Kathleen O’Toole, associate vice president for K-12 Education at Hillsdale College, and Robert Pondiscio discuss his Atlanta Classical Academy commencement speech, the value of learning together in a community, and the promise and perils of AI in education. Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and an affiliate of AEI’s James Q. Wilson Program in K–12 Education Studies, where he focuses on K–12 education, curriculum, teaching, school choice, and charter schooling.

Learn more: https://k12.hillsdale.edu/

A 20-minute podcast featuring professors, K-12 teachers, and friends of Hillsdale College, all speaking about classical education—what it is, why it’s still relevant today, and what makes it unique. Hosted by Scot Bertram.

Welcome to the Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula, and teacher led classrooms. Now, your host, Scott Bertram.

Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show at our website, k12.hillsdale.edu. Today, we hear a conversation between Doctor Kathleen O’Toole, associate vice president for K-12 education at Hillsdale College, and Robert Ponzio. Robert is senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an affiliate of Aei’s James Q Wilson program in K-12 Education Studies, where he focuses on K-12 education, curriculum, teaching, school choice, and charter schooling. We’ll hear discussion about Roberts Atlanta Classical Academy commencement speech, the value of learning together in a community, and the promise and perils of AI in education. Here’s doctor O’Toole.

Well, I’m so pleased to be joined again by Robert Desio, senior fellow at AEI and a wonderful writer on all topics related to education. Robert, thanks for being here again.

Thanks. Enjoyed it. Enjoyed it last time. Looking forward to this time.

Yeah, it was a fun conversation we had. I thought since that conversation, you were the graduation speaker at one of our member schools, Atlanta Classical Academy. How was that experience going to see ACA?

It was fantastic. Um, I have never given a commencement address before. I’ve never been asked, didn’t want to say no to this. And it was just a lovely day. I mean, it’s a very small school, as you might know, incredibly dedicated, diligent, smart staff, wonderful students and families. It was just, um, it was a long way to go for me. I live in upstate New York, but man, what a what a terrific day that was. I was I was flattered to be asked and, um, really enjoyed the experience and I can’t wait to go visit again. I mean, I was there obviously after instruction was over, but just seeing the love that the staff has and the engagement with those students and hearing the description of their academic program made me want to get back there as soon as possible on an instructional day to see to, to, to get a closer look at how they run.

Yeah. Well, I think if you were to visit the classrooms, you’d be really impressed. ACA has been a Hillsdale member school for a long time. It’s one of our earliest schools that we helped to found, and the faculty down there has been. They’re just excellent. I mean, individually they’re excellent and they have this wonderful community with each other. Many of them knew each other from college. They all moved down together right after graduating and then brought on board some really talented people and the community that they have with each other and the way that that community has shaped the community of the entire school, I think is a real lesson for K-12 schools.

And what makes them really shines through. It shines through in every interaction you have with, again, with, with staff, with students, with family members. It’s they’ve really got something special there.

Well, let’s talk about your commencement speech. It was it was on this topic about community and schooling together. And one of the arguments that you made was, there’s something valuable in not just receiving information in school, but receiving the same information as the other students at the same time as the other students. That creates something important. You argue.

Yeah, you know, I think not not the people hang on every word that I write, but I’ve, you know, I’ve said for years that I’ve never had a thought about education that Ed Hurst Jr didn’t have. You know, first, more originally and better. So, you know, I can’t put two sentences together without invoking Hirsch and his work. And and that’s basically the subtext of, of that commencement address. There is value in shared knowledge and there’s also value in learning together. If I’m being really honest, I think I kind of conceived of that commencement speech. I’m not going to say as a shot across the bow of school choice advocates, because I am one. Um, I believe very strongly in school choice. And there and Atlanta classical is, you know, that’s why you have school choice to allow institutions like that to, to, to exist. It’s a, it’s a public charter school, but it, I always worry, I mean, frankly, my, my, my joke over the last couple of years has been I’m always the skunk at the picnic, including my own. Um, I guess because I just see complexity everywhere. So part of the subtext, I didn’t speak about this in the commencement address. But it was what was informing my thinking was, what does it look like post school choice when we are all kind of choosing our own adventure, you know, educationally speaking and, you know, learning what we want to learn when we want to learn it, well, then we may lose something important. We may lose not just, you know, shared knowledge, common knowledge, shared vocabulary, so to speak. We may lose the experience of learning together. I’ve made this observation elsewhere, Kathleen, that that, you know, it’s not as if we couldn’t educate kids differently if we chose, you know, you see this critique all the time. Oh, if Rip Van Winkle, you know, were alive today, the one thing he’d recognize is the school. And usually this is said dismissively, as if, you know, we’re so hidebound that we can’t imagine another way to educate children. Well, that’s not true. We can we can easily do that. And some of us do. But the reason that schools persist in the form that they have had for, you know, decades. Centuries is because we like it. Okay. We it’s a cultural value. It’s a cultural norm. There’s something about the experience of, you know, 25 kids in a room with an adult leading instruction and learning the same things together that has a cultural valence. And so when I, when I say it’s a shot across the bow, and I don’t mean it that way because again, I am a school choice, um, fan. It’s just a caution to, you know, let’s not throw out that baby with the bathwater. Let’s remind ourselves that not just the structure of school and the content of school, but just, again, the, the, the, the cultural habit of learning together is something that we have had and should continue to have. It’s not all bad. In other words, let’s, let’s, let’s not, you know, in, in our effort to, to innovate in our effort to, you know, make education more efficient. Let’s not forget that there are reasons that some of these things persist.

Yeah. Very good. And are those reasons do you do you think that schooling together is successful merely because we enjoy doing it? It gives, you know, direction and and motion to our learning. Or is it is it possible that you learn more quantitative, you learn more and you learn more deeply, simply because others are there?

I’m not sure those are the same things. Learning more and learning deeply. You know, if you think about it, think about something that you know well. And I love the question. And so let’s, you know, I’m not going to pretend that I’ve got the answer, but let’s think through it together. When I think about things that I have learned most deeply and studied most closely, if I’m honest, it’s probably mostly independent study. People can’t see this. But behind me, you know, on this podcast, there’s a there’s a whole, you know, floor to ceiling collection of books. Well, that’s once you get to a certain level of, of sophistication about any topic, all roads lead to, to print, right? You know, there’s there’s no substitute for that. That’s how we engage with ideas over time with with people long dead. You can’t do that in a classroom. So it’s not an either or. I mean, I think there is something to be said for the active schooling as serendipity. It’s the place that you go to learn about the things that you didn’t know that you were interested in until somebody pointed them out to you and said, hey, this is interesting. But at some point, at some level of sophistication, all roads lead to reading and independent study, right?

Well, I don’t know. I mean, so if I think about the times in my life when I learned the very most, it was my undergraduate years, my graduate years, both of those were in both of those situations. I had a tightly knit group of friends who was going through the major with me or going through the degree with me, and we would I’m trying to think, you know, so what did I get from that exactly? A good deal of it was conversation. Yeah.

And challenging each other’s ideas.

Challenging each other. Did we teach each other things? Yes we did. We did teach each other things. We also kind of learned from watching each other how to be a student. Yeah. So, you know, I was a, I was a not very good note taker in high school. And then I sat next to this in when I was a freshman in college, I sat next to this senior in one of these, a class I was taking on Russia. And he was an amazing note taker. He got everything down and I didn’t know that it was possible to take notes in that way at that frequency. And so I just copied him and I was like, if if Dave is writing, I’m writing, and my hand was tired for a week and then I got, I got good at it. And so now I take notes like Dave, you know, so would I have figured that out by just by myself? No.

I wouldn’t the risk of, of diverting us into something completely different. That to me feels like a violation of cognitive load theory. In other words, if I’m spending all of my time trying to transcribe what the professor is saying, that’s that then then some part of me is not engaging with the content. I’m merely a stenographer at that point.

It was that way for me when I was typing in graduate school. But in undergraduate, I was very I was very good in undergraduate because I was copying this one student and I would, I would write and then I would go home and type up or go back to my dorm and type up my notes that I had written. Okay.

And that then you’re clearly at a different level of intellect than I am. I find it difficult to, you know, to walk and chew gum at the same time, let alone engage.

And well, having those two, having those two touches with the material, I think helped me not feel overwhelmed by it.

Okay. But I mean, you raised you’re pushing back on my point and you’re raising raising a better one, which is it’s not an either or. Obviously, it’s not just, I’m going to read great books and engage with with authors. And that’s, you know what my deep study looks like. But then, yeah, I want to pressure test those ideas in a room with other similarly engaged people to, you know, who, who will broaden the lens for me or point out things that I may have missed, etc. so it’s not an either or, but none of it. Back to the point of this, this, this, this talk that I gave in Atlanta. None of this gain says the, the, the larger point, which is there’s something valuable about both of those experiences about sharing, you know, experiencing common common texts, classical texts in common and doing it in community with other scholars.

Yeah. At ACA and at other excellent classical schools, you would in a literature class or maybe a history or philosophy class, you would see seminar discussion going on and teaching via that method is hard and it requires a really good teacher. They have such teachers at ACA, and that is a really valuable thing for students participating in a seminar, because the seminar is, you know, the discussion is only about the text. Yeah. And the students are talking with each other and the teacher is there. Not every class is run this way, but, you know, a couple of times a week, perhaps the teacher is there as a as a guide for the discussion. And the students learn through the discussion to disagree with each other. And when it’s it’s, you know, as I say, it’s hard to do it well, but I have seen classes where it’s been done well. And it’s a valuable thing because students learn a to articulate exactly what they think, find the words for exactly what they think, and then confront another student disagreeing with them, which is a big deal as a teenager. But also if you if you can, if you can develop such trust among the students, they really do learn to help each other learn. And they, they develop a deeper appreciation for all of the various complexities of a text or all of the various ways in which it might be interpreted. And, you know, it’s maybe it’s more efficient for them by themselves to master all of that content. But with some things we’re not seeking mastery of content. You know, when you read hamlet, you’re not seeking mastery of hamlet, seeking to be the kind of person who can think about the big questions that that text raises.

Wait. You’re not you’re not trying to find the main idea of hamlet when you. AU contraire. No, it’s. I’m being a smart aleck, but I’m. You’re making me a little bit wistful because you’re reminding me the best experiences that I’ve had, both as a student, but especially as a teacher, were in exactly that kind of discussion that you just described. For a time, I taught a senior class at Democracy Prep, a charter school in New York City, on civics. And with that, that was my goal was a lot of it. It was basically, you know, a course, an informal course in the the Constitution, in the news. I was forever looking for issues to make the point to students that the Constitution is not some dry, dusty document that’s, you know, 200 odd years old. It’s very much at work in your life. And this usually took the form of reviewing and reading Supreme Court decisions on on, on contemporary issues. And some of the most enjoyable and, and challenging and fruitful conversations were exactly that. And I always used to point out like, look, this decision was five four. This decision was six three. That means the most educated, erudite people that we have ever produced don’t agree. So of course you’re not going to agree either. And that’s I’m not going to say it was, you know, perfect every day. But man, when when it worked well, you would just go home walking on air feeling like, I love this work. I love what I do, I love these kinds of discussions. And I wouldn’t leave this job to go to heaven.

Yeah. And I think those are the those are the teaching moments that the students really remember over the long term.

No question.

So all of this, I think is especially relevant today because we’re seeing the dawn of AI schooling.

Oh, boy.

And there are schools. The Alpha School is one. But there just in general, I think we are tempted by the possibility that AI could reach students who are not being reached. Fill teaching gaps where teachers cannot be found. And, uh, provide a kind of an instruction that is of higher quality than, than the average teacher. And you have written a little bit about this, and I understand you’re going to be writing more about it. And I’ve been thinking about it a lot too. And I thought maybe we could talk about the promise and the peril of AI schooling.

Well said.

Promise and peril. You know, I’ve said for a long time in completely different contexts that every every good conversation about education quickly gets to, well, it’s complicated or it’s not a very good discussion. And none more than this one. I just wrote a piece recently, kind of again, cautioning, you know, my, my, my, uh, fellow education analyst to kind of tap the brakes on, on the anti screen movement because, you know, there has been, as I’m sure, you know, a real backlash in the last couple of years to phones in classrooms, and that has morphed into a let’s just ban all screens and look, to be perfectly honest, I’m. I’m a thoroughgoing edtech skeptic for good reasons. I mean, it just has never lived up to its its instructional promise. Um, but having said that, I have now seen any number of applications of AI in the classrooms that I can’t pretend are not good. Um, I’ll give you one, one quick example. So, um, a year or two ago I was at a demonstration and I wish I could remember the name of the platform. It was an AI product that evaluated and gave feedback on student writing. And, you know, I’m sitting there with my arms crossed like, this had better be good because I was prepared to, to hate it if I’m being, you know, candid. And I started looking at the feedback and it was good, like really good. And I’m a professional writer. Okay. And it was noticing things about the students writing that I didn’t notice. And then I had two thoughts in this order. The first was, well, wow, I’m learning from this. As the teacher. I’m learning from this. I’m now noticing things in student work that if I were still in the classroom, would help me give better feedback. And then the next thought was, well, a lot of teachers probably aren’t even going to look at that. They’re just going to hand back the, the, the AI corrected feedback to the student. But either way, the student is getting good feedback that he, he or she would not have gotten from me as a teacher or frankly, from the indifferent teacher. How do we say no to that? You know, how do we say that that has no value whatsoever? Is it optimal? Is it the kind of lovely discussion that we were just discussing a few moments ago? No. But is it without value? I think also no. Another experience. Um, and I need to be careful in describing this because I don’t want to out anybody. So I was asked to go take a look at a AI program teaching early reading in a, in a school not far from where I taught myself in the Bronx, in New York City. And I walked into the classroom and there were four adults, and two of them didn’t even look up from their phones. I mean, here, here I am, you know, a middle aged white guy in a suit walking into a classroom. They don’t know who I am. They were so indifferent, to be blunt, that they couldn’t be bothered to pretend to be curious about who was this stranger who showed up in their classroom. The only instruction that was going on was the AI program. So how can I say no to that as well? Again, suboptimal. None of us would want our children’s education to turn into, you know, just kids in front of a screen all day. But it’s are we prepared to say no to that, knowing that the alternative may be even worse? Um, it’s I don’t want to be that guy who says, no, you can’t have this because it makes me uncomfortable.

Yeah. Interesting. When I think about AI schooling, the first the first hesitation I have is this point we were making that it seems like if there is a community in that school, it’s a pale shadow of the community that we would see in a classical school, for example, because the students, because the teachers are at best guides and they’re not really the people providing direct instruction. Maybe in Alpha, they provide direct instruction in the afternoon when the students have time to focus on electives. But, you know, for the for the meat of the day, it’s really between the student and the AI. And that’s a very private personal relationship and an individual relationship, I guess with a, yeah, not a person with a fake person.

Let me ask you this, because.

I’m curious about your own experience in what you’ve seen in terms of AI tutors. I was talking to a gentleman the other day, not a great length, but he was waxing rhapsodic about a program that literally allows students to interact with Aristotle. Now, obviously not literally, because Aristotle has been in his grave for thousands of years. But I gather from his description, it’s a AI doppelganger of Aristotle. So you’re reading Aristotle, and now you can interact and ask questions with with, you know, an avatar or some such. Of Aristotle. So does. Does that scratch your itch for deep engagement with. With subject matter and in community with others?

Well, my first question would be who designed that? Aristotle. And what had they read and how much had they understood and how much when, what translation did they work from? You know, like, there are lots of big questions. It’s not so simple to just say, you know, here’s your AI, Aristotle. And then the relationship with the the relationship with the the image of Aristotle is not real. And it, you know, it behaves kind of like a person, I suppose, but it is not a person.

And so it’s not a person. But presumably.

And I’m again, I’m kind of, you know, talking out of my ear here because this is not something this is something I’ve had described to me. I didn’t didn’t interact with it. It’s not hard for me to imagine. And let me be clear, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not promoting this idea. I’m just asking questions about it. I’m now curious about it. Right. One assume that AI has reached a level of sophistication that you could upload to it. Every thought and utterance and written word that we can attribute to to Aristotle. And it can emulate Aristotle, right? So it’s, it’s, um, it’s obviously not the real thing, but it’s closer than, than any of us could, you know, sort of a time machine. It’s the closest thing we’re ever going to get. Does is there educational value in that I guess is the is the question I wonder?

I mean, one thing I’ve noticed about students, even very young students, is they can tell when it’s real and they can tell when it’s not real.

Yeah.

And so I think, you know, it might seem fun and entertaining or something to give them an opportunity to talk to this Aristotle robot or this Shakespeare robot or whatever. But they would know the whole time that it’s not real. And, you know, and then we could, we could take, we could go in two directions with that. We could say, well, let’s make it more real.

Can I interrupt for one second? Sure. Just. Just to push you. Sorry. Sorry. I’m. Now let’s have our own Socratic seminar. Right. You’re not interacting with the real Aristotle or the real Shakespeare, but you are interacting with the real ideas and the real words, right?

Maybe. I mean, again, assuming it’s assuming it’s well programmed, but it’s, um, I don’t know. What bothers me about it is the veneer and the, the personification of it, because I think they, I think we know what’s human and we know what’s not human right now. And I think that’s very good for us that we can discern. And I worry that by making something like that really prevalent, young people would lose their ability to discern what’s human and not human and become kind of detached from reality.

Yeah. No, I think that’s I think that’s a very fair point. But I don’t want to fetishize, you know, one difference and use that as a, as a reason to dismiss the entire thing. And again, I’m going to say this ad nauseam, I don’t want anybody to think that I’m an enthusiast for this. I’m just I’m AI curious at this point, right. My, my larger concern with, AI is what I’ve come to call the illusion of learning. So, you know, again, to invoke Ed Hurst Jr. 25 years ago, when, you know, Google and Yahoo were were, you know, the toast of the town. He wrote an article for the American Educator magazine, and I believe the title was something like, you can just look it up or can you? And he made the point that these these search engines were useful only if you already possessed a certain amount of background knowledge. Otherwise, you know, you you wouldn’t have the discernment to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff in the results that you’re getting when you look something up. And he wrote this piece because, you know, and this will sound familiar again, in the age of AI, a lot of folks were like, well, why do we need to teach kids any content knowledge whatsoever? When we have Google, they can just look it up. Hirsch’s point then and now was, no, these tools are powerful in in the hands of knowledge haves. They are useless in the hands of knowledge have nots. Well, AI kind of puts that on steroids. So what I’m describing as the illusion of learning. Not only can a student use AI to look things up, they can use AI now to produce polished, sophisticated work that without a great deal of discernment, it’s really, really hard to tell. Is this your original work or is this the work of AI? Yeah. And so you bypass the learning altogether. You know, you’re not only not gaining the knowledge to, to, to, to use the tool effectively, the tool is helping you obfuscate the fact that you don’t have the knowledge. And here’s where this gets a little bit perverse is if you think of the way that we, um, reward teachers, okay, this, this goes beyond instruction to education policy. Now. Well, what incentive does a teacher in a mediocre or struggling school have to be honest about this? If they’re evaluated by the caliber of student work and suddenly students are turning in work, that is Looks like it is, you know, polished and sophisticated. Well, that makes me look good as the teacher. So nobody has an incentive anywhere along here, to be honest about the fact that no learning is actually going on. So on the one hand, I’m really intrigued by, by the opportunities that AI will create for, for, for students who might not have access to it otherwise. On the other hand, I’m awfully scared about the potential to just hollow out the entire enterprise, right?

And particularly particularly because the teacher is not there delivering the lesson. The AI is delivering the lesson while the teacher watches. What insight does the teacher have into what the student is doing, what the AI is doing? And how confident are we that our programming of the AI is going to remain within the limits that we set up for it when we started the whole enterprise?

Yeah. I mean, on the one hand, I don’t think the genie is going back into the bottle, so I don’t think it profits us whatsoever to just say, well, let’s just ban it because there’s other issues with that as well. You know, one of the things you hear all the time is, okay, let’s just bring back the blue book. And every writing has to be on demand in class. Well, that’s fine, except now it’s taking time away from those richer experiences that you and I were just describing a few moments ago. If I have to spend my entire time as a teacher guarding against AI creep into in to what I do, well, then that by definition takes time away from richer things that I could be doing with kids. So I’m not sure that’s the. It would work. You’d be, you know, have a clear example of what kids did and did not know based on what they produced with pen and paper in front of you. But it’s also taking time away from, from richer experiences that you and they could be having together.

What do you think about this idea in, um, in school, there are some subjects where we are seeking mastery. And in school, classical school there are and schools that follow a classical curriculum or a great books curriculum. There are some subjects where mastery is not the goal. It’s easy to see how mastery is the goal in lower level mathematics. Once I’ve learned my multiplication tables, I should fully understand them. I should have no further questions about them. I should wrap my mind around them until there’s nothing more to know. But if I take that same approach to the study of history, the study of philosophy, the study of literature, really any of the humanities at the high level, then I am fooling myself. It seems like our current methods for measuring the success of schools are only effective in the subjects where mastery is the goal. It’s very easy to know if a child knows multiplication. It’s very difficult to design a test that tells you whether a child has read and understood Shakespeare. Therefore, I think it is very easy to design an AI tutor that could teach a child one of these lower level, mastery based things, and very difficult and fraught with peril to design an AI to take a child through higher level humanities subjects?

