why Hillsdalians Balk at the Workplace

On Hillsdale’s campus, “The Workplace” can be one of those conversation topics that causes fidgeting and aversion of eyes.  We know it’s coming, but it seems like an unnatural follow-up to a life of inspiring classes, soul-changing textual encounters, genuine conversations, and self-driven schedules that abound with time for friendships, reflective walks, and the rest of life’s most important elements.  We’ve given ourselves over to great ideas and arguments and stories, and suddenly the looming question (“So, what are you going to DO?”) seems grossly out of place.  Even those of us whose majors point us towards a clear post-graduate trajectory may feel resistant to the thought of hunkering down in a cubicle or jumping through the hoops of a thousand tightly-scheduled days that look exactly alike.

At its core, there is a wonderful problem with liberal education: it makes us a bit uncomfortable with the world.  It doesn’t do this by teaching us arrogance or selfishness; on the contrary, it aims to instill in us great humility, humanity, and generosity.  But it does teach us to look up out of this world and into the eternal; it teaches us to invest our souls in that which is permanent; it immerses us in “the higher things.”

But without direct intentionality, this colors our perception of a world which has little mind for permanent things.  We become foreigners, travelers who seem to be walking in a fundamentally different direction than most people.  With our sights set on the higher things, the world and the workplace, which are driven by such different motives than we have learned to champion, become unelevated.  We are launched into a world we have a difficult time respecting and asked to find purpose in it.

This leaves us with an important question: How is our education an adequate preparation for the world we will soon inhabit?  If you google  “How does liberal education prepare you for the world?” you will likely turn up a whole host of nearly identical answers: “I believe that the value of a liberal arts education does not lie within the subject matter itself but with the skills it nourishes.”  Baloney.  No Hillsdale student would be caught dead making this defense, which by elevating the practical fruit tarnishes the innate substance of the educational endeavor. And aside from mistaking utility as a defense of beauty, the answer still fails to address the essential question: How am I to undergo this kind of transformative study and somehow find fulfillment in the world?

There perhaps could not be a more important question for Hillsdale graduates, or a more difficult one.  It is a spiritual question, a moral question, a deeply intellectual question, and yes, a question with a lifetime of practical ramifications.  And so it is a question to be pondered in numerous future blogs, which we hope will ignite your reflection and spark new considerations about the future.  (Don’t worry—we’ll intersperse plenty of practical advice and help too.)  For now, when your fellow classmates shirk the thought of the world that looms ahead, don’t. Engage it head on, reframe it, wrestle with it.  (Put that Hillsdale mind to use!)  We’ll be there to help you along the way.