There and Back Again: Former Hillsdale Student Returns as Professor

Written by Kate Cavanaugh

What does it mean to be “an honorable man” in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar? At what point did sin enter the garden in Milton’s Paradise Lost? Is Shylock as much of a villain as his enemies make him out to be in Merchant of Venice? Dr. Patrick Timmis, a new English professor at Hillsdale, helps his students pursue these questions in his seminar-based English classes. Through close-reading the texts, students learn that stories are never as cut and dry as they appear.

When Timmis arrived at Hillsdale as a student in 2009, he knew he wanted to study English. But what he didn’t know was that he would be returning to Hillsdale in 2021 to teach English. Dr. Timmis’s journey from student to teacher opens a window into the academic life of Hillsdale.

It was the philosophy behind the Hillsdale education that drew Dr. Timmis in as a young student. His parents had homeschooled him and incorporated classical education, and he saw more of that at Hillsdale. “The professors wanted a great texts approach,” Timmis began, “in which all the liberal arts are leading you, making you a complete person, and giving you an understanding of truth that isn’t segmented between disciplines.”

The path to the English major was not always clear for Dr. Timmis. “I came in expecting to be an English major,” he recalled, “but I briefly thought about switching to a history major.” His moment of crisis came during Great Books II with Dr. Stephen Smith, one of the most difficult classes he remembers taking at Hillsdale. “With an existential crisis after a C-, I managed to continue with the English major,” he grinned. At Hillsdale, students become familiar with the occasional Great Books “C,” which often spurs them on to better writing.

For Dr. Timmis, joining the Dow Journalism Program helped him develop his writing skills. “Your English professors will tell you, stop writing such flowery, extravagant prose,” Dr. Timmis began. “But in the journalism program, you’re writing every week and your editors are crossing out every adverb. When I started writing regularly for the journalism program, my thesis statements got clearer, my topic sentences got stronger, and I learned to rely on verbs instead of adverbs.” Dr. Timmis recalls Advanced Writing, a journalism class taught by Professor Miller, as a turning point for his writing. “Op-ed writing is very transferable to English,” Dr. Timmis explained. “There’s an emphasis on clean and clear prose that the best academic writers have.”

Dr. Timmis continued to study English, first at the University of Virginia, and then at Duke University. “When I got to grad school, I realized what other students hadn’t done in college,” he explained. “The things that I had taken for granted in college, I realized were fairly unique.” However, Timmis still found a community of people who valued the style of education he had received at Hillsdale. Before attending UVA, he read the work of several researchers there and found something familiar. “They were old-fashioned, classical liberals who valued freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry,” he recalled. “They thought that you read texts to learn from them, not to use them. It felt like an extension of the kinds of things we did at Hillsdale.”

From practicing close-reading in Hillsdale’s Great Books classes, to studying literature in depth in graduate school, Dr. Timmis is now able to incorporate these skills into his own classes at Hillsdale. “In the past few years I had the idea in my head of going back, but I wasn’t really expecting it to be a possibility,” Timmis said. So, when he received an opportunity to return to the College, the decision was easy. “Once we had an offer to come back here, the answer was ‘Yes. We’re doing that.’” He added with a grin, “It felt kind of miraculous.”