No. I think I think that’s right. But again, you know, I’m going to play the it’s complicated card again. And this is let me take it out of the, the the classroom setting and take it into my own work. So I’ve, you know, I was a late I’m not going to call myself a convert, but a late adopter of, of, of AI. Um, and I’ve noticed something recently, one of the hardest things, hardest things for me to do as a writer is just to get started. You know, I’ve said for years, when people, when people ask me about my writing process, I always joke and say, oh yeah, I should really get one of those that would help. I describe what I do is I just kind of like, I throw ideas on onto the screen like a potter throwing wet clay onto the wheel and, you know, shape it and shape it and then realize, oh, you’re making a vase. That’s what that is. So I’m sloppy in terms of my process. Well, AI helps a lot with that. I can what, what was once a problem for me as a writer is now frankly a benefit. In other words, I don’t have to worry about structure and order. It can. It can do that for me. And I know what I want to say. I know the points I want to make, and then it can fashion it into a usable outline. That or even a draft that I can, I can write from. Lately I’ve noticed, and ChatGPT is the one I use primarily. I’ve noticed because I’ve been using it and because it knows my writing so well, and it knows, I guess, my rhetorical style. I feel like it’s been giving me unsolicited advice on tone, on argumentation. And on the one hand, that would be creepy. On the other hand, it’s pretty good. It’s back to that example that I was using about giving student feedback. It notices things about my writing that I didn’t notice, and makes suggestions that if a, you know that that that are as good as the best human editors that I’ve ever worked at or worked with. And once I noticed that it kind of my first impulse was to be kind of a little bit find it eerie in a sense. And my second impulse was to be a little bit awed by it, like, wow, it’s noticing things now. Make of that what you will. Again, I, you know, I’m just a user. I’m not a sophisticated theorist about AI, but it seems like it’s getting better and sharper. So if it can do that for me as a writer, why can’t it do that for students when they’re learning about Shakespeare, for example, when you’re interacting with the program? Well, maybe it’s noticing something about the argument that you’re making saying, well, you said this, but how about this? I can’t close off that possibility.

Well, I think you can benefit from AI’s suggestions about your writing because you had so many decades of writing without AI beforehand. That’s right. And I think if you were 17 years old and you were writing your first serious essay, an AI was providing you with those suggestions, you would not be in a position to evaluate. And also you’d be incentivized to just let AI do the work for you, and then you’d never learn it.

Yeah, that’s really well observed. In other words, what you’re suggesting, and I think correctly so is you wouldn’t get a chance to, to, to, to find your own voice to, to develop your own style. I think that, I think that’s that’s exactly right. But I guess, you know, and again, I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just being mindful of the fact that the vast majority, I think of, of 52 million students that we have in this country, we are not suffering from an air of sophistication in their instruction. They are probably suffering from a lack of sophistication in their instruction. So on the one hand, your cautions are very well observed. On the other hand, I’m always going to be that that South Bronx fifth grade teacher who worries that my kids are not going to get what they need to get to the starting line, to even participate in conversations like the one that we’re having.

Yeah. Well, as someone who is AI curious, what are you going to be observing over the next, you know, one, five and ten years? What are you going to be looking for to discover whether this is a healthy whether this is a healthy improvement rather than a great question.

Great question. And let’s, let’s think out loud together about this one as well, because I’d love your thoughts. I just noticed today a survey because it came over the, the website of the 74, which is an education news website. And I thought it was a new survey. Turns out it’s from a year ago, but it’s still interesting. It was a survey that was done, I guess, by Gallup, that described the different things that teachers were using AI for. And somehow, in the aggregate, it turned out that AI was this was the headline of the piece was Saving teachers six hours a week in time that they would have spent doing other things. To me, this is an unambiguous good thing. In other words, you know, the one thing we can’t give teachers more of is time. So if there’s things that we can do that will save them time, then that’s great. But the survey shed no light on what to me is the obvious question. Okay. What are you doing with those six hours instead? I’ve made this point about curriculum for years. One of the reasons that I’m a curriculum fetishist. It’s not because I want to be the guy, you know, who says, thou shalt learn this because I said so. it’s the issue of of teacher time, you know, and when I was a classroom teacher, I was kind of scandalized by how much time I had to spend creating, you know, bespoke lessons, 20, 30 hours a week, creating lessons from scratch because there was no curriculum in the school that was teaching. And I was shocked by that. But it turns out that’s kind of a norm. So ever since then, I’ve been the evangelist for this idea that, look, you know, your your individual lessons may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, however, which is a better use of your time creating lessons from scratch or studying student work, giving feedback, developing relationships with kids and families, etc.. Deepening your own knowledge base. All. Surely all of those things are a better use of teacher time than, you know, opening up that empty plan book on Sunday night and thinking, what am I going to teach tomorrow? So this to me is the conundrum, not a conundrum, but both the opportunity and the question I have about AI. So great if it’s saving you those six hours a week, are you just using them to watch, you know, reruns on TV, or are you using that time to study student work and give feedback? If it’s the latter, then it’s a good thing. If it’s just okay, now, I can work, you know, 34 hours a week instead of 40 or whatever. Then then then less so. But I the long answer to your question is I want to see how we’re how, how AI is changing the job of the teacher to bring it more in line with what I’ve always thought teaching should be, which is less about individual differentiation and more about deepening sophistication.

Yeah, that’s a very good test. You know, are we taking advantage of this extra time to do the things that only we humans can do?

That’s right. Yeah. And that’s exactly how you I’ve said it for years. It’s like, look, you know, I can’t be the one who, you know, engages with the student. I can’t be the one who gives feedback. I can’t be the one who gets to know the kid. You, teacher, are the only person that can do that. So we got to take something off your plate. The only thing I can think to take off your plate is is is is lesson planning.

Yeah. Interesting thought.

Yeah. But let’s, let’s, let’s keep in touch on that because I, when I read this piece about, you know, the, the 6000 hours, it, they weren’t even curious. I seem to to ask that question. Okay. What are you doing instead with that time?

Right. Well, Robert, always fascinating to talk with you. Thank you.

Thank you. Always a pleasure.

Where can we read your work, especially your work on AI? You have a panel coming up, I understand everything.

Yeah. Next week at the Villa Fund in Washington DC. I’m on a on a on a panel, uh, talking about this exact topic. So I appreciate the opportunity to, to think through this and rehearse my lines in advance. But everything that I write as an American Enterprise Institute scholar shows up on our so-called scholar page. So if you Google my last name, good luck. Good luck spelling it and and a e I will take you to my my scholar page at AEI. And literally everything I publish ends up there.

Wonderful, wonderful. Well, thanks again and, uh, maybe we’ll see each other at Atlanta Classical Academy someday.

Oh. Let’s go. Right. It’s summer. Summer’s over. One summer is over. Uh, you won’t have to ask twice. That will be a treat to to to spend some time at that school with you. Let’s do it.

Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you.

Thank you. That was Doctor Kathleen O’Toole, associate vice president for K-12 education at Hillsdale College. And Robert Ponzio, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. I’m Scott Bertram. We invite you to like us on Facebook. Search for Hillsdale College, K-12 Classical education. You also can follow us on Instagram at Hillsdale underscore k12. That’s Hillsdale underscore k12 on Instagram. Thank you for listening to the Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. [email protected] or wherever you get your audio.

The post Kathleen O’Toole and Robert Pondiscio on The Promise and Peril of AI in the Classroom appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Host Scot Bertram plays excerpts from a lecture by Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health of the United States, titled “Restoring Gold Standard Science.”

And Mark Edward Lender, author and historian, discusses the keys to victory in the American Revolution and his book War Without Mercy: Liberty or Death in the American Revolution.

From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true and the beautiful are taught, nurtured and honored. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.00:25S2

It turns out that every single additional paper produces less and less actual improvements in health per paper. We’re spending a lot of money, but per dollar that we spend, we’re not getting as much as we might as we have. People have labeled that the scientific stagnation problem.00:42S3

This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. That was Jay Bhattacharya from the National Institutes of Health. Today, we hear excerpts from a lecture he gave in April of this year titled Restoring Gold standard science. And later on in today’s program, historian Mark Edward Lender joins us. He’ll tell us the keys to victory in the American Revolution. First, with Doctor Anthony Fauci and Covid back in the news cycle, we listen back to portions of a lecture by Jay Bhattacharya from the National Institutes of Health, from a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in April of 2026 titled Restoring Gold Standard Science. Bhattacharya begins by giving his diagnosis for what happened during Covid.01:32S2

The problem we have now, and it was it was the reason the root cause of what happened during Covid is that we have a scientific authority that decides what’s true and false, instead of instead of the normal functioning of science. And it’s not just one person. I could, I could highlight Doctor Fauci. And that would be a very simple kind of example, right? Everyone you remember the votive candles to Doctor Fauci anyone? Anyone buy one I one. Just not a single person bought a votive candle. Um, I have to say, it’s I find it deeply uncomfortable also to, to be a scientific authority, because I think really the root of the first scientific revolution was that there wasn’t a scientific authority. What you had instead was you had a displacement of the power to decide for society to decide an epistemological authority. Um, out of the hands of a small number of ecclesiastical powers. And you put it instead in the hands of a few very clever people with telescopes, right. That they got to decide if the moons of Jupiter move. We are in a situation now, and I think Covid made that situation bear that a relatively small number of journal editors, uh, people who pontificate on TV about science directors of the National Institutes of Health get to decide what’s true or false in science, and I think that’s a pretty big problem.03:00S3

Jay Bhattacharya continues by assessing the current state of America’s health.03:05S2

We’re not a healthy nation, and that’s just a sad fact. The Make America Healthy Again movement. I’m allowed to say that political slogan here, aren’t I? It’s a political slogan, but it comes out of a real cry for help from the American people. We aren’t a healthy nation. We have. We have huge chronic disease problems. But because of the Make America Healthy movement again, I think we actually have a chance of, of, of, of solving these problems. Um, but we can only do it if we fix science. If we want to make America healthy again, we have to get the science. We have to launch the second scientific revolution, right? Because it’s not just that we should look to gurus to decide how to make America healthy again. I mean, this is part of the problem. Doctor Aaron mentioned podcasts. There’s some great podcasts out there. But is it easy to tell who to get the information from? No, it’s very it’s very, very confusing. And it’s a symptom actually of the problems of science.04:05S3

We’re listening to excerpts from a lecture by Jay Bhattacharya at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in April of 2026. The lecture, entitled Restoring Gold Standard Science, Bhattacharya continues by outlining the problems of science. Why are we not making more progress? He begins with the replication crisis.04:25S2

I’m going to show you some evidence about this, but it turns out that it is often the case that when people publish scientific articles, even articles you see on TV or touted by podcasters or whatever, when independent people look at the same article or same ask the same question, do the same, even sometimes the same experiment, they don’t find the same answer. And the vast majority of science is not actually subject to replication. That’s a major problem because because what that means is that a lot of what the science we read, a lot of the science that we see, um, is not actually true. Just to put a fine point on it, I mean, it means, it means that when you are making decisions about your health and you go look up an article, uh, you try to read it and it gives you an answer. A lot of the time it’s not right. And that means and that’s true even for your doctors. Your doctors will look things up and they’ll give advice based on, on essentially bad, bad, like bad science. I mean, for instance, I’ll give you an example. Um, are eggs good for you? Eggs are good for you. Eggs are good for you. Now they’re the superfood, right? I grew up in the 19. My dad had a heart attack when I was when I was 13 years old and in the in the 80s, early 80s. And, um, uh, back then, uh, eggs were poison. Remember that? Uh, I did not eat an egg until I was 19 years old. And then it was a horrible egg white omelet. I don’t because because because of the cholesterol thing, right? So egg whites then were good for you in the 90s and now eggs are superfood. Why is that? I could go on about examples like this. It’s the replication crisis, the scientific ideas that that rule our society are not subject to the kinds of things that we all learn when we first learned about science are the basis of truth. Lots of clever people using telescopes to look to the moons of Jupiter. They all see the moons of Jupiter move. Then we decide together the moons of Jupiter move right. We take as authority of someone at Harvard published something and that therefore, that person must be right about that thing, right? It was published in a top medical journal. Authority is replaced replication as the basis of truth in science. It’s a major epistemological problem that’s solvable.06:44S3

The second problem of science, as Jay Bhattacharya outlines, is scientific stagnation.06:49S2

This is a funny claim to make, but it’s actually true. Per dollar that we spend on science, we get. We get less and less advanced than we did ten, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. I’ll show you some evidence on that in biomedicine. Um, just to, just to give some examples of that. There’s you’ve all heard of Moore’s Law. Moore’s law is the, is the, is that the speed of CPUs doubles every, every few years. Right. Um, that actually apparently is no longer true. The speed of CPUs are no longer doubling at that at that rapid rate anymore. Um, in, in biomedicine, it turns out that every single additional paper produces less and less actual improvements in health per paper. Right? So like, I’ll show you some evidence in just a second in a bit about, about randomized trials. Um, that’s now we’re spending a lot of money and we are actually getting advances. I already told you that about the cystic fibrosis and the and the and all, all of the big, big advances. But per dollar that we spend, we’re not getting as much as we might as we have. People have labeled that the scientific stagnation problem. Now, again, I think there’s reason. The reasons have to do at least. I think the reasons the. The way to solve it is, is through some reforms at the NIH that I’ve been working on. I’m going to I’m going to brag about in just a bit.08:13S3

We’re listening to a lecture by Jay Bhattacharya at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in April of 2026. The third problem of science, says Bhattacharya, outlines, is funding concentration.08:24S2

About a third of the portfolio of the of the third of the money that spending. The NIH goes to about 20 institutions, 20 institutions. Now, I know that Hillsdale is not one of them, because famously, Hillsdale takes $0 from federal government. But there are excellent scientists at Hillsdale. And just as there are excellent scientists all across the country, I’ve now gone on a tour of so many different colleges across the country, studiously avoiding as best I could any of the top 20. And the reason I’ve done that is because I wanted to see. And what I found is that everywhere you go in Alabama, in Iowa and Kansas in in in Wisconsin, in Arizona, what you find is excellent institutions not in the top 20 that do not receive, like, you know, a third of our portfolio of money. You have excellent institutions with excellent scientists who have a much less of a chance to get NIH support for their research than if you are a scientist in one of those top 20. And that’s the problem, right? We are competing with the Chinese who have made tremendous investments in their biomedical research enterprise. Actually, they’ve stolen a lot of ours and we’ve trained them too. But that’s another story. Um, we have to. So, but, but in order to solve that problem, in order to really compete with the Chinese, in order to really make the kinds of advances that can translate over to better health for Americans. We have to we have to empower scientists wherever they are. It doesn’t matter if they come from Stanford or Harvard or whatever. If they have a great idea, we should be. We should. We should be funding them. We should be trying trying out ideas with them. All right. So I’m going to give you those are the that’s that’s my diagnosis. I’ve given you my three, three reasons. I think that we have this problem and we’re fixed that we’re in.10:15S3

We will continue in a moment with more from Jay Bhattacharya’s lecture at a national leadership seminar for Hillsdale College on restoring gold standard Science. First, if you have 30s, take a quick break, go to radio our.hillsdale.edu because we want to stay in touch with you. If you click the subscribe button at the top of the screen and then enter your email address, you’ll be signed up for our email list every week. One email from us telling you about the brand new radio free Hillsdale Hour episode. Might it be Victor Davis Hanson this week, or Mollie Hemingway or Doctor Matt Spalding from Hillsdale in DC, or Carol Markowitz or Heather MacDonald? We’ll tell you our guests each week via email so you don’t miss a thing. Go to Radio hour.hillsdale.edu, click the subscribe button at the top of the page and enter your email address, and then we’ll be in contact. We continue now with excerpts from a lecture by Jay Bhattacharya from the National Institutes of Health. It’s titled Restoring Gold Standard Science. This was delivered in April of 2026 at Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar. We previously heard Doctor Bhattacharya outline the problems of science, why we’re not making more progress now, some potential solutions. He begins by outlining and explaining the cause of the replication crisis.11:40S2

It’s authority. It’s authority. We decide that we’ve elevated a relatively few sources of knowledge of of authority to decide for us what is true or false in society. Maybe Doctor Fauci, maybe CNN. God forbid. Don’t do that. Um, you know, it could it could be anything but um, but we, we pick these sources. It could be podcasts. We pick these sources of authority and say, well, this is what’s going to determine what’s true or false rather than, rather than replication. Uh, the way that we solve the problem then is by making replication the standard of authority in medicine, the standard of truth in medicine. Essentially, it’s an epistemological revolution. And actually the the lucky thing for me is that the NIH can do that. And this is something I’m working on this year. Very, very simple thing. First, we have to fund replication, not something that’s like sexy, right? Because I’m like, okay, I’m going to every time I say I’m going to fund replication, I start to see people yawn. It’s a terrible thing. Um, but I have to do it because if I don’t fund replication, then how do you know what’s what’s true or false? Now, I don’t want the government to tell us what what should be replicated, what shouldn’t. In fact, what happens now is if some if some student comes to me and say, Jay, I want to replicate your paper, I view it as a threat to my career. Right? Because what if they find if I’m wrong? Oh my God, a scientist is wrong. That’d be terrible. The problem here is that is that is that we need to make replication a source of advancements in science. Like, it’s actually a great honor. Some scientist comes to me and says, Jay, I want to replicate your work. Well, that means my idea is worth replicating, worth looking at. And if they find it’s not true, then maybe we can figure out why we got a different answer. That’s how we advance science together. Make science into a collaborative thing, rather than one where we’re looking over our shoulder worried that what I what I’m saying doesn’t replicate.13:27S3

Bhattacharya continues by talking about scientific stagnation and how to get things moving once again.13:34S2

The average age at which people got their. Get their first large grant at the NIH in the 1980s, you could be in your 30s and you would get a large grant, you get your first large grant. Now, the age at which a scientist earns their first large grant from the NIH is is the mid 40s. That’s what this very depressing graph shows you. We require young scientists to do postdoc one, postdoc two. Postdoc three. After they’ve done their PhD. After they’ve graduated from Hillsdale, they still can’t get an assistant professor job, much less get support to get to try their new ideas out. Um, it’s also true that it’s young scientists that are the most likely to have new ideas in the first place. Um, this is the most depressing paper I’ve ever this is the paper I wrote in Mikko Packalen is the most depressing paper I ever wrote. I’ll show you why in just a second. Um, the question it asks is, uh, when in your career are you most likely to publish a newer idea? I just there’s no way to sugarcoat this. It’s like it’s the first year after you finish your PhD. My career age is. I first published my first paper in 1996. I’m do the math 30 years old in career age when I was 0 or 1 years old is when I was most likely to publish a new idea. The 30 year olds are all way on the right side of that graph. The probability of publishing new ideas declines monotonically with career age. And yet we are now in a scientific ecosystem where we delay the time to which people get their first support for large, large grants long into the future.15:18S3

We’re listening to excerpts from a lecture by Jay Bhattacharya for Hillsdale College in April of 2026 at a national leadership seminar entitled Restoring Gold Standard Science, Bhattacharya says we also need to change how funding decisions are made.15:33S2

We have to give support for early career scientists. We’ve already done some, some, some, some some things to do this. But this is this is a culture, a major cultural shift that’s taking place in our scientific, uh, um, in science over the last several decades, we have essentially, uh, made it much more difficult for early career scientists to get their ideas, uh, you know, attempted. We made it much more difficult for early careers. We’ve made it too easy to fail as a scientist, as an early career scientist. Right. So what happens is you, um, in Silicon Valley, you start a firm, you’re 22 years old. Somehow you convince somebody to give you $30 million and you start a firm, um, and it fails, but it was a productive failure. And then you get another shot where someone gives you $60 million. It’s a real good business if you can get it, but it’s not everyone gets it right. Um, the problem in science is that if you do your PhD and you don’t get your paper published, well, you don’t get a chance that the postdoc number one, if you don’t get your a, a fancy paper published postdoc one, you don’t get postdoc two it’s so easy to fail in signs anywhere along the training path. And we have to change that. We have to make science more resilient and easier and with with possibilities of success. So that early career scientists can try their ideas out earlier and earlier. Second, we have to start funding ideas that are that we don’t know they’re going to work. We have to fund ideas that are the bleeding edge.16:59S3

And here, Jay Bhattacharya outlines the tricky trap of acquiring research funding.17:04S2

In order to attract scientists to your institution, where that can win those grant applications. You better have great facilities. I can tell you, what I’ve seen is that lots of young scientists at some of these top institutions, they can’t get lab space because it’s so competitive. At the same time, you have people with amazing ideas outside of these top institutions that can’t that don’t have a chance of getting our money because they’re an institution that is not that doesn’t have that fancy lab space the NIH gives you. We give facility support, but the way that we do that is by. We look at all the project money that all the projects. If you look and if you win the projects, um, you get the grant money. What’s the solution to this? The solution to this is a radical change and I’m going to work on this this coming year. You cut the link between the direct money and the indirect money and instead have market competition for the facilities money. And then you allow researchers to more easily move the project money that they’ve won to the places where the labs now are. And you have a dynamic market that attracts scientists to go to the places where the facilities are. Essentially, what this will do is just expand the places where we send our money. Um, and it’ll allow the facility support to go not just to 20 institutions, but to wherever the great scientists are. And then you build the institution up and attract the great scientist to your institution. It’ll supercharge science across the country because the NIH money essentially is a seed seed money that that that attracts other investments in institutions. It shouldn’t just be 20 institutions in this country that get half our money or a third of our money.18:53S3

Doctor Jay Bhattacharya from the National Institutes of Health concludes his lecture by explaining how all of this works together to point toward a second scientific revolution.19:04S2

The unified funding strategy makes sure that the portfolio is at the bleeding edge, that we are funding early career scientists with the newest ideas so that we get back to funding things at the bleeding edge, solve the stagnation problem. But if your funding ideas the bleeding edge, you better check if they’re true. And so you solve the replication crisis. And so you allow people to do replication work to check if these bleeding ideas, the bleeding edge are true. And then finally, you recruit scientists from everywhere with this with this new funding model of funding research. And what you have is a second scientific revolution. I started this with a pessimistic note, and I want to end with an optimistic note. We can solve these the nation’s health problems. We are the most important nation in the world for many, many reasons, not least of which is that we are a nation that is absolutely devoted, that has tremendous scientific accomplishment to point to. And the future is bright. The future is bright because the investments that that that we make in science can translate over to better health for people. If only we if we solve the things that have led to us where we are, there’s no reason for you to listen to me as an authority. Let’s instead reason together and figure out what the what, what, what way to what what’s true in science, and make investments that really meet the health problems of the country. Thank you so much, and thanks for your kind attention.20:29S3

That’s Doctor Jay Bhattacharya from the National Institutes of Health. His restoring gold standard science from April of 2026. At a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, you can find the entire lecture at Hillsdale. Freedom Library at Freedom library.hillsdale.edu. Up next, historian Mark Edward Lender joins us. We’ll discuss the keys to victory in the American Revolution. I’m Scott Bertram. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour. We’re back on the radio free Hillsdale hour. I’m Scott Bertram. Be sure to follow us on X at Hillsdale Radio. We’re joined by Mark Edward Lender. He has a PhD in American history from Rutgers University, professor emeritus of history at Kean University, also the author or co-author of 11 books, including Fatal Sunday, George Washington The Monmouth Campaign and The Politics of Battle. And the New One is War Without Mercy. Liberty or death in the American Revolution. Also here on Hillsdale’s campus, part of our lecture series on 1776. Delivering a lecture on Keys to Victory in the Revolution. Mark, thanks so much for joining us.21:58S4

Well, thank you Scott. It’s a pleasure to be here.22:00S3

Mark, how did the British treatment of the colonies initially spark this war?22:06S4

Well, there are so many myths, particularly as to why the Americans won that war. And there’s a question is, did they win the war? Maybe the British lost it. And there is a difference. I was asked for last night’s lecture to to discuss, uh, the keys to the Patriot victory. And it was, uh, historians love to get asked questions like this because the answer is almost completely Subjective. I mean, I’ve got to pick and choose between any number of issues. And historians dealt with this question for generations. You take this disparate group of colonies and you match them up against the probably at that time, the premier military power in Europe, well trained, well equipped army with a very capable officer corps. People make jokes sometimes about the automatons of the British army. That’s nonsense. These were good troops. They were motivated. They were led by a career officer corps. So how did they do it? There’s a lot of things that come into play on this. And I think part of the reason you’ve got to begin with the issue of motivation. I mean, uh, what what possessed these people to take up arms in the first place? And, and for that, I think we have to look back to the British and specifically to Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish statesman conservative writer who, in looking at the relationship between the mother country and her colonies, came up with the term salutary neglect, meaning that the British got their empire on a cheap. They had the economic benefits and strategic benefits of the colonies without a great deal of overhead, because they let the colonies rule themselves. The Colonials like the arrangement, of course, because well, they were loyal to the. To the King. They had a very ambiguous relationship to Parliament, and they liked that. This ended with British victory in the Seven Years War, or in the American context, the French and Indian War. All of a sudden they’ve got an empire to run. They’ve got Canada. They’ve picked up colonies elsewhere. So in rationalizing the whole thing, then came this whole series of acts, which, you know, we learn about from third grade on the the Tea Act, the Sugar Act, the Quebec Act, the proclamation of 1763, and that brought an end there, a practical end to salutary neglect. All of a sudden, uh, these colonials are no longer going to have the kind of local autonomy they come to expect as a right as rights of Englishmen. So what happens now? Uh, I think the best answer by a 91 year old militia captain, Levi Prescott. And he, uh, was Massachusetts. He’s a Lexington and Concord, uh, veteran. And he was asked why, you know, what was this all about? He said, well, I, I didn’t use any stamps for the Stamp act. Forget the Tea act. I never read any of these radical Republican ideology, ideological things. We had always governed ourselves. We always meant to govern ourselves. And they meaning the British. They didn’t mean we should.25:17S3

Mark was the entirety of the revolution motivated by this desire to return to self-governance that the colonies had enjoyed under earlier British salutary neglect, or did the motivation for the war change over time?25:32S4

I think there was enough of that feeling to. Certainly there was enough of that feeling to spark armed resistance. I don’t know that there was enough of that feeling to maintain the war until 1783, and for a lot of folks, yes, it was. But, you know, the reasons that people initially go to war aren’t necessarily the reasons that sustained them through a long and traumatic conflict. Unfortunately, war goes on. It tends to develop a momentum of its own and cycles of revenge and retribution set in. And the reasons you went to war somehow become less important because you’re dealing with actual survival as time goes on. And we have to keep in mind that the war for independence was not only a war of major armies and major battles, that was a mere minority of the actual conflict. Most of it took place at the local level between, uh, irregular pickup groups, militia groups, uh, tribal groups, even families defending homesteads. When that kind of conflict takes place, uh, grander notions of liberty and so forth, uh, kind of fade away, uh, and their place taken by, uh, an existential struggle for survival. Mhm. Uh, there was an interesting comment by Lord Carlisle. In 1778, the British sent the Carlisle Commission to negotiate with Congress, saying that everything you objected to will get rid of. No one called it such at the time. But what Carlisle offered, essentially, we would call Commonwealth status today recognize the sovereign. But for all practical purposes you are independent. Your own laws, your own armed forces. Mhm. Well, Carlisle came up with a blank wall and he finally realized that it’s too late. There’s been too much blood, too much treasure, too much pride. And he recognized, and he said that as long as Washington has an army in the field, these people aren’t going to quit. Mhm. And at that point, there was no more talking. It was just going to fight it out.27:48S3

How close did the Americans actually come to losing this battle? Was there ever a point when it was inevitable that they that they would win? Or was there was there this chance of loss?27:57S4

You know, there’s there’s it’s impossible really. Historians have tried. There’s been all kinds of of efforts to say, did the British really, given the resources available to the military, fiscal, diplomatic and otherwise, do they really stand a chance? I mean, at top strength, maybe 35,000 active troops fit for duty. I mean, think about 35000 in the expanse of just the Eastern American states, 35,000 would barely fill a Big Ten football stadium on a given weekend today. They were just stretched too thin, but let’s assume that they had a reasonable chance. I think that chance disappeared after the campaign of 1776, when they had several chances to destroy Washington’s army at Long Island. At Second Trenton, and they didn’t. They? There were other chances, too. I think they stood a chance in the South in, uh, when they came back in strength in 1779, late in the year. But then in 1780, uh, they made appreciable gains in the South. And I think if Cornwallis had followed orders and really focused on bringing South Carolina back into line, maybe, maybe they could have rallied enough loyalist support to, to make a dent in the in the colonial cause and at least perhaps taken the South back. But For various reasons. These things did not pan out for the British. Let’s borrow from tennis. Call them unforced errors and they could have done a classic error as Howe swept across new Jersey in the 1776 was before the Battle of Trenton. He offered pardon, and all you had to do was accept the pardon, read, you know, read, declare your allegiance to George the Third. Go home and stay peaceable. It’s about 3000 people took him up on that. And then within days or weeks, as the British Army moved across new Jersey, disciplined, somehow collapsed. And there’s explanations for that. And, uh, we try to explain it in the new book you mentioned, but they pillaged and plundered their way across the state. Rape was all too common. The town of Princeton was actually sacked. And all the goodwill that Hal had accrued, offering pardon and simply evaporated. And within weeks the new Jersey countryside, which had scattered the state government had scattered. The militia had melted away. I mean, rose in arms. You had a popular rising. And that was very, very, uh, costly. I mean, new Jersey was all but back in the British orbit, and they blew it. And then what happened to those 3000 who had taken the pardon? They were publicly identified in accepting the pardon, and they were ripe for, how should we phrase it, political reeducation. And they were re-educated with a vengeance. Patriot authorities came down hard on loyalists.31:05S3

Mark Lender with us here on the radio free Hillsdale, our mark. Were there any counter revolutionaries in the comedies? How important was it for the Patriots to suppress any of those loyalist efforts?31:18S4

Show me a revolution that survives and allows an opposition to become effective. I mean, you, the Vendée and the French Revolution, the revolutionaries put it down the the white armies that opposed the Bolsheviks. They were put down and they had to if the revolution was going to succeed. And our revolution was was really no different. Patriots understood that their enthusiasm. Many of their neighbors, family members didn’t share it. I mean, there was a lot of loyalty to the Empire. And you establish your ascendancy by making sure that your opponents simply can’t organize effectively and mount a counterrevolution. And the patriots struck hard and fast to make sure that that didn’t happen. And that was a war long effort.32:03S3

Mhm.32:04S4

And the British were never able to cover loyalists to the extent that they could declare publicly against the revolution in any, any safety, any way, and certainly not in strength enough to mount an effective counter-revolution. It was brutal. It was absolute brutal. And terror is not too strong a word to describe what happened in many instances.32:26S3

Talking with Mark Edward Lender, the new book War Without Mercy, Liberty or Death in the American Revolution. A point made that local forces were left to fight according to their own rules, which quite often meant no rules whatsoever.32:38S4

Right. Uh, this was pretty grim. And one thing that my co-author was James Kirby Martin. That’s our fourth book together. As a matter of fact, what we did was we we looked at some of the numbers that other historians had generated, particularly, uh, Howard Peckham, who actually tried to quantify in 1974 in the run up to the bicentennial of the Revolution. He tried to quantify, using graduate assistants and other research assistants, to scour the archives in the various states to quantify the number of military actions that took place. And he came up with a number of, uh, over 1500 land and naval actions. And of those 1300 and change were land actions. Jim and I took a look, and about a hundred of those were 100 more, 100 less. But it was kind of an arbitrary decision, was a major battle. But our chief criteria was for actions that concerned the main American and British armies going head to head with one another, and that come with about 100 of them. So you’ve got like 90% of the war that was fought at the local level, not combat between the main American and British armies. So who was doing the fighting? As I mentioned earlier, it was often ragtag pickup groups, organized militia loyalists against patriots on the frontiers, tribal groups fighting white settlers. Uh, we’ve got instances of families defending themselves on isolated farmsteads. The, uh, the fighting was, uh, all out. Mhm. People understood that you were fighting in a contest where you simply couldn’t expect much quarter much mercy from your opponents. So why should you display it toward them? It got very messy indeed. And if anything, we know that Peckham’s numbers were quite conservative. I mean, we looked at, uh, new Jersey, my native state, the number Peckham came up with was 250 and change actions, uh, in new Jersey. Well, new Jersey was located between the chief British garrison in New York City and the de facto rebel capital in Philadelphia. So you’re right there. You know, you’re going to be in trouble. Mhm. But, um, as a member of the new Jersey archives staff, while Peckham’s research assistant was compiling numbers for him, was also working on his own compilation of what was going on in new Jersey and had much greater access to archival and other local sources. He came up with about 600 actions. I mean, more than double the number that Peckham found. And when we went through those, we found that about 20 qualified as major American British armies going head to head. So it’s again, about that 90% comes up. And we know that in new Jersey it was absolutely brutal. You had part of the northeastern part of the state across from New York City, became known as the neutral ground because nobody could control it. I mean, there was raid after raid counter raid after counter raid. Down south in the southern part of the state, Monmouth County, and below the local inhabitants, local patriots became enraged because the state simply could not stop loyalist incursions from from the coast. And they formed a group whose name says it all. The Association for retaliation. They fought a private war. The Patriot authorities frowned on it because they wanted a war conducted within legal boundaries, because that establishment was not a question of mercy. It was a question of legitimacy they were trying to establish. And while they frowned on it, did they try to stop it? No, no. They’re having their cake and eating it too. Like, tut tut, don’t do that. But nice job. On the other hand. So, uh, it’s this local aspect of the war that I think accounts for a great deal of the violence associated with the war.36:46S3

With all these small scale skirmishes, private wars happening up and down. How did people find out about the status of the war? How did they find out how anything was going in the fight?37:00S4

You know, we have the benefit of 250 years of hindsight to look back and document all this stuff at the time. People frequently had no idea. I mean, uh, there were efforts at communication. They were irregular. Sometimes they were dangerous. I mean, you couldn’t get couriers through certain areas and expect them to survive. We know that sometimes we’re really important messages that American commanders were trying to get the word out. British commanders trying to get the word out. You sent more than one courier and by different routes and at different times, because you knew there was a pretty good chance that the message was not going to get through. Worse, it was going to be intercepted. And that was that was a real problem. So frequently people fought not knowing what was going on elsewhere, particularly on the frontiers. And sometimes when you found out what was going on, it didn’t make any difference to you. A classic example. October of 1781. Cornwallis surrender at Yorktown, out on the frontiers. Did they care? They did not care. That war continued. Mhm. The Indian wars, uh, had settler forces back footed for a long, long time. They didn’t end that until the 1790s. There’s some pretty stiff fighting. Went on well after Yorktown out west. So communication was a real a real problem, even in the more settled east. But when you get out into the frontier areas, it could take a long, long time for people to learn what was going on. And then once you heard about it, it could be even longer to actually verify it. So this was, I mean, communications that we take for granted today. You simply could not take for granted. Mhm. In the 18th century.38:44S3

Mark Edward Lender has written in a book about the Monmouth campaign called Fatal Sunday. For listeners who might not remember Monmouth from textbooks or their their school days. Tell us a little about what that was, when it was and why it needed the focus of an entire book.39:04S4

Well, this battle that was fought in the middle of the state, 1778, after, uh, the British had evacuated Philadelphia and after Washington had gone through the experience of the Valley Forge winter, it was the politics of the whole thing. What did this battle mean? Because, you know, the battle was technically we’re talking about a tactical draw. Uh-uh. Henry Clinton, who replaced William Howe as British commander in chief. Uh, poor fellow. He was in Philadelphia. And, uh, you you get handed the top job with, along with orders saying, give up the only real prize the British had won in 1777. And and he finds out that he can’t even make a complete evacuation because the Royal Navy simply didn’t have the transports to to get the army down. So they you you packed up a lot of loyalists, uh, some military units, a lot of dependents and a lot of your equipment. But then everybody else has got to march across new Jersey, which is a pretty hostile place to the British by this time. What I found was that this was Washington’s chance to redeem himself. He had done a brilliant job in reconstructing the army at Valley Forge, but he had had a very, very hard time early in the winter of 1778. It’s been called the Conway Cabal. Poor Thomas Conway actually had relatively little to do with it. But let’s face it, you had Congress doing its job. You had hired a general to win a war. And in 1777, it did not look like Washington was going to win that war. So the stakes for Washington at the Battle of Monmouth were certainly military, if you’re going to collide with the main British Army. But they were political. If he had lost another campaign, I think Washington’s political problems would have increased exponentially. And working with an archaeologist was great because the archaeology had not been completed when I’d originally written that manuscript and Gary Stone was posted at Monmouth Battlefield State Park as an archaeologist, and I held off because I wasn’t going to write something up. And then the archaeology comes in. So wait a minute. And, uh, when, uh, it was pretty much done, uh, Gary had come up with some wonderful stuff. And the Arc is the team working at Monmouth had come up with some wonderful stuff and really did it didn’t change the strategic look at it, but, uh, looking at the tactical level to figure out actually what happened, because Monmouth is generally considered one of the most complex and difficult to explain of revolutionary engagements. Uh, we straightened out a lot of stuff and we were able to write it up.41:48S3

Very neat. That book is Fatal Sunday, George Washington, The Monmouth Campaign and the Politics of Battle. The most recent book, War Without Mercy, Liberty or Death in the American Revolution. Mark Edward Lender, American History PhD, from Rutgers and professor emeritus of history at Kean University. Mark, thanks so much for joining us.42:07S4

Thank you very much, Scott. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.42:09S3

That will wrap up this edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Our thanks to Jay Bhattacharya from the National Institutes of Health. We heard from his lecture Restoring Gold Standard Science. You can find the full lecture at Freedom library.hillsdale.edu. And Mark Edward Lender, co-author of the book Fatal Sunday. Remember, you can hear new episodes every week on this station. You also can find extended versions of some of our interviews, or listen any time to the podcast. Find [email protected] or wherever you get your audio. Until next week, I’m Scott Bertram, and this has been the radio free Hillsdale Hour.

The post  Launching a Second Scientific Revolution appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss the choice that Odysseus makes to begin his journey back to Ithaca before introducing a lecture from Dr. Benedict Whalen.

Calypso had held Odysseus captive for nine years on her island but now sets him free. He is shipwrecked again on the island of the Phaeacians.

The Odyssey tells the tale of the cunning and crafty hero of the Trojan War on his journey home. After ten years of war, Odysseus faces another ten years of fantastic temptations, deadly monsters, treacherous seas, and impious men. Meanwhile, Ithaca is threatened by suitors who plague his wife and plunder his wealth. When Odysseus reaches home, he must slay the suitors, test the loyalty of his friends and family, and restore order to his marriage and his kingdom.

Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I’m Jeremiah Regan and.

I’m Juan Davalos. We’re back with the Odyssey lecture number three Calypso.

So in lecture three, Professor Whalen takes us through the Odyssey books five and six. When we meet Odysseus, he is not at the height of his heroic glory. He is a captive now of seven years of the goddess Calypso, a beautiful, immortal goddess who offers Odysseus her hand in marriage. She wishes for him to be her husband, but he resists. He is faithful to Penelope. He longs to go home, and he is stuck in this difficult situation until the messenger god Hermes arrives with a command to Calypso to let Odysseus go to resume his journey home.

Like you mentioned, when we meet Odysseus, he is at his lowest. And it reminded me of the beginning of the Divine Comedy. When we meet Dante, he is at his lowest also, and I appreciate these heroic journeys when we meet the heroes at their lowest, because I think we get to identify with that hero better when we see them at their lowest and the journey that they’re going to go through, and the things that they’re going to learn through that journey, and the virtue that is developed through that suffering.

That’s right though, don’t mistake Homer for a sentimental modern. We have many depictions of heroes who are too humanized. They’re brought too low, they’re shown to be too frail. They’re really not heroic, even at this low point. And it is a low point when Calypso questions Odysseus and says, hey, aren’t I more beautiful than your wife? Why don’t you want to marry me? He responds, ah, great goddess, worldly! Odysseus answered, don’t be angry with me, please. All that you say is true. How well I know. Look at my wise Penelope. She falls far short of you. Your beauty, stature. She is mortal, after all. And you. You never age or die. Nevertheless, I long. I pine all my days to travel home and see the dawn of my return. So even in this temptation. Immortality. The most beautifully formed woman. Because she’s not immortal, she’s a goddess. He still desires. He has the fortitude to be faithful to his wife and seek to return to her. So yes, he even a hero, can be laid low. And yet he gives us something to admire, even in even in his travails.

This is a beautiful chorus, and I encourage you to go watch the chorus, because the online courses team did a fantastic job in creating an environment that displays that beauty. Jeremiah. I believe this is one of the biggest sets.

That’s the biggest set.

The biggest set that we. And how, how big was.

Was it over 50ft wide, 30ft deep and about 20ft tall?

Yeah, it’s it’s an incredible set. We actually have some statues that were 3D printed of.

Athena and Herakles. That’s right. There was supposed to be a statue of a hoplite, but there was an error in the computer file, and the statue was coming out to be 12 or 13ft tall when it was supposed to be seven, so it was too big and we had to abandon him. But the rest of the set worked out pretty nicely.

So I encourage you to go to hillsdale.edu/course. That’s hillsdale.edu/course, so you can enjoy also not just the great lecture by Doctor Whalen, but also the beauty that goes along with the set design and the different images that have been put together for the course.

Now let’s turn to Professor Whalen, who is quite a handsome guy himself, as you’ll know, if you tune in and watch the course with lecture three of the Odyssey Calypso.

In this lecture we are going to cover books five and six of the Odyssey. It is in these books that we finally meet Odysseus, the man of twists and turns. We will see him escape from Calypso’s Island, Ogygia, and begin his re-entry into human society. Book five begins with Hermes coming to Calypso and telling her that she must allow Odysseus to escape. So Hermes skimmed the crests on endless crests. But once he gained that island worlds apart, up from the deep blue sea, he climbed to dry land and strode on till he reached the spacious cave where the nymph with lovely braids had made her home. And he found her there inside, a great fire blazed on the hearth, and the smell of cedar cleanly split and sweet wood burning bright, wafted a cloud of fragrance down the island. Deep inside she sang the goddess Calypso, lifting her breathtaking voice as she glided back and forth before her loom. Her golden shuttle, weaving thick, luxuriant woods, grew round the cave alders and black poplars, pungent cypress, too, and their birds roosted folding their long wings. Owls and hawks and the spread. Beaked ravens of the sea. Black skimmers who make their living off the waves. And round the mouth of the cavern trail divine. Laden with clusters bursting with ripe grapes. For springs in a row. Bubbling clear and cold. Running side by side. Took channels left and right. Soft meadows spreading round. Were starved with violets lush with beds of parsley. Why, even a deathless god who came upon that place. Would gaze in wonder. Heart entranced with pleasure. Hermes the guide, the mighty giant killer. Stood there spellbound. Now, there are several interesting things that we should observe about this description of Calypso’s Island, where Odysseus has been trapped for seven years. First of all, Calypso lives in a cave. It’s not even a house that she lives in, and the cave is representative of the larger natural order of the island. What we hear about the island is that it has many natural splendors. There are woods, these different trees. There are birds, there are wild grapes that are bursting there. There seems to be plenty of food, but it’s it’s simply natural. We have spring’s flowers, herbs, but also the island seems to be uncultivated. There aren’t things built on it. There isn’t horticulture, it seems. There’s simply natural splendors. It’s a simple, uncultivated, natural beauty on the island. I’ll come back to this point later in lecture eight. As this setting has significance that we cannot yet understand, we have to proceed farther in our narrative before we understand the full significance. But I want to note this. Now here we see a life of ease, of peace, of simplicity. That’s all part of Ogygia. And it is represented to us as worlds apart. So Hermes has to fly far across the ocean. Now. It is so beautiful that even a god is spellbound by the sight. It’s beautiful but simple and natural in total isolation. It’s represented to us as sitting on the edge of the world. Now, after gazing at the splendors for a while, taking delight in them, Hermes comes to Calypso and he gives her Zeus’s command that she must allow Odysseus to escape. Calypso is quite frustrated. She says that even though she offered Odysseus immortality along with being her husband, she’s frustrated that he always yearns to be back in Ithaca, that he yearns for his old wife. And she also expresses frustration with the behavior of the gods, that they have their dalliances with different mortals. But she’s not allowed to keep Odysseus on her island. Despite these complaints, however, Calypso assents to the order of the gods. Hermes leaves and Calypso comes to Odysseus on the beach where we see him for the first time in our narrative. With that, the powerful giant killer sped away. The queenly nymph sought out the great Odysseus, the commands of Zeus still ringing in her ears, and found him there on the headland, sitting still, weeping. His eyes never dry, his sweet life flowing away with the tears. He wept for his foiled journey home. Since the nymph no longer pleased in the nights. True. He’d sleep with her in the arching cave. He had no choice. Unwilling lover alongside. Lover all too willing. But all his days he’d sit on the rocks and beaches. Wrenching his heart with sobs and groans and anguish. Gazing out over the barren sea through blinding tears. It’s an interesting depiction of Odysseus here when we first see him. It’s not quite the depiction of the heroic man that we might imagine. This is the man who sacked Troy. He sits here on the beach, weeping day after day. This is not Odysseus at his best. This is not Odysseus, the triumphant sacker of Troy. This isn’t Odysseus, the raider of cities. This is Odysseus, the captured Weeping hero. Now, this is important for our work. The Odyssey as a whole. Because what we will see is that Odysseus, when we first meet him, is at the very bottom of his fortunes. He’s stranded. He’s a prisoner, he’s alone, he’s isolated. He’s living apart from the whole world except for Calypso. And so the movement of the Odyssey, the movement of the work as a whole, will be a movement from isolation to reintegration, from solitude to marriage and political community. A movement from the edge of things, the edge of the known world from a wilderness into the center of a full and flourishing human life and human community. Now Calypso comes to Odysseus and she relates the message from the gods. She says despite her frustrations, she will allow him to build a raft and to escape from her island. But it’s here that Calypso offers one final test for Odysseus. It’s very interesting to see how Odysseus interacts with Calypso, this goddess who has offered him immortality in marriage, she says to him. So then, royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, man of exploits, still eager to leave at once and hurry back to your own home, your beloved native land. Good luck to you. Even so, farewell. But if you only knew down deep what pains are fated. To fill your cup. Before you reach that shore. You’d stay right here. Preside in our house with me. And be immortal. Much as you long to see your wife. The one you pine for all your days. And yet I just might claim to be nothing less than she. Neither in face nor figure. Hardly right is it for mortal woman to rival immortal goddess. How in build in beauty. Now, this is a delicate moment for Odysseus. This is an immortal, a goddess who’s questioning Odysseus on why he wants to return to his home. And the question is a serious one, she says. After all, how can a mortal woman, Penelope, your wife. Compete with me. An immortal goddess. How? In build and beauty? I think also, in fact, Calypso is alluding to the indubitable fact that Penelope must have aged. Calypso is offering immortality here, and she is an immortal. But Penelope Odysseus has been gone for 20 years. She’s got to be older. She can’t have the build and beauty of an immortal. It’s a delicate moment for Odysseus. He needs to respond to her explaining himself in some way, maybe justifying himself in some way. At the same time, not angering Calypso, who’s about to let him finally go home. He responds, ah, great goddess, worldly! Odysseus answered, don’t be angry with me, please. All that you say is true. How well I know. Look at my wise Penelope. She falls far short of you. Your beauty, stature. She is mortal, after all. And you. You never age or die. Nevertheless, I long. I pine all my days to travel home and see the dawn of my return. And if a God will wreck me yet again on the wine. Dark sea. I can bear that too. With a spirit tempered to endure. Much have I suffered. Labored long and hard by now in the waves and wars. Add this to the total. Bring on the trial. Now Odysseus here in fact, is in part playing on his own name. He’s one who suffers pain as as we talked about before. But his response to Calypso’s challenge is quite interesting. He says yes, yes, Penelope, surely she can’t compete with you in Build in Beauty. She is mortal, after all, and she is aging. But Odysseus is clever and cunning here as well, because he tucks in that one detail. That is the difference maker between Penelope and Calypso. And that is. He said, look at my wise Penelope. She falls far short of you in beauty and stature. The thing that Penelope has that Calypso doesn’t have is wisdom. The word in the Greek that Odysseus uses to describe Penelope here is Peripheren Penelope. This is one of Penelope’s attributes. And this is a word meaning cunning or intelligent, or as translated here, wise. And so we can see in part and appreciate in part why Odysseus, the man of twists and turns, the man with Metis, is drawn to Penelope rather than calypso. Calypso is beautiful and immortal, but Penelope has wisdom. She has something intellectual about her. She is Peripheren Penelope. She has some intellectual quality that is that which really drives Odysseus. It’s that which Odysseus really wants to pursue. After this exchange, Odysseus builds his raft and he sails off away from Calypso’s island, eventually coming in sight of Scheria, the island of the Phaeacians. Now, as he does this Poseidon, who is the god of the sea, and who is Odysseus enemy stirs up a massive hurricane that wrecks Odysseus raft and nearly kills Odysseus. Odysseus desperately swims for days until he finally comes to a place where a current allows him to make his way into the island, but he loses in the process all of the provisions that Calypso had provided him with. And so he comes to shore, alive, but barely, and without even a shred of clothing. Homer then tells us he set out for the woods, and not far from the water found a grove with a clearing all around, and crawled beneath two bushy olives sprung from the same root, one olive wild, the other well-bred stock. No sodden, gusty winds could ever pierce them, nor could the sun’s sharp rays invade their depths, nor could a downpour drench them through and through, so dense they grew together, tangling side by side. Odysseus crept beneath them, scraping up at once a good wide bed for himself, with both hands, a fine litter of dead leaves had drifted in enough to cover two men over even three in the wildest kind of winter known to man, long enduring great. Odysseus, overjoyed at the sight, bedded down in the midst and heaped the leaves around him as a man will bury his growing brand in black ashes, off on a lonely farmstead. No neighbors near to keep a spark alive. No need to kindle fire from somewhere else. So great. Odysseus buried himself in leaves and Athena showered. Sleep upon his eyes, sleep in a swift wave, delivering him from all his pains and labors, blessed sleep that sealed his eyes at last. And that is how book five closes. Now, this moment is interesting. I want to point out a couple of things. First of all, notice that the two trees that Odysseus crawls underneath, one is wild and the other is well-bred stock seem to be symbolically suggestive. That is, I think Odysseus beds himself under these two olive trees that are representative of these two different parts of Odysseus. Odysseus is partly this wild man coming from the edge of the world back into human society. And on the other hand, he’s the king of Ithaca. He’s the king coming back to his own. There’s a wildness and a order to Odysseus, the man of twists and turns. At the end of this description, we get a comparison that Homer makes, and this has led later generations of commentators and readers of Homer to call a Homeric simile. That is, it’s an extended description asserting a sort of likeness between two things, and Homer writes, he’s. He’s famous for writing these wonderful and expressive similes. And this is one of the great ones in the early part of the Odyssey, as a man will bury his glowing brand in black ashes off on a lonely farmstead. No neighbors near to keep a spark alive. No need to kindle a fire from somewhere else. So great Odysseus buried himself. That simile. It’s a comparison. Using Lecras as a man will bury his glowing brand to keep the spark alive, to bring it back out. This is how Odysseus buries himself underneath the leaves. We have a sense that the spark that Odysseus carries is himself. He has not a single possession, not even a shred of clothing. And yet he’s burying himself beneath these leaves as a man might bury embers to keep the fire alive for the next day. And we’ll see that Odysseus will emerge in some impressive manner in the next book. So book five concludes with Odysseus beaten down by Poseidon and in a desperate situation. But at the same time, having landed on a on an island inhabited by humans, book six begins with the reintroduction of Odysseus into human society. The book begins with Athena coming in disguise to a princess of the realm. A young maiden named Nausicaa disguised. The bright eyed goddess chided Nausicaa. How could your mother bear a careless girl like you? Look at your fine clothes lying here neglected. With your marriage not far off the day, you should be decked in all your glory and offer elegant dresses to those who form your escort. That’s how a bride’s good name goes out across the world. And it brings her father and queenly mother joy. Come, let’s go wash these clothes at the break of day. I’ll help you lend a hand in the work. We’ll fly. You won’t stay unwed long. The noblest men in all the country court. You now all Phaeacians just like you. Phaeacia born and raised. So come the first thing in the morning. Press your kingly father to harness the mules and wagon for you all to carry your sashes, dresses, glossy spreads for your bed. It’s so much nicer for you to ride than go on foot. The washing pools are just too far from town. So this is Athena’s inspiration to Nausicaa, to rise in the morning, to gather her clothes and to go off to the washing pools which are by this river where Odysseus has fallen asleep. Now, it’s interesting that Athena has planted thoughts of marriage here in Nausicaa’s mind, as she inspires her to go and and do her laundry. She speaks of your marriage is not far off, and this is important for what will emerge as Odysseus meets Nausicaa. We see, in fact, that this really does touch Nausicaa, because when she goes to her father to ask for the cart, he also thinks of marriage. She sort of shyly asks her father for the. She doesn’t want to mention her thoughts of marriage herself, but Homer tells us. So she coaxed. Too shy to touch on her hopes for marriage, young, warm hopes in her father’s presence. But he saw through it all and answered quickly. I won’t deny you the mules, my darling girl. I won’t deny you anything. So we can see. Interestingly, the king also. Her father Alcinous, is also thinking of marriage. So I’ll. Drowsiness has marriage on his mind. Nausicaa has marriage on her mind, and she goes down to the pools to wash the clothing. Now, after they wash the clothing, they leave it out to dry and they start to play with a ball. And the ball gets overthrown at one point and splashes in the water. And it’s this that wakes up Odysseus. The ball. The princess suddenly tossed it to a maid, but it missed the girl. It splashed in a deep, swirling pool and they all shouted out. And that woke great Odysseus. He sat up with a start, puzzling his heart pounding man of misery, whose land have I lit on now? What are they here? Violent, savage, lawless, or friendly to strangers? God fearing men listen, shouting, echoing round me. Women, girls, or the nymphs who haunt the rugged mountain tops. And the river springs and meadows lush with grass. Where am I really close to people who speak my language up with you. See how the land lies. See for yourself now. Now notice the antithesis of what Odysseus wonders to himself. We have. What are they here? Violent, savage, lawless, or friendly to strangers, God fearing men. The friendly to strangers is exercising the virtue of Xenia, of hospitality that we’ve already discussed. And if you exercise that virtue of hospitality to strangers, then you are a God fearing man. That is, you have piety. You have a proper relation to the laws of the of the divine, and the antithesis of the hospitable, pious man is the violent and savage and lawless man. So we have a sense here of what it is that makes a man lawful and peaceful and ordered, or violent and savage and lawless, and that is piety to the gods, and and hospitable, friendly to strangers. Now Odysseus creeps out from the bushes, and Nausicaa, this young maiden is there with her servants, and we get another wonderful Homeric simile as Odysseus comes out from his hiding place, muttering, so great! Odysseus crept out of the bushes, stripping off with his massive hand a leafy branch from the tangled olive growth to shield his body, hide his private parts. I always love that detail. Odysseus, the great epic hero, the sacker of cities. Here, with proper modesty and out he stalked as a mountain lion, exultant in his power, strides through wind and rain. And his eyes blaze. And he charges sheep or oxen or chases wild deer. But his hunger drives him on to go for flocks, even to raid the best defended homestead. So Odysseus moved out, about to mingle with all those lovely girls, naked now as he was for the need, drove him on a terrible sight, all crusted, caked with brine. They scattered in panic down the jutting beaches. It’s a great simile because it changes the way we should understand Odysseus position. On the one hand, Odysseus is here. We have an emphasis. He doesn’t even have clothing, so he seems desperate. He’s a suppliant. He’s a beggar. He. He needs their help. But the simile changes how we understand him. We see him as a lion coming out of his lair and stalking for prey. He is not the suppliant in the simile, but a predator. And he’s coming even to raid the best defended homestead. What homestead would that be? Perhaps the home that we’ve seen at Nausicaa in Alcinous Palace. And so we have a question here. Is Odysseus the suppliant or is he predator? And is Nausicaa the one who can grant help to Odysseus? Or is she the prey whom Odysseus is about to devour? Homer goes on to tell us only Alcinous, daughter held fast for Athena planted courage within her heart, dissolved the trembling of her limbs, and she firmly stood her ground and faced Odysseus, torn. Now should he fling his arms around her knees, the young beauty plead for help, or stand back, plead with a winning word, beg her to lead him to the town and lend him clothing. This was the better way, he thought. Plead now with a subtle winning word, and stand well back. Don’t clasp her knees. The girl might bridle. Yes. I like to ask my students this. Do you think he. He chose correctly here. A huge brine caked, massively strong naked man diving at this young maidens knees. I think Odysseus here exercises proper prudence, proper judgment in standing back and pleading with Nausicaa. Now it’s interesting we see him. This is part of his Metis, part of his cunning that he can evaluate different courses of action and choose the best one. And now we see him as suppliant, asking Nausicaa for help. And here, too, we see that he’s very skilled in his speech. Odysseus, even when naked and landing on an island without a single possession, actually has quite a bit at his disposal, because it has to do with his mind. He launched in at once endearing Sly and suave. Here I am at your mercy, Princess. Are you a goddess or a mortal? If one of the gods who rule the skies up there, you’re Artemis to the life. The daughter of mighty Zeus. I see her now. Just look at your build, your bearing, your lithe, flowing grace. So it’s a great beginning for the line for Odysseus. Are you a goddess or a mortal? It’s almost like one of those cheap pickup lines, right? But Odysseus comes out of the bushes and asks her this, and he praises her. And then he goes on to say, I have never laid eyes on anyone like you, neither man or woman. We have to take this in context. Odysseus, of course, has seen Helen of Troy, unquestionably the most beautiful woman in the world. So he can see that this Odysseus using flattery, building up Nausicaa because he is going to beg her for help. Then Odysseus presents his request for help to Nausicaa. He says, only yesterday, the 20th day did I escape the wine. Dark sea. Till then the waves and the rushing gales had swept me on from the island of Ogygia. Now some power has tossed me here, doubtless to suffer still more torments on your shores. I can’t believe they’ll stop long before that. The gods will give me more still more compassion. Princess. Please you. After all I have suffered. You are the first I’ve come to. I know no one else. None in your city. None in your land. Show me the way to the town. Give me a rag for cover. Just some cloth, some wrapper you carried with you here. And may the good gods give you all your heart desires, husband and house and lasting harmony too. No finer, greater gift in the world than that. When man and woman possess their home. Two minds, two hearts that work as one. Despair to their enemies. A joy to all their friends, their own best claim to glory. It’s a really remarkable request from Odysseus. He’s asking for advice and for clothing, but he ends expressing what he understands to be the best gift of the gods. When man and woman possess their home, two minds and two hearts that work together as one, we can see what it is that Odysseus is striving for, what he hopes to accomplish on Ithaca. It’s also interesting that Odysseus makes this allusion, saying he prays the gods will give her what she wants a husband and a house, because, as we noted, Athena already planted thoughts of marriage in Nausicaa’s mind. Nausicaa thinking about marriage, her father was thinking about marriage. Now Odysseus comes out and invokes marriage as this highest good, one of the best gifts the gods have to offer their own best claim to glory. In fact, for men and women to live in a harmonious marriage that’s despair to enemies and a joy to friends. Now, Nausica is quite brave. She stands up to Odysseus, and she does promise to help him. And she gives him clothing. And Odysseus goes to bathe himself in the river to clean himself up before coming into town. When he completes his bath and puts on the clothing, we get an interesting detail from Athena. Zeus’s daughter Athena made him taller to all eyes, his build more massive now and down from his brow, she ran his curls like thick hyacinth clusters full of blooms as a master craftsman washes gold over beaten silver. A man, the god of fire and Queen Athena trained in every fine technique and finishes off his latest effort, Handsome Work, so she lavished splendor over his head and shoulders now and down to the beach. He walked and sat apart, glistening in his glory. Breathtaking, yes. And the princess gazed in wonder, then turned to her maids with lovely braided hair. Listen, my white armed girls, to what I tell you, the gods of Olympus can’t be all against this man who’s come to mingle among our noble people. At first he seemed appalling, I must say. Now he seems like a God who rules the skies up there. are. If only a man like that were called. My husband lived right here. Pleased to stay forever. It’s a very interesting moment where Athena adorns Odysseus, makes him look godlike. Then Nausicaa is stunned and filled with wonder by his look, and she is thinking even more of marriage. We might wonder at this moment, what does Odysseus have to do to get Nausicaa’s help? She’s saying, if only a man like that were called my husband Nausicaa’s thinking of marriage. And now here is a truly magnificent man come upon her doorstep as a suppliant. What is she to do? Well, she does give Odysseus advice on how to come into the city. She warns him that the Phaeacians are quite wary of strangers, and so she tells him to come to her parents house, the palace, and to ask them for help. And that is how book six concludes. Odysseus, having escaped from Ogygia and found Nausicaa as a suppliant, is coming to the court of the Phaeacians, and King Alcinous with only his wits to help him as he tries to get passage home. It’s that we’ll look at in our next lecture.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. If you want to continue learning, please visit hillsdale.edu slash. There you will find over 40 free online courses, including Ancient Christianity, the Genesis story, classic children’s literature, and many more. The courses include additional readings, study guides, fully produced videos. Upon completing a course, you will also get a certificate. All our courses are free because we believe that what you’ll learn will enrich your life, and that a virtuous citizen is the best defense for liberty. So pursue the education necessary for freedom and happiness at hillsdale.edu/today. That’s hillsdale.edu/course. Thanks for listening.

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Once per week, Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss Great Books, Great Men, and Great Ideas.

This week: The war in Iran, construction on Hillsdale’s campus, and the Michigan U.S. Senate campaign. Dr. Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, joins Hugh Hewitt on the Hillsdale Dialogues.

Release date: 31 July 2026

Every week. Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss great books, great men, and great ideas. This is Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you find your audio.00:30S2

Morning glory and evening Grace America. I’m Hugh Hewitt. That music means it’s time for the Hillsdale Dialogue. Welcome to the last broadcast hour of the week. My guest is Doctor Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College. He joins me each Friday, either to look very far back or just even a week back. In this case, we’re looking at recent news, what’s been going on in the news recently. Doctor Ian welcome. I hope you are having a an excellent summer and that the kids haven’t come back to school yet. So you’re still enjoying yourself, am I right about that?01:01S3

Well, we have to work in the summer. But it is true that the 1650 variables are not on the campus. And so it’s a different kind of work in some ways.01:11S2

Are the teachers there? Because most summers there are teachers courses convening at Hillsdale?01:18S3

Yeah. We have a lot of people come to the campus. We had 1500 K through 12 teachers. We have hostels and they’re always full, and there’s seven of them, I think this summer in the last week. And, you know, hundreds of people come. Yeah. It’s a it’s a busy place, very busy.01:35S2

And and the construction I like to get the construction update. Are we closing in?01:41S3

No. Well, the we’re about a year away on the library, but now it looks like a, a a library. It’s going to be impressive. And it’s you know, it’s if you learn about construction, the early stages of construction are demoralizing to people. We had a hard winter last winter in the quad. The North quad was all torn up, but now it’s looking imposing. And, uh, so it’s, you know, it’s going to be really great, but it takes a while. Uh, we’ve just finalized the design of a war memorial that we’re putting directly across the quad from the library to memorialize our country and our war dead, which are numerous through our long history. And, uh, we’re going to, we’re starting work on a visitor center pretty soon. So it’s going to be a picture. But, uh, right now it’s not a fully complete picture.02:33S2

Well, I raised the construction question because first segment of this Week in Review and we’re taping on Tuesday for a Friday broadcast. So there could be things that happen after the program tapes before it airs. We’re in a pause when we’re talking in our battle with Iran. And the last 13 days before the last three days, heavy bombing of sites. And you know what it’s like to rebuild. I am a little skeptical of our legacy news media saying, oh, they’ve rebuilt everything. They’re doing great. Aren’t you skeptical of those stories that, you know, construction?03:08S3

Yeah, sure. It, um, you know, you know, what do I. So first of all, they’re resilient, right? I thought they would be. I think this thing is very hard. I think it’s part of a great world contest that’s going on intensely now and will go on, in my opinion, for a long time. But we’ve heard him pretty bad, too. They don’t have as many allies as they used to have. Their capacity is degraded, although apparently not removed, and they’ve got Russia and China to help them. And so they will tend to come back. And, uh, when and whether a final end to our problems with Iran will come. It’s hard to say, but the problems existed before the war. And at some point they’re going to be acute in the future if and they are acute now.03:57S2

So in.03:58S3

Your.03:59S2

20 plus years as leading Hillsdale, have you drawn many students from the Persian diaspora heavily located in Southern California, but it’s also throughout the United States? Have you had a lot of Persians who fled the country after the revolution of 79?04:15S3

The answer is a few. Not a lot. We’re pretty full and we don’t really recruit abroad a lot. Although our numbers of foreign students have been swelling lately. Swelling doesn’t mean a big number, but it’s probably tripled to maybe 60 kids or something like that. And we didn’t really make any particular effort about that. We seem to be getting known. And so yeah. And and, you know, if you if you come to Hillsdale College, you have to make a bunch of commitments and you’re aware that you’re going to undergo a torture that applies equally to everyone. So that tends to collapse the differences among our students in in Persian.04:59S2

American.04:59S3

You.04:59S2

Know, diaspora in LA, very achievement oriented, lots of doctors, lots of lawyers, lots of people who excel in business. I just thought they would be showing up. I had one of your own on This Week, Philip Wegman, now ace reporter for The Wall Street Journal. You’re taking over slowly. Major media outlets. John Miller is doing a fine job there. I’m not surprised. But are you are you happy with that? Do you want Hillsdale to own the media too?05:28S3

Yeah. If nothing else, to be able to to hope that it will shut up. It’s no, it it yeah. We’ve, uh, you know, there’s your, your, your buddy Jack Butler, my graduate is important at the Wall Street Journal, I think. Yes. Nine working there now. Yeah. And they get around and they, you know, the reports of them are they know a lot and they’re used to working hard. And, uh, I had a former general editor of the Wall Street Journal come to see me one day. He’s retired now. And, uh, he was on the campus and he paid a courtesy call on the president’s office. And I said, what are you doing here? And he said, I came to get some kids. And I said, uh, good. And he said, here’s a different. And I said, how? And he said, well, what we do in journalism is look at the facts, and we’re not as good at that as we used to be. But your kids learn to look at things and try to see them as they are, rather than impose their theories on them. So yeah, it makes good journalists get a good education.06:38S2

And learn how to write along the way. Let me talk to you and go back to the the war with Iran. There are immediately after I’m done talking with you today, I’m going to talk to one of your fellows, Victor Davis Hanson, historian extraordinaire, and put to him this question. The 1930s took a while for people to realize Churchill before anyone else, that the world was dividing into camps, and it took the United States getting hit at Pearl Harbor to actually join the good guys and the Soviet Union, get double cross to join the good guy. And that war went on for for six years after that. It took a couple of years for it to become clear that there was a Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact and China for a while, and their allies and the West and our allies and an online movement. Now, it seems to me it’s become very clear that it’s China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, a couple of proxies like the Houthis and the Hamas and Hezbollah, and then all the rest of the world has to pick up sides and Venezuela pick wrong. Now they’re on our team. Cuba picked wrong, and they’re they’re out of power. Is it that stark in your mind, Doctor Oren?07:50S3

Oh, yeah. Yeah it is. And the reason for that is China too is proving resilient. I mean we you know it’s the trouble. The hard thing about the about predictions is that they have to do with the future. But China has gained in strength consistently now for a generation. And they’re assertive and they’re all over the world and they’re you know, the thing that I worry about the most is that we’re studying the Second World War in our long term view right now. And our contribution to, to winning that war was simply decisive. And it had very much to do with manufacturing. The reason the Russians did so well against the Germans in the East and built what was then the biggest and probably greatest military of the age, was that they moved in trucks And those trucks were made in Detroit. And the German army, right through the Second World War was mostly a horse drawn army, and they just couldn’t keep up. And when they confronted us on the Western Front after the Normandy invasions, they couldn’t quite, you know, they were staggered by the speed of it. And the reason is it was moving in machines. Now, China has greater manufacturing power than we have now, and the administration is working on that and trying to build that back up. And there’s progress. But we’re not the world’s greatest manufacturing power anymore, although maybe still the most sophisticated one hopes.09:22S2

So how far along do you think the Clarity Index is in the minds of most Americans? Because when you and I were young, there was a Soviet Union and they were the bad guys in the Warsaw Pact was on their side, and China was on their side. And it was very clear. We have a minute to the break. How clear is the division in the world today in the mind of people coming back to campus in a few weeks at Hillsdale.09:45S3

Well, I think everybody knows it. Yeah. And, you know, there’s another thing that’s like the 1930s is America is angst ridden and it probably worse than it was in the 1930s, although it’s hard to measure. And their angst came from the First World War and the terrible nature of that war and the fact that it sort of changed everybody’s thinking about the past and the future. Well, we have things like that going on in our country that are very serious, and we’re worried about them. Right.10:14S2

Doctor, I want to go back to the Iraq war. There are three results, broadly speaking. And I’ll ask this as well. We can win. I think I know what that looks like. They capitulate or the regime collapses. They agree to simply non-belligerent status and to leave Israel and our friends in the Gulf alone. And the strait is open or we lose. And that means the strait is closed and we can’t open it, or we’re going to have a long, drawn out blockade to wait for them to collapse. Of those three options, what do you think is going to happen?10:50S3

Well, first of all, I don’t think that we’re nearing a end of our problems with Iran. Uh, I think that it’s probable that they will be better in the intermediate future than they have been, because I think they’re weaker. And I think that we’re organized about them. We’ve put we’ve put together a coalition. Like one of the most promising things to come out of this war is that we’ve got a bunch of allies in those Arab states. And, uh, they’re very worried about Iran. Some of them have attacked Iran, which they were very reluctant to do in previous times. And so there’s a clarity there that is healthy. On the other hand, It’s a despotic state, and they have used torture. And there are ten, probably tens of thousands of them who impose the state. And so that’s not going to get overturned tomorrow, probably. And as long as they’re there, they’re a problem. And and so I don’t expect us to settle this soon. And I even I, I thought you people may remember I said on the show at the outset, the idea that we’re just going to do them in right now is optimistic. Probably not. But if we can restrain them. I’ll mention two articles that suggest strategic thoughts. One was an account of the Trump foreign policy, which was he was trying to restrain our enemies. He’s not trying to liberalize them. He’s not trying to turn them into democracies, which are infinite tasks. He’s trying to restrain them. If you see this war in that context, you’d think that he’s had some success and they’re hard to restrain, and we don’t have complete success yet. Uh, the second one is, is about a concept called strategic interdiction. How do you figure out how to hurt them so that their essential capacities to do you harm are compromised? And this article that I read claimed that the Israelis thought better about that than we do. But Trump has done some cool things here. The current cease fire and God knows how long it’ll last. That comes from him saying, okay, every time you take out a freighter, we’re going to take out a power plant.13:11S2

Yes.13:11S3

The blockade. Our blockade was an act of genius. Now it imposes cost on the world economy that we don’t want. Right. I looked this morning. I think oil is selling about $80 a barrel, and that’s pretty good. And, um, you know, if it goes to 200, that’ll be really bad for the world economy and us. And I think I made the point earlier that we are the world’s largest exporter of oil, but we’re also the world’s largest importer of oil, because there are some kinds and some refining capacities that we don’t have. And that means that we have a net advantage. But the world market for oil is terribly significant to us as it is to everyone. So yeah, that’s these problems are deeply rooted and they’re not going to go away tomorrow. China is a powerful country and it’s a despotism. And Russia is a powerful country. How powerful is controversial but powerful for sure. And it has an old habit of putting up with too much out of its government. Whatever problem it is, it’s likely to persist. So that’s going to go on, I think. And I think we have to accommodate ourselves to that world. And another thing people should remember is economies when they’re free. And the world economy has a lot of freedom in it. Not enough for my taste, but a lot. And when they’re free, they adjust, right? And there are huge adjustments underway right now. Major pipeline built so that you don’t have to go through the Strait of Hormuz to get some of the Gulf oil out that’s underway that they’re building that now. So that’ll change things, right? And there’ll still be problems when those are changed. But if we are adaptable and run our affairs well and don’t spend our seed corn on government waste, which is a chronic problem, then we can be a strong nation for a long time, which we very much need to be.15:16S2

And our mutual friend, Dennis Prager, has always said clarity before agreement. And I think things are becoming very clear. Israel has always had great clarity about Iran, but things are becoming very clear for the Gulf Arabs, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Bahrain. I think UAE always had a good vision of what was going on in Iran. I think that’s a positive, an enormous benefit to the West. Do you agree with that?15:44S3

Yeah. We need you know, I mean, look, it’s just the case that we need allies and we need them to contribute at least as much as we contribute. And so those are important accretions of strength. And, uh, that’s you got to salute that.16:03S2

And are you shocked how shallow is the root system in NATO? My last question in this segment, we’ll go to Ukraine and Israel in the third segment. But what about NATO? I’m just amazed at how little they’ve done, how weak they’ve become.16:17S3

Well, European countries are in a trauma, right? It’s I was in England last month and it’s you know, they’re on their seventh prime minister in ten years, and this guy is pretty laughed and seems vigorous. The last guy didn’t. But they’re not spending the money to defend themselves. And it’s not just the money. Remember, it’s a culture. We’re going to read about that when we go back to Churchill, because of the passages we’re going to take up in the final, our finest hour have much to do with that. It depends on, you know, war is great trial, a national trial. And what is the national will and unity and how well can they. And see they they don’t have that right now. Now, the surging parties in Europe are all. They would all diminish the European Union in its power. They would get control of immigration and they would go down a new track. And the Tories in England, which they pride themselves being the largest political party in in the world. Kemi Badenoch is the leader of the Tories. My wife likes her and she is not going to let anybody run. Who’s for net zero?17:35S2

I’m taping this show with Doctor Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College on Tuesday, when both President Zelensky of Ukraine and Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel are at the white House, they’ve met with President Trump by the time we’ve begun this. And the funeral service is underway for Lindsey Graham, which we’ll talk about in the next segment. I am curious, doctor, at the very beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you said on this program, sometimes there’s a figure appears in history that is unanticipated who’s able to rally a country. And that was Zelensky. And boy, he’s held it together for a number of years. A lot of critics of him in the West, but they’re still standing and they’re doing more than standing. They’re fighting back. And now they’re making a million drones a year, and they’re providing drones to our Gulf allies, and they’re fighting on. Meanwhile, Israel has been flying wing to wing with the United States. This is a fundamental difference from February, when this war began with Iran, or at least the current phase of the war began. How do you assess those two countries as allies? Well.18:41S3

The big the first question about an ally is are they on your side? And the second question is, can they contribute? And Ukraine is just a marvel, right? I was with some military guys at a camp last week, and one of them commented that Ukraine is building more drones in a month than we have in our arsenal. Ukraine? Yup. Little Ukraine. And, you know, they’re striking Moscow and they’ve basically eliminated or what, neutered the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, which is part of the pride of Russian military power going back to the 18th century when they got control of Crimea. So they’ve just done marvels, right? And, you know, Trump likes a winner. And and, uh, you know that it matters. Your allies, you need them to help. And so these guys are pretty strong and, uh, good on them. And the Israelis, too. We’ve known for a long time they can fight and they have fought very well alongside us. And so they’re those are valuable. Right. And if you if you look at what NATO has, you know, if if I’m right, that, you know, I mean, I’m writing something about this right now. If God gives me time, I’ll finish it. And, uh, I was asked to give a talk about, uh, standing on the shoulders of giants George Washington and Winston Churchill and the Anglo American Alliance. I didn’t make up the title, and I thought the title was funny because the effect of George Washington on the Anglo-American alliance and the effects of Winston Churchill were precisely opposite. Yes. And. And so what have those guys in common? Well, come to find out, they have a very great deal in common. Winston Churchill will see evidence of it in these chapters that we’re going to read next week from Finest Hour. Churchill didn’t believe in making commitments except in the interest of his country and commitments that were calculated to be able to perform and make the country stronger. And that’s George Washington, too. And, you know, Churchill became, you know, a great builder of grand global alliances. And George Washington never did that. He stayed out of the war between France, which was vital to our revolution, and England, which was the enemy in our revolution. He stayed out of the thing. Some wanted to join France, some wanted to go join England. He wanted out. So he was neutral. Well, you have to account for the world being different, right? The world is. We are now subject to immediate attack, and technology has changed in ways that make the world dangerous immediately to us that it was not before. I mean, in the First World War, there was no power that could sail a fleet across the Pacific and do serious damage to an American naval base. And our entry into World War Two was provoked by the destruction of Pearl Harbor. That’s because aircraft carriers. And so it’s you know, we need allies. And we’ve got some. And they’re helping out. And Europe needs to get its house in order. One of the themes of this administration has been you’ve got to get your house in order here. I think J.D. Vance, his finest hour, was a couple of speeches he gave in Europe about those themes. You should. And it wasn’t just. You needed to build up your military. And remember, that’s not just money, right? That’s young people believing in the country prepared to fight for it. And he said, you ought to protect people’s freedom, too. Why don’t you do that?22:33S2

As I note, at the beginning of the program, I taped this discussion with Doctor Larry Arnn on the day that Lindsey Graham was being memorialized at the National Cathedral after a ceremony in the rotunda. And I just wanted to ask Doctor Arnn about three things. The the nature of Lindsey Graham, the nature of the Senate and why the D. S a want is on record as wanting to destroy it. And his own state’s Senate race in the primary between Doctor Al Saeed and Congresswoman Haley Stevens. Let’s start with Lindsey. Lindsey Graham, I don’t know how often you cross paths with him. Frequent guest on the show and and always a hawk. Always funny, always smart. And I heard a funny story about Lindsay this week, which is the only thing he feared in life was being called the former senator Lindsey Graham. Well, what did you think of Lindsey?23:23S3

Yeah, well, he has something in common with Donald Trump. He was a I always found him unpredictable. I mean, those great themes in his life defend the country. He was hawkish. And that’s partly right. At least it depends on the circumstances whether that’s right or not. He was usually right, I thought. But he would just come up with the wildest things, you know, and, uh, he get mad at Trump and then he’d support him. And, uh, so he was a nimble, he was galvanizing. And he had a long, great career in the Senate, which is a great thing to have.24:02S2

And the Senate is a unique place. I think it’s unique in the world, actually, for the importance that it attaches to its members, the significance they have. But they still have to act as a body. No one individual matters that much. And the Dsa’s attack on the Senate is really a leveling. It’s a bulldozer of one of our great institutions. I think people should be aware of that, that they’re wreckers of a great institution.24:26S3

Yeah. Well, you know, the key to have good government of any kind, free government is the hardest of the kind. That can be good. You have to have two things. You have to have the gathering and use of power, and you have to have the distribution and check power. And the Senate is a key institution, especially in that second thing. It you know, there’s a lot of debate about the filibuster. And I have a very consistent record about that. I’m in favor of it. When they’re about to do something terrible and I’m against it when when they’re preventing from doing something good. But it’s, uh, uh, so it, uh, but the Senate is that and there is an element like the British House of Commons, is kind of a herd now. Right. And our Congress, as a rule. Right. They don’t make most of our laws anymore. And that’s a pride. Like you will know that the constitutional health of America is strong again, when Congress has authority over all the laws. And right now it makes 20% of them or something like that.25:41S2

They’re getting closer, though. This court is carving back the administrative state. It’s been over four years that that’s unfolded, but it’s getting closer. And I like that. I know you like that as well. Neil Gorsuch is the one who said his book was overruled. He said, we don’t know how many agencies are in the federal government from the Supreme. We can’t count them. There’s so many of them.26:03S3

I wrote there’s a great, uh, that book I wrote a review of that book and, uh, it admire almost everything he’s done. There’s a couple of things we could name, but, uh, that book has a story in there about a guy who lost his fishing boat to, uh. And what he had was they stopped his boat and weighed his fish, and he had some number out of thousands under the right poundage and not enough. And then he went back to the dock and they weighed him again. And this time they found a few too many and they took his boat. And that’s just a local decision by a nameless bureaucrat under laws that are vague and nobody quite knows what they mean, including the bureaucrat. And then he goes, you know, eventually, if I remember the story correctly, is the book opens with this story. I think he died and his wife kept up the lawsuit and was finally vindicated. And then Gorsuch makes the point that most people never get that vindication.27:14S2

No they don’t. So and they’re working on that. I’m I’m glad they are. I want to make sure I get on Tuesday next. Michigan’s going to select someone to run against Mike Rogers. Now I’m supporting Mike Rogers. Hillsdale is nonpartisan. But as you look at Haley Stevens, sort of a traditional left wing Liberal Democrat, and Doctor El-Sayed, who is a DSA er and a Marxist, in my view, though, he denies it. Do you think Michigan is all for turning? Do you think they’re really going to go all the way to the left? They’ve never been crazy.27:44S3

Well, you never can tell. It’s a non-presidential year. And so the turnout will be crucial and not as great as in a presidential year. And so it’s hard to predict what can happen. It’s a close race in the polls at least. And who comes to the polls is vital. I. If the Democratic Party has any sense in it, it needs to put a stop to some of this stuff, right. Because it’s very destructive. This this man, I’ll say this, he’s a very academic guy. Mom has got some academic chops right there, highly educated people. And they’re strongly of the left. And they would undo the institutions that have kept America stable and growing for its history. So if the Democratic Party’s got any sense in it, and it is a very disciplined party, you know, they’ve got, I judge, more central control than the Republicans have. They’ll get out the vote for the other guy. And, you know, and it’s not just a matter of winning the general election. This stuff is, you know, fundamentally destructive to the country. And so and it’s growing in the Democratic Party. And so.28:59S2

And, and it’s a menace. And it’s taken over congressional seat after congressional seat. I think it’ll get turned back in Maine. I think it’ll get turned back in Michigan. Minnesota will be the third. All things Hillsdale [email protected]. And in three weeks when we’re back or four weeks from when we’re tired, we will review what happened in Michigan with Doctor Ryan, talk about what it means for the Democratic Party going forward. All things [email protected]. All of our dialogues are contained over at hue for hillsdale.com. That’s Q for hillsdale.com.29:35S1

Thanks for listening to the Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you find your audio. For more information about Hillsdale College, head to hillsdale.edu.

The post The War with Iran Continues appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Kevin H. Gary, associate professor of education at Hillsdale College, joins host Scot Bertram to discuss the differences between orators and philosophers, the disciplines of rhetoric and philosophy, and how teachers can cultivate a balance between rhetoric and philosophy in the classroom.

Learn more: https://k12.hillsdale.edu/

A 20-minute podcast featuring professors, K-12 teachers, and friends of Hillsdale College, all speaking about classical education—what it is, why it’s still relevant today, and what makes it unique. Hosted by Scot Bertram.

Welcome to the Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula, and teacher led classrooms. Now, your host, Scott Bertram.

Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show at our website, k12.hillsdale.edu. We’re joined by Doctor Kevin Gary, associate professor of education here at Hillsdale College. Doctor Gary, thanks for joining us.

Wonderful. Wonderful to be with you. Thank you for having me.

Talking today about orators and philosophers. The dialectic of classical education. Classical education often speaks about this relationship between orators and philosophers. What’s at stake when we talk about the distinction? And why has it mattered for so long?

Well, the distinction, I think, goes right back into Plato. I mean, we see it clearly on display where Socrates is in conversation, and these are often tense conversations with what are labeled sophists. These are folks that study rhetoric and are there in Athens helping young people learn how to speak well and persuasively. And Socrates is going to interrogate in question. And so there’s there’s this back and forth tension. Um, and, you know, we think of orders and philosophers, we’re talking about two foundational, uh, disciplines of the Trivium logic and rhetoric. And we can see the Trivium as this, you know, wonderful inheritance that we pass on, but we go back into the into the sources we see. There’s this tension right there at the, at the outset. And so I think it’s, it’s really significant. And I and I’m going to say that it’s pedagogically significant. It’s not a tension that we should resolve, but but a tension that we should actually maintain. There should be a dialectical relationship between the orator and the philosopher.

We’ll define some terms here and then ask about a relationship. First rhetoric. What is rhetoric?

Rhetoric, this is Aristotle’s definition is discovering the means to persuade someone. So it’s it’s it’s something that is trying to. So we have our logos, our reason. But we want to speak in a way that will move the person to come to our side of seeing things, but not just logically, but also passionately to, to, to move the pathos or the passions of the people we’re speaking to.

Is that word rhetoric misunderstood in some places today?

I would say largely in contemporary discourse, rhetoric has a negative connotation. We think about politicians that are using rhetoric, and so it tends to connote manipulation, trying to sway this. This is certainly something that the ancients were not, you know, oblivious to. Socrates especially says that rhetoric is just. He says in the Gorgias, it’s just a form of, of. He describes it as like cheap fast food. You know, it’s not the real substance. It’s just it’s just saying what people want to hear. But folks like Cicero and Quintilian and Isocrates are going to say, no rhetoric is speech that moves us to live virtuous lives. And so it’s it’s fundamentally about speech that’s edifying. That’s literally trying to build up the the person. So the contemporary negative connotation doesn’t have often that connection to virtue which which is, which is central in classical rhetoric.

That’s rhetoric. How about philosophy? How should we define philosophy?

I think about this, uh, in relation to a I was at a conference a few years ago, and there was a professor there presenting on stoicism, and he was making the argument, this is the philosophy we need to teach to children. We live in a world that’s precarious, uncertain, and it will help, you know, contend with just all the the catastrophes that we’re dealing with in the Q&A time, the dialectical time. So he gave his rhetorical argument for stoicism. I asked him, I said, so I take it then that you are a stoic. How’s that going? How is the practice of stoicism? And he said, oh, no, no, no, I’m not a stoic. I’ve tried meditation. I wasn’t very, very good at that. And thinking about philosophy, I think, you know, an academic, modern understanding of philosophy sees it as, you know, something that we argue about. It’s a discipline in universities. But in the ancient world, philosophy was a way of life. It was a rigorous way of life that needed to be practiced at every instance. And so Socrates is the exemplar of that. He is a philosopher, he’s a dialectician. And this is the way he lives his life. And we see it on display in all of the the depictions that we have of him. So, so that’s an important distinction between the academic understanding of philosophy and a classical understanding of of it as a way of living.

So why should those two things, rhetoric and philosophy, be held in tension with one another?

This is on display, I think, beautifully in the meno. Meno is a young person who studied with Gorgias, this famous rhetorician who’s come to Athens and has won a lot of fame because he’s quite good at giving speeches. And meno poses a question to Socrates. The question is, you know, can virtue be taught? What he wants is he wants to see Socrates display his rhetoric. Give me a speech that I can I can learn from, maybe mimic and bring it into my arsenal. And Socrates responds dialectically, logically, and he says, well, that’s a great, great question, meno. But gosh, can virtue be taught? I don’t even know what virtue is. And meno retorts, he says, oh my gosh, you don’t know what you don’t want. Virtue is, do you want me to go back and tell Gorgias and all the others, all the other sofas, the wise ones, that you a reputed wise one, you don’t even know what virtue is, and Socrates Actually, then, you know, he’s quick witted. He says, oh, no. Yes, please tell him that. In fact, you can tell him that I’ve not met a single human being who knows what virtue is. And this is a total prod, because meno knows that that Socrates has spent time with Gorgias and and he didn’t. Didn’t Gorgias tell you? And Socrates says, well, let’s not worry about Gorgias. I forget what he said, but you tell me what virtue is. And meno tries and gives three definitions, all of which are incoherent, and Socrates is able to quickly deconstruct them. And so in terms of the tension, I think rhetorically, we can think we know more than we do. And meno gets to a point where he has this famous aporia, this puzzlement, this, he’s totally he’s totally perplexed. And he says, you know, you are the stingray that numbs me. And, and one line, that’s great. He says, you know, I used to give I’ve given up to this point, Socrates, many talks on virtue that I thought were excellent. And now I can’t even say what virtue is. And so the tension is necessary to keep the rhetorician humble rhetoric is this powerful tool to persuade others, and we can dupe ourselves into thinking we know more than we do. And so. So needing to keep that tension. The converse side, though, is the the dialectician is interrogating and asking questions. There’s a deconstruction there that can lead to a skepticism, sort of a paralysis by analysis. And so the rhetorician, there are certain things we know are good and we just need to do them. And the rhetorician is the person who’s going to help us live up to the ideals that we know are true and are good. And so the tension keeps them both vibrant and I think helps keep both of them at their best.

Their conscience, a conscious ways to maintain that balance, to make sure one does not begin to dominate over the other.

Yeah. I think that’s, um, part of that is friendship. I mean, I would say that’s probably the, the, you know, with friendships, the best friendships are always going to be dialectical. Our friends are not going to let us get away with being overly rhetorical. Good conversations are both rhetorical. I’m going to tell you a story and dialectical. Now I’m going to I’m going to question you or I’m going to interrogate you. So I think I think friendship, the best kinds of friendships, the kinds of friendships that Aristotle talks about of excellence, are training grounds for keeping these two together, because we love to hear our friends tell a good story, but we also want there to be a conversation of nursing with in a back and forth. In a way, Socrates, when he’s talking with rhetoricians and he makes this move over and over and over again, he says, please don’t give a long speech. Please make your answers concise so that I can ask a question to clarify terms. And so that’s, that’s kind of the move that I think we’re always trying to do with our friends. And then I would say, and we’ll talk about this with, with teaching as well.

Yeah. This tension that you described, do you see this embodied in particular figures from the classical tradition, and what can educators learn from that today?

So Socrates is the, you know, the classic example of this tension where he’s, you know, at odds with Callicles Thrasymachus, the famous rhetoricians of his day. Gorgias. But over time, you know, there’s the rise of of rhetoric after the the the classical Athenian period rhetoric moves into its its kind of premier standing with Rome. But then there’s the emergence of logic in the scholastic period. But we see this push and pull, this counter Renaissance humanism was largely a concern. That logic, especially as it was displayed in Scholastic thought, was missing something vital in human. That human beings are not just logos. We’re not just mine. We have. We have passions. And so the humanist is trying to write and resurrect an eloquent way of speaking that animates pathos and also takes seriously ethos, the character of the person who’s speaking. And so we see that with people like Petrarch and Erasmus and Melanchthon, who are critiquing and at times making fun of the scholastic ways of writing and, and laying out reasons. And then we also see it, I would say more recently in writers like G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, who have a very strong logos, but are going to do it rhetorically and do it in ways that are creative and actually move us to live into the logos that we understand to be true as teachers.

What are the dangers of producing students who are persuasive but not committed to truth? And on the other hand, what about producing students who know truth but then can’t communicate it effectively?

Well, the danger endures. I mean, the clever sophist is is kind of the classic case. I mean, this was Socrates concern with Alcibiades. This was someone who was ready to go out into the political sphere and to persuade and Socrates, you know, asked, what are you going to what are you going to tell them? You know, I’ll tell them about virtue. And then he uses. Or I’ll tell them about justice. And he uses dialectic to show that you really don’t know what you’re talking about. So the risk is that you get quite good at rhetoric, but you really don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re like Mina, who thought he gave great speeches on virtue or justice and you don’t know. The other risk is that if you don’t see through rhetoric and you’re not able to discern the logos in it, you’re at risk of being duped by modern rhetoricians. The influencers that that populate the internet today, and I would say related to that, you’re at risk of being stupefied. I mean, literally made stupid because rhetoric is it’s enjoyable, it’s pleasurable. It’s pleasing to listen to. And so, um, so there’s, there’s that risk. People, people.

Want to believe it’s the, it’s too good to be true. It confirms all my priors, as you’d say these days, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So I think, I think if you’re not studying logic and rhetoric and keeping them together in this tension, the risk of being dazzled by rhetoric, you’re weak. You’re vulnerable. But but then just being able to speak rhetorically, this is going to be, I think, increasingly called upon, uh, as, as employers get cover letters that maybe AI assisted or AI generated or CVS that look just a little too good to be true. We’re going to say, come on in, let’s have a conversation. We’re going to ask you a question. And so being able to speak on your feet in person, I think that’s going to be at a premium increasingly.

How does this dialectic between rhetoric and philosophy then show up inside the classroom, whether it’s literature, history, science, mathematics, how do we see it?

I think we see it. So, you know, we think about teaching history or teaching science or math. There’s a logos. There are reasons I’m going to make arguments. I’m going to I’m going to convince you of the logic of this field and this discipline. But the best teachers also use humor. They also create stories. They’re trying to awaken curiosity to excite the imagination. Ultimately, I think what they’re trying to do is to guide students to see and delight in the intrinsic value of what it is they’re learning. And so the need to balance logic and rhetoric is, is, is thinking about human psychology and thinking, thinking about rhetoric we risk as teachers to talk too much to monologue at our students. And so needing to check that with dialectic, where we’re asking students questions when we ask students questions, it is a form of formative assessment to get a sense of how are you comprehending and assessing what is going on right now, puts them on their toes, keeps them on edge at the same time. Sometimes rhetoric or excuse me, dialectic doesn’t do enough. Going back to Alcibiades, Socrates uses dialectic and brings them to a point where he admits he doesn’t know what he is talking about, but he says, but you know what, Socrates? I’ll still win with my charm, good look and rhetoric. I’ll still win. And Socrates says, wow, you’re wedded to stupidity, Alcibiades. And so he turns, he changes course and he says, but your real your real competitors are not here in Athens. They’re in Persia. And he describes the education of the Persians, the Persian king, in ways that are just captivating. And so he’s using a rhetorical story to bring Alcibiades along. And so the best teachers, I think, are always holding dialectic and rhetoric together to, move the hearts, the pathos and the logos of their students. And they do it with ethos. The best teachers have character. The students come to trust the teacher. And so when the teacher says, this is going to be hard, but trust me, there’s going to be some good things you’ll understand and appreciate if you if you go along with me, you’re you’re doing that. I mean, this is pervasive in, in teaching, but also in coaching. You think of the proverbial half time speech, right? The players already know what they’re supposed to do. They’ve trained, they’ve studied. Um, and he’s just trying to rhetorically say something that will get, get more of them, uh, as they go into the next half.

You suggest that teachers should be masters of both logic and rhetoric across disciplines. What does that look like in practice for a classroom teacher at a classical school? What habit should teachers cultivate? How can schools help teachers cultivate those capacities?

Well, if a teacher is all rhetorical, you walk in and you’re just listening to them talk for 50 minutes. That’s. They haven’t. They’re not living in the tension. And so, um, there would be that issue if a teacher is all dialectical, I think of, um the great books approach at Saint John’s where it’s question after question and it just goes and goes and goes. There comes a point in time where the teacher, as an authority, as someone who studied this text, I think needs to weigh in and offer a strong, persuasive interpretation of what is happening in this play by, by Shakespeare or this or this dialogue by Plato. So, um, needing to balance the two for two rhetorical, we’re just talking heads and we’re not reading the room because we’re just hearing ourselves talk. If we’re overly dialectical, we’re not being directive enough. We’re not being normative enough in terms of this is the right way to look at this text. And so needing to balance that constantly. Um, and this, you know, is, is definitely a question that requires practical wisdom. It’s going to look a little bit different in math than it will look in history. But I think holding this tension together is, is, is vital and it makes the classroom space more dynamic and more interesting. If the students can know that I’m going to tell a story, but I’m going to turn and ask you a question right now. It keeps it keeps students on edge. And so that’s why I think holding these two together is vital and important.

Are there ways that school leaders or administrators can help cultivate those skills in their teachers, or encourage those skills inside the classroom?

I think, I mean, first off, we have to read the greats. And Cicero says, if you want to be a great rhetorician, you need to you need to read and study the greats. And so there’s professional development. I think I think of it more as spiritual renewal. Reading great text and having conversations, conversations with other other teachers is a way to nourish. Um, we can’t give what we don’t have. And if we’re not going to the well ourselves continually and repeatedly, we can start to, to run on fumes. There is, you know, an education. There’s burnout where people leave the profession. But there’s also burn in where. Teachers stay in the work because they need to. They need a job, but they no longer feel the same kind of excitement and intensity. And so needing to go to the well, the enfants, to the sources ourselves to read these great works and to study them and to have conversations with them. I think part of what we’re talking about ultimately is the art of conversation. Yeah. Which I mentioned in context of friendship. Friends have good conversations, classrooms, the best classrooms are marked by a rich, thoughtful conversation. And this is something parents are trying to do at their dinner tables with their children. Are we creating the space so that we can have a good conversation? And so that’s something we’re trying to do as parents, as teachers, and as school leaders.

Yeah. You mentioned parents. So let’s speak to our parents listening in today. Yeah. How can they help reinforce this balance at home conversations, practices that can help children learn to both love truth and communicate it in a beautiful way?

Well, I teach logic and rhetoric here, and I would say this is a very simple thing that is part of this tradition is, is memorizing beautiful texts, just having it accessible in your heart and mind. And so having that, doing those recitations and performing it, this is something families can do. Uh, say a prayer. Let’s have you say it out loud. And so recitation, um, I don’t think we can overstate how valuable this is because it literally puts the thoughts and the words that are eloquently stated in your heart and mind. And so repeating it again and again to creating space for conversation, protecting conversation. We are distracted from distraction by distraction in this modern world. And so families need to carefully curate a space where there can be conversations that go and are not interrupted by all the things that we let ourselves be interrupted by. So protecting the space for conversation so that when students get to their classrooms, they. They have a sense of what is a good conversation, when not to interrupt, when to listen, when to, to venture out. And so I think that’s the kind of the primary school of conversation. And the school should then reinforce that. And you know, the word school, leisure, leisure is, is something we do because anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. We just enjoy this intrinsically. And so the ideally, the school and the home are reinforcing. And that may not be the case. And so this is where school leaders are not just educating their students, but they’re also helping families, right? This is the kind of thing that would be helpful in the home to reinforce what we’re doing here in the school.

As you talk about, um, memorizing great works, great texts, uh, we had a conversation with Ellen Condit from the Hillsdale Academy here about why it’s important, why memorization is important. And I remember she said, you know, when we, when we remember things, memorize things, we don’t say, I know them by my head or by my brain. We know them by heart. My heart. Yeah. that’s a real, you know, kind of definition of what that means.

Yeah. Yeah. The word record is to write on the heart. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.

Doctor Kevin Gary, associate professor of education here at Hillsdale College. As we talk today about orators and philosophers, the dialectic of classical education. Doctor Gary, thanks so much for joining us here on Hillsdale College K-12 classical education podcast.

Thank you.

I’m Scott Bertram. We invite you to like us on Facebook. Search for Hillsdale College, K-12 Classical education. You also can follow us on Instagram at Hillsdale underscore k12. That’s Hillsdale underscore k12 on Instagram. Thank you for listening to the Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. [email protected] or wherever you get your audio.

The post Orators and Philosophers appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Host Scot Bertram talks with:

Jan Jekielek, senior editor at The Epoch Times and host of American Thought Leaders, about China’s state-sanctioned harvesting of organs from living donors and his new book Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary.

And Kelly Scott Franklin, associate professor of English at Hillsdale College, continues a series on the poems of Emily Dickinson. This week, he focuses on “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” 

From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true and the beautiful are taught, nurtured and honored. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.00:25S2

People called hospitals and said, hey, I’m looking for organs. Can I get them in two weeks? Absolutely. Can I get Falun Gong organs? Absolutely. Those those are the ones we have. Those are the best.00:35S3

This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. That was Jan Yaklich. He’s the author of Killed to Order China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary. We’ll talk about the evidence with Jan on today’s program. Also later on, Kelli Scott Franklin from Hillsdale’s English Department joins us to go in depth into another poem from Emily Dickinson. First, pleased to be joined right now by Jan Yaklich. He is the author of the book Kill to Order China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary. He’s also senior editor at The Epoch Times, host of American thought leaders as well. Jan, thanks so much for joining us.01:24S2

Scott. I’m thrilled to be here.01:26S3

This is a book that you could perhaps find in some sort of science fiction. You think it’s not real, you think it can’t be happening. And yet the data and information is is strong. This is about systemic forced organ harvesting in China. Why is this happening and how do we know it’s happening?01:50S2

Excellent questions. Let me explain to you one example of what we discovered back in 2026. And I think that will kind of open up the the road, if you will, to answer both of your questions. Okay. So there was a Israeli transplant surgeon, actually, former head of the Israeli Transplant Association named Yaakov Levy. And he had to pay. He was a heart transplant surgeon. And he had a patient who one day had a really bad condition. And his patient told him, look, I’m tired of waiting. I might not make it. They’ve scheduled it for me in China in two weeks, and I’m going. And Jacob, he couldn’t believe this. Right. And I’ll explain to you in a moment, if it’s not obvious why there’s all these red flags going off in his head.02:41S3

Mhm.02:41S2

He just couldn’t believe that this was possible. But the guy went and got it done and came back with his new heart. And that was one of the whistleblowers back in 2020, pardon me, 2006. That kind of I kind of say I was hit over the head by the evidence, if you will, because I had heard rumors that we knew that actually, that the Chinese Communist Party surgeons had killed people for organs before. But the idea that it was happening at a large scale in the sort of systematic, industrialized way was not something that I conceived or wanted to believe, if you will. Okay. So that that’s a starting point.03:18S3

Can you juxtapose or contrast the way things work in an ethical society and ethical system with the way that things work in China?03:28S2

Absolutely. So here in the US, if you let’s say I need a new heart. Someone has to have a catastrophic accident. And that accident is a very specific kind of accident. Because if the person loses all circulation, it’s that catastrophic. Those organs degrade very quickly. You can’t transplant from a heart from a person like that. So it has to be a very specific kind of accident. But on the flip side, you also don’t want to transplant for someone who has a chance of making it right. And there’s an ethics team that has to make that call. It’s a tough call to make. And then on top of that, you also need to match for blood type and tissue type. And the reason for that is that our bodies reject foreign objects, including organs. So we try to approximate organs that are as close to us to maximize the likelihood that the organ will keep including, you know, of course, this is including the anti-rejection drugs and everything else. And size also matters. Size is something. That’s my point here, is that it’s very rare actually, to get the right heart for a person. And so this catastrophic accident happens, this donor appears, and there’s this field of people that are waiting for that heart, and there’s an algorithm that decides who gets the top of the line, right? Based on availability, based on how long they’ve been waiting there need all that kind of stuff. That’s a normal system. Okay. And the Chinese system under the Communist Party is the exact reverse. And let me explain why. There’s a little bit of a background. And this is something actually that I know has been discussed at Hillsdale to some extent. So I’m very happy, happy to say that in Communist China, they have this long history of creating class enemies, what they call black classes. And so the first one was, let’s call them landowners, okay, the revolution happens. It’s 1949. The Communist Party says, hey, we don’t do private property. We’re going to take that land. Okay. Except that there’s all these people that have worked hard for their land or inherited it, and they have friends and they’re not going to go easily, right? Obviously. So what they did was they they figured out a way. And this is every totalitarian system seems to do this very effectively. They seize the means of dissemination of information, i.e. the media and so forth. And then they use that to push mass dehumanizing propaganda into the system about the group. So for example, um, you know, for the landowners. Landowning is evil. These landowners themselves are evil. They’re contemptible. You should fear them. They’re dangerous. Actually, they took that land from you. You should get it back. You know you deserve it. So we’re going to help. ET cetera, et cetera. ET cetera. And that conditions what that does is when it’s done en masse, you know, again and again it conditions our minds. And some people are more susceptible, some are less to this, to basically bad things being done to this group of people. Okay. Now there is kind of a way out usually, and the way out is if the landowner says, Great Communist Party, thank you for emancipating me from the land. Thank you. I thought land ownership was reasonable. Now I know I’m wrong. And anyway, if they do this, become contrite, you know, basically subjugate themselves to the will of the party. They might live otherwise. You know, a lot of a lot of people were killed. And actually there has been many, many of these class enemies, black classes that have been created by the regime over the years. Part of the reason is also to show the rest of the population what will happen if you go against the regime. It’s like an education tool or something. So so this is an important piece of this puzzle because in 1999 the a group became black classed, if you will, and that was Falun Gong practitioners. And Falun Gong is a very unusual system. It’s a you can think of it like a slow motion exercise system, like a Chinese yoga, but also with very deep moral principles, truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. People that did this and it took it very seriously. And it’s not like a typical what you would think of as an organization. So there’s a lot of teachings, but what there aren’t is a lot of rules. The rules might be there’s no collection of money around it. You’re not allowed to enrich yourself from it. There’s actually no hierarchy in it. There’s no there’s a the Li Hongzhi, the man who wrote the teachings, right? Like you could call him the founder or the teacher, but there’s no worship or something like that. And also, there’s not even a roster. You don’t join a group. You’re kind of living the teachings is what makes you a practitioner. People shared it by word of mouth, and by the end of the 90s, it was 100 million people were doing it, 70 to 100 million by government estimate. And so this was bigger than the Communist Party. And communist parties don’t like something that’s bigger than them in society that they don’t have explicit control over. Right. And with Falun Gong, there really is no way to control a whole fleet of individual practitioners. And what they discovered that. So Jiang Zemin, the dictator at the time, basically blocked, classed them, pushed this mass dehumanizing propaganda through the system. But the Falun Gong kind of as the first black class that did this really at some significant scale. They refused to do the contrite thing. They refused to be re-educated or, you know, you know, really he used the term eradicated. But that didn’t mean kill everybody. It meant break them, get rid of this whole thing. Right. But people wouldn’t do it. They wouldn’t. And sometimes you’ll even see in capitals around the world, in DC and other places, you’ll see people with yellow shirts that says Falun Dafa is good. It’s another name for Falun Gong. Those. That was kind of the slogan that the film Gong practitioners created, really in juxtaposition to this dehumanizing propaganda that they were facing. They were like, no, Falun Dafa is good, Falun Gong is good. It’s not all the things that you’re saying it is. Right. So what? Why is this important? Okay, because this is what this unique situation in Chinese history sets up the killed to order forced organ harvesting industry. Because you have this mass group of people, 7000 million, they’re dehumanized in the eyes of their peers. So people are being conditioned against them. And now the regime not knowing what to do, these people are not going easily. It incarcerates a million of them. We don’t know how many actually, but hundreds of thousands. The State Department in 2005 said half of the people in the re-education through labor camp system in China were Falun Gong practitioners. So just like it’s like massive amounts of gong practitioners in the system. And this is where some very evil person and I kind of hypothesize about who this is in the book and how this developed. Exactly. We don’t know for sure. But he they started blood typing. Tissue typing and organ scanning. These people on mass incarcerated in the system and creating a database. Right. So now let’s say I’m a wealthy transplant tourist. And unfortunately people have done this in some scale. I need my new heart. I’m desperate. I pay my 100 or 200 grand, which is the going rate. And now there’s a database, right? And because there’s so many people in the database, that perfect match for me already exists. And that person can be shipped and killed to order so that I can live. So in this situation, there’s one recipient. This is how it’s the exact reverse of an ethical system. But there’s this whole field of so-called donors, actually innocent prisoners of conscience to be used for as this unwilling organ bank for for for profit and frankly, for the longevity of the super elites in China.10:47S3

Yeah. How widespread is this in China? How many transplants are we talking over the course of a year? How many people are killed over the course of a year in China?10:59S2

So the rough estimate and this is very rough because remember this is all a state secret, right? Right. But there was this massive growth of hospitals, right. The Falun Gong persecution begins. They incarcerate massive amounts of people. And suddenly the organ industry just just starts to skyrocket. They’re building hundreds of hospitals. Okay, hundreds. And so in each of those hospitals is going to be doing some basic, at least a little amount of work because it’s a lot of it’s a lot of work to set up a transplant team. So if you assume the most sort of cautious estimates and you just say this giant transplant team is just doing one transplant today. Reality is they’ll be doing more. But let’s say you were just so that would you would get about 60,000 transplants per year. More realistic would be 90,000 100,000, something like that. Ethan Gutmann testified about this in Congress, I think in 2016 about that, that estimate. So it’s a very large number of transplants. That’s not people. That’s transplants. Right. So with the advent of technologies like ECMO, which is a machine that replaces heart and lungs and allows circulation, they one of the pieces of evidence we collected was that when those portable ECMO machines came online, what happened was that these transplant hospitals started buying them like hotcakes because, you know, in, in a it’s a life saving device here in America, right? It allows you to, to fix heart and lungs situations, kind of bypassing them in a case of severe trauma in China. They use them as a as a profusion device to keep the body healthy so more organs can be transplanted out of a body. This is this is the scale we’re talking about.12:46S3

John is with us here on the program. His book is called To Order. We’ll continue with him in a moment. First, I want to remind you about the new Hillsdale College online course, The Odyssey. You might have heard Doctor Ben Whalen, your teacher for this course, on an earlier episode, and maybe since then have seen the new film. Well, now it’s time to take the online course. hillsdale.edu/course, hillsdale.edu/course. The Odyssey contains themes about love and marriage and fatherhood and kingship and duty. Homer touches on the full experience of humanity in this great epic poem you can learn and appreciate so much more with Hillsdale new online course The Odyssey. Find it at hillsdale.edu/new course, NEWCOURSE. hillsdale.edu slash. New course for the Odyssey, we continue with Jan Jekielek. He’s the author of Killed to Order China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary. A somewhat uncomfortable conversation about forced organ harvesting under the Chinese regime. Jan, something I noticed when reading Jan is that we hear stories occasionally people going to foreign countries for surgeries, and sometimes the results aren’t great doesn’t work out well. There are infections, right? You get a chop job. That doesn’t seem to be the case here at all in China, meaning this is a very efficient and very successful process that they’ve put together in this organ transplant, this forced organ transplant system.14:30S2

Well, the set of C, the set of incentives is different, right? So I’ve actually been just learning more about this. And you’re sort of run of the mill, pretty horrible cartel transplant deal. Right. Which of course those exist as well. It’s kind of like any organ into any body because, you know, you make the deal, you’re desperate. Someone says a cartel can broker it. You’re, you know, you obviously know that this organ is coming from illicit sources. And then, you know, if it fails, which it often does, what’s your recourse? You’re going to complain to the cartel that it didn’t work out, right? Right. That doesn’t even make sense. Right. So that’s kind of how it works there. But here we have something where the Chinese do you remember there was this hot mic moment back in September of last year? Yes. XI Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong un, they’re watching the parade in Tiananmen Square. And so this I’ll just paraphrase what they said, right? Because it reveals, you know, why this system works so well, so to speak. So she says to Putin, hey, when we’re 70, we’re just babies. I’m paraphrasing here, okay? And Putin responds, you know, with continual organ transplantation, perhaps we can achieve immortality with continual organ transplantation. Perhaps we can achieve immortality, continual organ transplantation. Right. And then she responds, our targets 150 years, we hope we can reach 150 years. And that’s actually 150 years is the target of their elite longevity project. It’s called project 981, they claim. And you always have to take every Chinese statistic with a massive grain of salt that has a political valence. First, the reality valence is not even second. Right. But but I think directionally I’m I’m sure it is correct. They say 16 years more life for people that are part of the Elite longevity project. And yeah, so if you’re a Chinese super elite, you have unlimited on demand organs available to you in perpetuity, right? Basically forever. And that’s, you know, people ask me, how much money do we estimate? It’s about a $9 billion annual industry right across these hospitals in China. But this this is like a whole different level of value, right? If you have no moral boundary and you’re ready to have people killed for organs, um, of course, you also want it to work very well. And then, you know, you’re going to get in bed with other people who share your lack of morals. Um, because they want that longevity too. There was even this, um, there’s an obituary that was sent to me a few years ago. It was kind of creepy and weird, but basically in the obituary, the author writes about the person that passed who was a, I think it was a vice minister, a very high level official in the Chinese Communist Party. And he had been he was known to talk about how many organs he had had transplanted. And this actually made it into the obituary unbelievably right. Like, I just didn’t even know what to make of it then, now I do.17:29S3

John, when we look at, uh, at this system, something you point out throughout the book is, uh, it’s very secretive. Uh, and it’s hard to know a lot about it because the victims here of the systemic forced organ harvesting, they don’t survive. There is a whistleblower in the book. And there’s also one person who did survive, and there’s some, some stories from from him. How do we know what we know? Or at least how do we know what we think we know about this Chinese system?18:01S2

So there’s, you know, as David Matas, who’s I think, one of the heroes of the research of this whole thing, he just says, you know, our problem is not too little evidence, but too much evidence. He likes to say that it’s true. We have really a great amount of evidence of a variety of sorts. I mean, in the early years, one of the problems is that the moment that you reveal some of the evidence, you reveal how you collected it, and then they would close that way of gathering the evidence, if you will. Right. So in the early years, there were hospitals that advertised online that said, here’s the price list and you can get it in two weeks. If you can imagine that we actually we archived some of these, thank goodness, because as soon as we started reporting on this, they those ads disappeared. Okay. People called hospitals and said, hey, I’m looking for organs. Can I get them in two weeks? Absolutely. Can I get Falun Gong organs? Absolutely. Those those are the ones we have. Those are the best. It was Falun Gong were known to be unusually healthy, by the way. That’s part of the sort of weird allure or whatever. Right. And by the way, I just there’s something else I want to mention. Right. No one really did anything about this for 15 or 16 years. Right? This is in the we believe it started around 2000. The Falun Gong are persecuted in 99. It’s starting. It’s really grows like super quick. Up until 2005 2006. And then it plateaus for a bit and keeps growing. Okay. But in 2015 and 2016, the Chinese Communist Party picks another group, adds another group. In the northwest of China, there’s a group called the Uyghur Muslims. It’s an ethnic minority in China. It’s a strategically important area. The US official position on what the CCP is doing up there is genocide, that they’re eradicating this entire group of people. And so what they did up there is they dehumanized them with similar rhetoric, again, as they always do, incarcerated a million plus. But then they went further because the whole area is run like a police state. Basically, they started blood typing and tissue typing people in their homes. Right? Basically, blood and DNA is enough to do the matching. And that’s what they’ve done through almost the whole population up there, from what I’m told. So it’s a very dark thing and it’s also geographically isolated. So it’s easier for that deniability aspect, right? Because again, no one wants to advertise that, that they want to advertise that you can get organs quickly to the right people. They don’t want to advertise how those organs are procured.20:38S3

John is with us killed to order is his book China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary. You point out that the system makes everyone complicit in these crimes. That includes people inside China, but also outside of China. And and in some ways, the United States being complicit. Why hasn’t why haven’t we done more about this? Why hasn’t the rest of the world done more about this? And I was trying to sort of manipulated us, perhaps to make us complicit in their activities.21:13S2

So it’s it’s very interesting. Like, I’ll share a little bit about how this complicity works, right? But let’s just super briefly internally, right as an example, right. You get called in to buy one of the, you know, MSS Ministry of State security people and you’re told, okay, well, comrade, I’d like to know what your wife did last night. She didn’t come home on time. I was like, oh, you’re creeped out. They’re watching you. You kind of know they’re watching you. It’s kind of how the system works. But you’re like, you know, you can’t really say no to those people. Actually, my mother faced this sort of thing in Poland. And see, what she said was, I’m not really made out to, to say any. I’m not really made out to do this kind of thing. That’s, that’s you could say that because it’s like directly going against these guys wasn’t a good idea. This is what I’ve been told. Right. So anyway, so they, they, they let her go. But she lost her travel rights. She just she was revealed she wasn’t like this big activist, but she was revealed as someone that was not on the regime’s side. Right. But what they could do in that situation. Very often do that. If my mother had had a kid, she if she was, you know, if she was married and if we had this situation that I described, the next thing the guy would say is like, well, actually, my compatriot is over there with your daughter at her school, just making sure that she’s safe. Are you sure you don’t want to tell us what your wife was up to last night? Right? And at that moment, you have to make the decision. What do I do? Right. And so you probably say where your wife was because you think, well, I got to protect my daughter. They’re going to do something to my daughter, right? And now first, you know, you were forced into this. You didn’t ever want it to make this decision, but you are now morally compromised because you had to do something immoral. And they work at you this way in small ways to make these. And this is, you know, um, one word of truth is worth more than the world. I’m kind of butchering a soldier line here a little bit, but this is the reason because it just becomes, you know, just you’re, you’re constantly having to lie to survive. You lie more, but kind of breaking out of that is very powerful and very empowering. Right? In the system. So that’s one way that people get complicit. And if you’re an American working in China, you have to kind of participate that in inadvertently, you have to participate kind of in the lie, if you will, you’re forced to bribe people and so forth.23:40S3

John, that’s a great explanation about how some of the internal complicity occurs. What about the the external complicity? How does China force coerce those outside the country to acquiesce to what they’re doing?23:55S2

It’s just simply the moment that you start having a financial relationship, right? A regular financial relationship with someone on the other side. This is the I had a whole kind of class of people that were. You could think of it as the wooers of the barbarians. They viewed, you know, the name for the for the Westerners and and actually Jiang Zemin, who started the Falun Gong persecution that he that was his job. He was an expert at this. This as on his rise to the top of the Chinese Communist Party, he actually had that deep relationship with Senator Dianne Feinstein long before he wrote all the way to the top. And, um, yeah, so, so you this financial relationship is built and what what you say, if you’re one of these wooers, so to speak, is you’re like, well, look at this great relationship that we’ve created, right? We’re, we’re changing China. You and I are making, you know, big change in China. We’re of course, doing very well financially alongside that. But then there’s those hardliners, those bad guys that want things to do it the old way. Right? And so now, okay, so let me tell you, since we’re friends, here’s what you shouldn’t do. Don’t say anything bad about it. Don’t talk about human rights. Um, you know, we’ll have to we’ll have to transfer some technology here to placate them. But we’re making a difference. We’re working together to change China. This is this was like the standard line. So many people, a lot of and frankly, a lot of people believed it even. Right. Because well, first of all, it’s, you know, there’s this famous Upton Sinclair quote where he says, you know, it’s, uh, it’s hard for someone to notice something if they’re financially incentivized to not notice it.25:35S3

Jan, how far does the complicity go? How deep are we involved in this morass, so to speak?25:42S2

Like we’ve trained some of those surgeons in China, those those Chinese surgeons come to America and get trained and then go do kill to order forced organ harvesting, which is, you know, as far as we know, that by vast, vast, a vast amount, the major way it’s done over there, there may be some legitimate transplantation, but it’s sort of hidden amidst this system. Remember, the incentive structures are really terrible against creating a, an ethical system like I described earlier, because it’s complicated, right? It’s incredibly complicated to have a system like that. And you have to find the right people and match them here. You’ve got the matches, you’ve just got them incarcerated, and you don’t even think of them as being particularly useful human beings at all. So it’s like a bank. Organ bank, right? It’s really messy. We we have partnerships with universities. We have partnerships with hospitals. We have NIH funding for some of these institutions. We provide some of the technologies, like I mentioned, ECMO and other things that actually, you know, there’s a company that provided the technology to do that DNA matching up in Xinjiang. I mean, it just sort of goes on and on and on. And so let’s say you’re one of these people that really doesn’t believe that America should be worried about anything outside of America. We have enough problems here, sir. You know, like, like, I’m, I, I personally believe that when it comes to these kinds of atrocities, you know, that you saw how it spread from the Falun Gong to the Uyghurs. I’m even seeing this really significant uptick in dehumanizing rhetoric against Christians right now in China. And, you know, my friend Bob Fu, who runs China Aid, agrees with me. That’s that’s a non-profit ministry that basically supports persecuted Chinese Christians. And so what does that mean? I don’t know for sure, but I do know that this dehumanizing rhetoric precedes, you know, being added to the to the databases. Right?27:31S3

Right.27:32S2

So that concerns me quite a bit. And, and it’s just this is with these atrocities, they always hurt. But let’s say you’re one of these people that says, you know what? Let’s focus on America. At the very least, we shouldn’t be complicit in this. You know, we can stop those all those channels by which we’re kind of helping it all function and work like that. There is, you know, the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation. They’ve cut off the Chinese, Chinese Communist Party and all of their any basically institution in China. They will not accept any papers related to transplantation because they see this as real. So some people are starting to take a position here. There’s legislation in the Senate right now that has just come out of committee. Hopefully will be voted on soon. The Falun Gong and victims of Forced Organ Harvesting Protection Act. Maybe we’ll see some traction there. And that’s something also that will sanction some of these people, establish in law that this is real. Get reporting on it. There’s another piece of legislation in the House as well, a stop forced organ Harvesting act. That’s it’s a very powerful piece of legislation. So there’s there is movement on this. Okay. But we still there’s wild amounts of things we should do, I think.28:41S3

Yeah. John is with us. His book is called To Order. Throughout the book, there are reminders about the brutal nature of China and the communist regime. You say that there’s no such thing as a civil society under totalitarianism. We have to remember that this forced organ harvesting is a logical outcome of a system that sustains itself through any means to serve the party’s ends. Do we have a fundamental misunderstanding about the threat posed by China?29:12S2

So let me touch on this. I’m so glad that you picked up this piece about how they destroy all civil society. This is like a really something we really fundamentally misunderstood. So, you know, the thing that de Tocqueville noted as he was watching this emergent America and writing about it, right? The thing that captured his imagination and he was incredibly passionate about it was that Americans would see an issue and get together spontaneously to fix that thing, or work on it or build it and create institutions around that. And he thought that this is amazing, that they do this in a way that no one else does. And this is going to make them very successful. Okay. That’s civil society, right? In communist and communist regimes, they have, or in Communist China, they have a department. You know, if it was in the UK, it would be a ministry, right? But a department called the United Front Work Department, whose express purpose. Right. It exists. It’s one of the top most funded by the way of these of the departments to destroy or subvert civil society so they can either put the Chinese Communist Party figurehead into it and run it, in effect that way, destroying it. Right. It stops being civil society, obviously, if it’s controlled by the regime, right. Or if they if it won’t, then they destroy it. That’s what that does. And that and this is they do that both inside China and outside these Chinese police stations. You hear about. Right? In America, that’s the united front work. That’s basically the way that the Chinese Communist Party does that with similar institutions in America. Right, which are ostensibly in that way controls the voice of the Chinese people. So, you know, you’re thinking you’re dealing with civil society organizations in Chinatown, you’re actually dealing with the regime. right? So of course, not all of them have been subverted overseas. They don’t have that kind of power to do that. But internally they have. So externally it’s just a lot of them.31:10S3

Yeah.31:11S2

And I just I think we this is just one example of something we don’t understand. Like we’ve only really been starting to grasp that recently.31:18S3

Jan Yelich is the author of Kill to Order China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary. Also senior editor at The Epoch Times and host of American Thought Leaders. I enjoy when the author does some of my work for me, because in the back of Kill to Order, there’s an appendix with questions and answers to those who still might be somewhat skeptical or have additional queries about what’s been laid out in the book. It is hard to believe it’s so extreme. It’s hard to believe, as you put in the book, but the evidence is is out there. Jan, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.31:52S2

Scott, thank you so much. And kill to order.com. If you’re interested in the book, that’s the Amazon short link to the Amazon link to order.com. And at the end, there’s actually an email. I don’t know if you may have noticed that as well, but it’s an email that it’s only for people who have read the book. It’s a very special one. I get really amazing letters from people and I try to respond to all of them. So I would encourage you, if you do read the book to to use that email.32:18S3

Wonderful. Kill to order.com for the direct link there. John, thanks so much.32:22S4

Thank you.32:23S3

Up next, Doctor Kelly Scott Franklin from Hillsdale’s English Department joins us. We’ll go inside another poem from Emily Dickinson. I’m Scott Bertram, this is the radio free Hillsdale Hour. We’re back on the radio free Hillsdale Hour. I’m Scott Bertram. Be sure to check out more audio from Hillsdale College on Hillsdale College Podcast Network, podcast.hillsdale.edu, or wherever you get your audio. We’re joined by Doctor Kelly Scott Franklin, associate professor of English at Hillsdale College. Doctor Franklin, thanks for joining us.33:11S5

Thank you for having me.33:12S3

Continuing our brief walk through a few of Emily Dickinson’s poems. And this time we will talk about Tell All the Truth but tell it slant. And we begin with a reading Doctor Franklin.33:26S5

All right. Tell all the truth, but tell it. Slant by Emily Dickinson. Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies too bright for our infirm delight. The truth. Superb surprise. As lightning to the children eased with explanation. Kind. The truth must dazzle gradually. Or every man be blind.33:51S3

Tell the truth, but tell it slant. If someone hears this for the first time, what’s her central piece of advice? What does it mean to tell the truth but tell it slant?34:01S5

Yes, that people have. We’ve puzzled over this one for for many years. It’s it’s a clear command. It’s a very assertive opening line. We are, to tell all the truth, leaving nothing out. But she wants it told slant wise. She wants it told. And as you see in the second line, right. Success in circuit lies. And I think for starters, I like to contrast like telling something directly or telling something straight with telling it in circuit that is going around the thing almost like a roundabout, right? You’re going across, you’re going to go straight or you’re going to go through the roundabout. I, I can never figure out roundabouts.34:41S3

Roundabouts.34:43S5

But if you go around an object, you see more of it than if you face it head on. And so on the one hand, it could sound like she’s saying, well, soften the truth or, um, and I do think there’s something about, you know, having to deliver the truth in a way that’s received. Right. But I like to think that she’s imagining the telling of it slant as actually a way to, number one, to actually bridge the gap between the truth and us, but then perhaps even to show something more about the thing to, to reveal more about it. Too bright for our infirm delight. The truth. Superb surprise. We we’re we’re going to be kind of shocked or startled by the truth. And so you need that, you know, and in the discipline of rhetoric, they think about this, right? How do we communicate the truth? Or how do we persuade. But it has to be adapted to your audience, right? It has to be suited to who you’re speaking to. So I think that’s kind of the starting point for for Dickinson.35:43S3

It’s a short poem. Um, I want to focus on this comparison to lightning that she talks about lightning, Something powerful, potentially dangerous, unpredictable. Also temporary, though lightning is gone in a flash, quite literally. So what is that image? Why that image? What do you think she’s suggesting about how humans can experience truth?36:06S5

Yeah, I, so I think she the word for me, one of the key words there in that third line is, is infirm. The truth is too bright for our infirm delight. That is, our capacity to receive truth is limited. Mhm. Dante talks about this in Purgatorio. The pilgrim is he sees an angel, an unfallen angel for the first time, and he’s completely blinded by it. So that kind of, uh, the poet’s job, it seems, or the teacher’s job or whoever it is that’s going to take these words, it has to adapt the truth because there’s something something wrong with us, right? My eyesight isn’t great yet. And so truth has to. It will will blind me, as she says at the very end. And lightning is interesting because she actually uses a simile in that second stanza. And I like to think I like to think that for. For Dickinson, telling the truth slant is using metaphor that I think that’s what she’s getting at is. And in the second stanza, we get a metaphor as lightning. She’s going to give us a simile. Uh, I know this is a hot take for all you English teachers out there and grammarians, but I, I think similarly and metaphor are the same thing. I’m just going to I’m going to take a stand right now. They’re not different. You use like or as for simile, but it’s the same thing. So she says she’s using a metaphor as lightning to the children eased with explanation, kind. So she says, this is how. An example of how you might do it or understand it this way. And children are scared of lightning. They’re terrified by it. They might not understand it, but you might give them an explanation kind. And one of my students who wrote her thesis on Emily Dickinson, she proposed, maybe this is like you tell them a story or a myth or, or you say like, oh, they’re having an argument. The thunderclouds are knocking into each other, or it’s God bowling or something. Like whatever your kind of analogy or metaphor is to help them understand it. And there’s a kindness there. And, and metaphor, if it’s going to give us success, it needs to, to, to really reveal and not obscure. It’s going to, it’s going to ease the truth to us because of our infirmity, because of our weakness. But it is going to deliver something of the truth. So there’s, there’s a statement there about what metaphor does. And poetry, which is full of metaphor, is still, I think, ridiculously going to tell us the truth.38:25S3

Mhm. And she says the truth must dazzle gradually, which is similar to what you’re talking about here. Yeah, maybe little portions as opposed to everything at once.38:35S5

Absolutely. And we I mean, we’ve experienced this ourselves in education. You gradually learn more and more about the world. You might learn more and more about history. I think God reveals to us slowly ourselves so it doesn’t shock us with our. He doesn’t shock us all at once with our. All of our failures. You sort of like reveal. Okay, here’s some weaknesses you have, right? There’s this revelation of truth because we’re weak and we need to receive it. Uh, we need to receive it gradually. And there’s a marvelous, uh, just the sounds there of that poem dazzle gradually. And it’s because otherwise we’ll be will be blind. And on the one hand, you can say, well, that means that the truth is going to be too shocking, but it could also just mean I won’t see the truth unless someone bridges that gap. I won’t even be able to see it unless you can help me to see it.39:26S3

Talking with Doctor Kelly, Scott Franklin, associate professor of English at Hillsdale College, about Emily Dickinson’s poem Tell All the Truth, but tell it slant. This is a very short, tightly structured poem. How does that economy of language perhaps reinforce her argument about the truth.39:43S5

That’s a good question. And Dickinson, some of her poems are really tight, really. And she would even write like on scraps of paper sometimes. So we’ll have like the corner of an envelope flap. And so it fits into the angle. Or you were a doodler. Yeah. She would use any scrap of paper she had sometimes. So she.40:00S3

I read a John Adams the same, the same thing. Paper was so expensive in Adams time that when they went through all his artifacts, they found scraps and corners, and he’d write the tiniest print to fit what he was trying to say in that little piece of paper.40:16S5

Amazing. Much to the chagrin of of historians and biographers. Right? Yeah. So Dickinson’s used to working, you know, in those even physically cramped spaces of a little corner of an envelope. But I think maybe saying too much about it would kind of blunt the vision of the poem we have. We have this opening statement that she unpacks for us. And then the second stanza begins with a metaphor, really the one metaphor of the poem. And. And then she leaves it to us. But yeah, it she doesn’t spend. She’s, she’s so concise. She doesn’t spend a lot of time unpacking that. The truth. She leaves it. Maybe there’s something mysterious still left over in the poem.41:00S3

It sounds the poem sounds almost like a proverb or a set of instructions. Is that typical for for Dickinson’s work?41:07S5

It’s one of her modes. Yeah. She doesn’t. It’s not every poem, but I. I really have noticed that she’ll begin. She has, you know, a poem that she’ll have a poem that just begins with that aphorism or that kind of received wisdom. And sometimes the poem unpacks it and says like, okay, here’s what this means, or here’s how this would work out in a life. Other times, she obliterates it. One of my favorite poems is, um, she. The opening line is they say that time assuages, you know, it’s like everybody says, well, you know, time heals all ills, right? They say that time Assuages time never did assuage like she just immediately contradicts it. So Dickinson will take those received wisdoms, sometimes explode them, sometimes unpack them. This is one of the unpacking ones. She she wants to give us a kind of injunction for how to speak, write, teach, and then gives us an example. Uh, in in what follows.42:02S3

This poem can feel especially relevant today. There’s a lot of talk about honesty and truth, bluntness, and there’s that phrase that seeps into place. Oh, it’s my truth. How might Dickinson speak to some of these modern debates?42:19S5

Yeah, the opening line tell all the truth. I think Dickinson is well aware of of the subjective experience of reality. And she validates that like when we experience reality, it’s in some ways it’s a is a truly unique experience, but I think there’s no doubt in Dickinsons mind that there is the truth. And she just. And she, along with Emerson and some of these other 19th century writers, Melville. They’re aware that the truth might be cosmic. It might be God. And so what I like to think about is I like to think about that moment in Exodus chapter 33 when God says to Moses, I’m going to Moses says, show me your glory. And God says, well, I’m going to go hide in behind this rock, and then I’m going to pass by. And when I’ve passed by, then you can look at my back and whatever that means, looking at the back of God. Well, when Moses has these encounters with God, he comes down. He comes out like glowing, right? So, you know, it’s like in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, you’re going to open up the ark and then your face is going to get melted off you. I think Dickinson’s aware, like Emerson, like Melville, that the truth capital T is real, but it’s like the Old Testament writers, you know, thinking about the tabernacle and the Holy of Holies. God and the truth are overwhelming. Yeah. Eternal cosmic. And so I think she’s thinking about that. But then knowing that even as weak and frail human beings, we’re still called to have some kind of access to that. But it needs to be mediated. It needs to be kind of bridged. I like to think about the myth of Zeus and Semele. Zeus took a mortal woman as his lover, and then someone who was jealous said, well, you should ask him to reveal himself in all his glory. And then, of course, she’s incinerated. Right. And that that model, I think, is, is the kind of a way to understand what Dickinson’s thinking about the truth, capital t God, the nature of things might be too much for us. Has to be has to be bridged to us, has to be mediated in some way or will be overwhelmed by it will be blind.44:36S3

Doctor Kelly Scott Franklin, associate professor of English at Hillsdale College. As we talk about the Emily Dickinson poem, Tell all the truth but tell it slant. Doctor Franklin, thanks for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.44:49S5

Thanks for having me.44:50S3

That will wrap up this edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Our thanks to Janice. His book is called to order and Kelly Scott Franklin from Hillsdale English Department. Remember, you can hear new episodes every week on this station. You also can find extended versions of some of our interviews, or listen any time to the podcast. Find [email protected] or wherever you get your audio. Until next week, I’m Scott Bertram, and this has been the radio free Hillsdale Hour.

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On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss the ways that Homer depicts women in The Odyssey before introducing a lecture from Dr. Benedict Whalen.

Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, uses her own cunning to deceive the suitors while she awaits her husband’s return. Telemachus, their son, journeys to Sparta seeking news of his father.

The Odyssey tells the tale of the cunning and crafty hero of the Trojan War on his journey home. After ten years of war, Odysseus faces another ten years of fantastic temptations, deadly monsters, treacherous seas, and impious men. Meanwhile, Ithaca is threatened by suitors who plague his wife and plunder his wealth. When Odysseus reaches home, he must slay the suitors, test the loyalty of his friends and family, and restore order to his marriage and his kingdom.

Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I’m Jeremiah Regan.

And I’m Juan Davalos. We’re back with the Odyssey lecture number two today. Rumors of Odysseus.

So in lecture two, Professor Whalen covers books two through four of the Odyssey. And you’ll notice, just like in book one, we’re not really following the story of Odysseus directly yet. We’re seeing what is going on at home. And while Odysseus himself is a man of twists and turns, a man of cunning and great virtue, uh, he’s he’s well paired to his wife, Penelope, who hasn’t seen him at this point for 19 years, but who mirrors many of his traits. Penelope is accosted by suitors. They wish to marry her. She’s a beautiful woman. She has an estate, uh, really? A kingdom that would be inherited by her new husband. Odysseus is presumed to be dead, of course, but Odysseus. But excuse me, but Penelope is faithful, and she is not quite ready to declare her husband dead and, uh, and marry a new man. So she comes up with ingenious ways to put off the suitors, to delay them without enraging them. And we learn some of that. Also at home is Odysseus 19 year old son, Telemachus, who was merely an infant when Odysseus left. He has not been raised by his father, hasn’t had that benefit. But he loves his father and yearns for him. And he hears stories about who Odysseus is. Uh, as he’s coming of age and getting to the point where he should be thinking about inheriting his father’s kingdom, he’s actually awaiting for his father to return and reclaim it.

I really enjoyed the deep dive into Telemachus and Penelope and Penelope that the lecture starts with, um, at the time of, of recording the the movie is launching by the famous movie by Christopher Nolan and one of the actresses for the movie was recently interviewed, saying how Homer didn’t understand women, and they were not prominent figures in his writings. And it’s awesome that the book actually begins with going into Into Penelope and how cunning and smart she is, and how Odysseus, uh, really is attracted to her because of her cunning and her intellect.

Not absolutely. And what’s great about Homer is he doesn’t have women in here so that there can be women in here. Homer is a master of understanding the human condition, and he. That includes being able to speak eloquently about the excellencies of women and the excellencies of men. Penelope is a key character in this story. She’s not only one of the things Odysseus longs to return to. She’s a fully formed character in her own right. The. The poem also features, uh, Calypso, Circe, Athena. These are are fleshed out female characters that are playing particular roles with excellence. And so there’s no there’s no dye in the Odyssey. There’s genuine human experience laid out in a great work of art.

Uh, if you’re following along the course, uh, on the podcast, I encourage you to go to hillsdale.edu/course and download the study guides. Uh, that’s at hillsdale.edu/course. Um, there’s study guides, uh, follow the lecture. There’s timestamps for all the different parts of the lecture with outlines. And, uh, this study guide for this course actually include now some illustrations, some maps, some key passages. Um, it really is something that will help you dive a little deeper into the lecture and get a better understanding of what you’re learning. So I encourage you to go to hillsdale.edu/course and download the study guide so you can follow along. Yeah.

Those illustrations are done by a young artist named Aidan Kennedy. His artwork is featured in the lectures themselves as well, along with many other beautiful paintings and drawings, and as a lot of color and life to the course. Now let’s join Professor Whalen for lecture two of The Odyssey. Rumors of Odysseus.

In our last lecture, we got our first glimpse of the situation on Ithaca and the difficult positions of Telemachus, Odysseus son and Penelope, Odysseus wife. In this lecture, we’ll follow how the situation unfolds on Ithaca, including Penelope’s situation there with the suitors and Telemachus journey to mainland Greece. In books two through four of the Odyssey. Now, at the outset, it’s interesting to note that books one through four of the Odyssey all focus on Telemachus and Ithaca and Penelope, rather than on Odysseus, our epic hero. This function something like the opening lines of the Odyssey as a whole, where we hear about the man of twists and turns but don’t learn his name until 24 lines in. So in the narrative as a whole, we delay meeting Odysseus until book five. This raises anticipation and suspense. Who is this man of twists and turns who. We have to work through four books of poetry before we meet. But it also stresses the position of Telemachus, his son Telemachus. We see as a young man trying to assert himself in a difficult situation, despite the mockery and laughter of these suitors who are courting his mother. So we should see the Odyssey as a story of Odysseus, the great epic hero’s return home. But we should also see the story as a coming of age story for Telemachus and as a coming of age story. We should watch for ways in which Telemachus grows and grows in what he understands, grows in virtue, and grows in confidence as he asserts himself. Coming of age stories are particularly important in seeing how the young man or woman is educated, and what we do see as Telemachus makes his travels in books two through four is a sort of education of the young Prince of Ithaca. This focus on Telemachus in books one through four leads some readers to call this part of the epic the Telemachus. That is the story about Telemachus. Now the last thing that the focus on Telemachus and on Ithaca does in these opening books is that it stresses for us, the reader, how dire, how terrible the situation on Ithaca is for Odysseus. Odysseus is coming home not to a happily ordered and peaceful land, a disordered domestic and political situation. Even if Odysseus makes it home, he’s going to have a lot of difficulty in cleaning things up. Now. Book two opens with Telemachus convening the council that Athena had advised him to do. At the close of book one, the council ends up being a complete disaster for Telemachus. The suitors laugh at him and mock him, and when he tries to assert himself and is derided, he ends up breaking down in tears and falling to the ground, weeping as the elders and the parents of the suitors refused to restrain their sons. Nevertheless, in the midst of this council, we do learn a very interesting detail that sets up for us one of the most famous scenes or images from the Odyssey. One of the leaders of the suitors, Antinous, complains back at Telemachus about the behavior of Penelope, saying that she’s been leading them on. This is what Antinous says. So high and mighty, Telemachus, such unbridled rage. Well, now, fling your accusations at us. Think to pin the blame on us. You think again. It’s not the suitors here who deserve the blame. It’s your own dear mother, the matchless queen of cunning. Look here. For three years now, going on to four. She’s played it fast and loose. With all our hearts. Building each man’s hopes. Dangling promises dropping hints to each. But all the while with something else in mind. This was her latest masterpiece of guile. She set up a great loom in her royal halls, and she began to weave. And the weaving finespun the yarns endless. And she would lead us on young men, my suitors now that King Odysseus is no more. Go slowly, keen as you are to marry me until I can finish off this web so my weaving won’t all fray and come to nothing. This is a shroud for old Laertes, for that day when the deadly fate that lays us out at last will take him down. I dread the shame my countrywomen would heap upon me. Yes, if a man of such wealth should lie in state without a shroud for. Cover her very words. And despite our pride and passion, we believed her. So by day she’d weave at her great and growing web. By night, by the light of torches set beside her, she would unravel all she’d done. Three whole years. She deceived us blind, seduced us with this scheme. Then, when the Wheeling seasons brought the fourth year on, one of her women in on the Queen’s secret told the truth and we caught her in the act unweaving her gorgeous web, so she finished it off against her will. We forced her. Now this is a famous scene. It shows the suitors arrogance and also their threatening nature. That last line against her will. We forced her. Should alarm us as readers. Penelope is in a vulnerable situation here. These. These suitors can force her to do things. This scene, though, is also sort of funny. It shows us the suitors aren’t that bright. She was able to pull this scheme off for three whole years before they noticed. So we learned something about the suitors. If Penelope is the queen of matchless cunning, these suitors might be a little bit slow on the uptake. There’s also a nice emphasis here on Penelope’s cunning. She’s respected in her cunning, even by the suitors, and we can already anticipate the way in which this display of her cunning, uh, shows her to be an appropriate a good wife for the man of twists and turns, Penelope herself has twists and turns. But these lines also remind us of the question we raised in our last lecture, which is what is Penelope’s intention here? Telemachus had said, she neither refuses a marriage she despises, nor does she accept one of them. Here we see the suitors saying that she’s been playing it fast and loose with their hearts, that she’s been dangling promises, dropping hints to each. And Antinous even uses the language that she seduced us. So what is Penelope’s aim? Now, here I like to push my students and ask, and I present them with this as a sort of provocation. Perhaps Penelope’s keeping the suitors around because she likes their attention. I mean, if we think about it, after all, Odysseus has been gone for 19, 20 years. How old is Penelope? If she was 18 when Odysseus left and left her with a young child, she’s been left alone for 20 years. She’s maybe in her mid to late 30s. Perhaps Penelope likes the attention of a bunch of young, handsome suitors coming to pay her court. This usually provokes a reaction from my students who don’t like that view, and they start to theorize. What is Penelope doing by keeping the suitors around and even dangling hopes or making promises? Perhaps it’s a way for Penelope to maintain control on the island of Ithaca in the absence of her husband. After all, as long as Penelope doesn’t reject the suitors but also doesn’t accept one of them, then she has the attentions of all of them. It’s a way for her to maintain power, a way for her to maintain authority in this situation. Maybe also, she’s waiting for Telemachus to be old enough to take the power himself. Perhaps she’s an attentive mother trying to maintain control of things until her son finally is old enough to act the man in the house. And perhaps she has some other plan in mind. We will continue to ask this question as we go. So despite the fact that Telemachus says she neither rejects a marriage she despises, nor does she accept a suitor. We are not really sure why she’s behaving the way she does or what her end is. We also have the sense that while she is besieged by the suitors, she’s not entirely helpless. She has twists and turns of her own. She has her own cunning as her defense. Now this cunning and her own resourcefulness is further emphasized over the course of books two through four. For instance, when the suitors realize in book four that Telemachus has gone to the mainland to find news of his father, they decide to set an ambush for him and plan to kill Telemachus. But as soon as they make those plans, Homer writes. But not for long was Penelope unaware of the grim plots her suitors planned in secret. The Herald maiden told her he’d overheard their schemes. Listening in Outside the court, while they wove on within. He rushed the news through the halls to the Queen. Now we see here. Penelope, in fact, has spies among the suitors, and she learns their plans. So even when she is up in her chamber and not around the suitors, she does keep tabs on them. She understands and figures out what they are doing. Then, at the close of book four, Penelope, yearning for her husband, falls asleep and Athena appears to her in a dream and gives her encouragement, telling her Odysseus is alive. Odysseus is on his way back. Just hold on a little bit longer. It’s very interesting there. Penelope, in fact, is wary and reserved, and she expresses doubts even to this dream figure. We see here another quality in Penelope’s mind. She is. She’s reserved. She’s wary. She’s cautious. She has circumspection. She has intelligence and depth of thought. That is part of the way she will defend herself against these suitors. She’s not going to be easy to fool or to take advantage of. So all of this representation of Penelope in books one through four adds up to make her more formidable than might appear at first glance. Yes, Penelope is besieged, and more than 100 suitors are in her halls seeking her hand. Yes, she’s terribly outnumbered. Yes, her son is not mature enough to defend the house or to take control of things. Yes. She has no definite knowledge of Odysseus condition where he is. Is he even alive? But the woman Homer presents to us is not a damsel in distress. She’s a cunning, thoughtful, tricky woman who is wary, watchful and competent. She’s a complex, perhaps even somewhat inscrutable figure, and we are left wondering why she neither accepts nor dismisses the suitors. She does have some plan in mind and will watch to see what that is. Now let’s turn to Telemachus travels. He first sails to Pylos, where Nestor rules and Nestor greets him, welcomes him in, tells him a couple of stories about his father, and then sends him overland by chariot to Sparta, where Menelaus rules. Menelaus is living there with his recaptured wife, Helen, who they recovered after the fall of Troy. On this journey we watch Telemachus growing up and learning several different things. Some of them are very easy to recount and are quite obvious. Telemachus is learning diplomacy. He’s polite. He is able to act in a courtly way with the different royal households he encounters. We also see him exercising courage and leadership. He takes a whole ship, a whole crew on a ship across the ocean to the mainland of Greece. We see him actively cultivating these virtues, and Athena, the goddess, is disguised as this herald this guide along with Telemachus, and she encourages him in these virtues as well. Telemachus is also learning about the greatness of his father, the different stories that he hears from Nestor, and then from Helen and Menelaus all give him a model of greatness, a model of virtue and excellence and cunning in his father. That is a bar that he should strive to live up to. But we also hear the story of the death of Agamemnon when he returned home, and of Orestes having to avenge his father’s death. And this is established for Telemachus as a potential model for what Telemachus himself might have to do, the way that Telemachus might have to be, Nestor tells him. But Atreus son Agamemnon, you yourselves, even in far off Ithaca, must have heard how he returned, how Aegisthus hatched the king’s horrendous death. But what a price he paid in blood, in suffering! Ah, how fine it is when a man is brought down to leave a son behind. Orestes took revenge. He killed that cunning, murderous Aegisthus who’d killed his famous father. And you, my friend. How tall and handsome. I see you now. Be brave. You too. So men will come to sing your praises down the years. We see here Nestor invoking the story of Orestes avenging his father’s murder during his father’s homecoming, which is held up as a potential model for what Telemachus might have to do. After all, Odysseus is coming back. His house is full of suitors. Will Odysseus be able to triumph, and will Telemachus have to take the role of Orestes and avenge his father’s death? Now from Nestor, Telemachus is not just learning how great his father was, and then also the model of Orestes avenging Agamemnon’s death. But at the end of a certain conversation with Nestor, Athena, having told Telemachus what to do, flies off as an eagle, and Nestor, seeing this, turns to Telemachus and advises him that he has been guided and has been in the presence of a God. And so we see another aspect of the education. This coming of age story for Telemachus is how to comport himself around the divine, how to deal with the gods. Nestor says, dear boy, never fear, you’ll be a coward or defenseless. Not if at your young age, the gods will guard you. So. Of all who dwell on Olympus, this was none but she. Zeus’s daughter, the glorious one, his third born, who prized your gallant father among the Argives. Now, O Queen, be gracious. Give us high renown myself, my children, my loyal wife and queen, and I will make you a sacrifice. A young heifer, broad in the brow, unbroken, never yoked by men. I’ll offer it up to you. I’ll sheathe its horns in gold. So he prayed, and Pallas Athena heard his prayer. So Telemachus is now being guided by Athena again and again. And on his journey he’s learning from the older veterans, the older, wise men like Nestor how to deal with these divinities who from time to time interrupt with and interfere with human life. Now, in book four, when Telemachus does finally come to Sparta, Menelaus says that he did indeed hear that Odysseus was alive but held captive on an island by a nymph. And so Telemachus has the first definite concrete news that his father is alive and still striving to come home. This is heartening for Telemachus, and gives him hope and direction in his activities. But I’d like to close this lecture by looking at another aspect of what we see in book four. It’s actually quite exciting for us as Telemachus makes his way to Sparta. For any reader of the Iliad to wonder, how is the marriage of Menelaus and Helen going. After all, the entire Trojan War was fought for the sake of this marriage. Now Menelaus has recaptured his unfaithful wife. How are they doing? It’s a natural question, and it leads to anticipation and excitement as Telemachus comes to them. Homer tells us that Helen and Menelaus both recognize the looks of Odysseus and Telemachus, and they all grieve for the lost Odysseus. And then Helen does this. Then Zeus’s daughter Helen thought of something else into the mixing bowl from which they drank their wine. She slipped a drug. Heart’s ease dissolving anger. Magic. To make us all forget our pains. No one who drank it deeply. Mold in wine could let a tear roll down his cheeks that day. Not even if his mother should die. His father die. Not even if right before his eyes. Some enemy brought down a brother or darling son with a sharp bronze blade. So how is the marriage of Helen and Menelaus doing? Well, this is not a good sign. Helen is slipping drugs into the wine, and the drugs might sound nice at First heart’s ease dissolving anger. But the effect of this drug is actually alarming. You wouldn’t even lament if your son or brother was cut down in front of you. So it seems already troubling that Helen is drugging the wine, especially with such a drug. But then Helen goes on to tell a story to Telemachus and Menelaus about one time when she encountered Odysseus in Troy. And this story is very interesting for how Helen represents herself. She says, my royal king Menelaus. Welcome guests here. Sons of the great as well. Zeus can present us times of joy and times of grief. In turn, all lies within his power. So come, let’s sit back in the palace now. Dine and warm our hearts with the old stories. I will tell something perfect for the occasion. Surely I can’t describe or list them all the exploits crowding fearless Odysseus record. But what a feat that hero dared and carried off in the land of Troy, where you Achaeans suffered, scarring his own body with mortifying strokes, throwing filthy rags on his back like any slave, he slipped into the enemy’s city, roamed its streets, all disguised. A totally different man, a beggar hardly the figure he cut among Achaea’s ships. That’s how Odysseus infiltrated Troy, and no one knew him at all. I alone, I spotted him for the man he was kept questioning him. The crafty one kept dodging. But after I bathed him, rubbed him down with oil, given him clothes to wear, and sworn a binding oath not to reveal him as Odysseus to the Trojans. Not till he was back at his swift ships and shelters. Then at last he revealed to me, step by step the whole Achaean strategy. And once he’d cut a troop of Trojans down with his long bronze sword back, he went to his comrades filled with information. The rest of the Trojan women shrilled their grief. Not I. My heart leapt up. My heart had changed by now. I yearned to sail back home again. I grieved too late for the madness Aphrodite sent me. Luring me there, far from my dear land. Forsaking my own child, my bridal bed, my husband. To a man who lacked for neither brains nor beauty. Now, this story is very interesting because Helen is purportedly sharing what she saw of Odysseus during the Trojan War. It’s a story that is purportedly in praise of Odysseus, and indeed we hear of Odysseus cunning, his ability to infiltrate the city and disguise himself. He’s a man of twists and turns who won’t be recognized by any of the Trojans. But on a deeper level, Helen’s story clearly is meant to show her loyalty to Menelaus. After all, she’s saying she recognized Odysseus and didn’t turn him into the Trojans, that her heart had changed, that she did yearn to be back with Menelaus. And so her story is praising Odysseus, but at the same time, it is trying to establish her as, in fact a loving and loyal wife, a wife of a husband who she gives naked flattery to. Here at the end of her speech, she calls him, and he’s sitting right there, a man who lacked for neither brains nor beauty. This is an obvious attempt to flatter her husband and to present herself as a loyal wife. Now, what’s very interesting is the way Menelaus hears her story and then responds. And the red haired Menelaus answered, Helen. There was a tale, my lady, so well told. Now I have to read those lines as as as almost. It sounds sarcastic on Menelaus part. She’s represented herself as the faithful, loving wife. He says, yeah, that’s a good tale. Now then, I have studied in my time the plans and minds of great ones by the score, and I have traveled over a good part of the world. But never once have I laid eyes on a man like him. What a heart that fearless Odysseus had inside him! What a piece of work the hero dared and carried off in the wooden horse. Where all our best encamped, our champions armed with bloody death for Troy, when along you came. Helen roused, no doubt, by a dark power bent on giving Troy some glory. The dashing Prince Deiphobus squired your. Every step. Three times you sauntered round our hollow ambush feeling, stroking its flanks, challenging all our fighters, calling each by name. Yours was the voice of all our long lost wives, and Diomedes and I crouched tight in the midst with great Odysseus, hearing you singing out, were both keen to spring up and sally forth, or give you a sudden answer from inside. But Odysseus damped our ardor, reined us back. Then all the rest of the troops kept stock still all but antyllus. He was hot to salute you now. But Odysseus clamped his great hands on the man’s mouth and shut it brutally. Yes, he saved us all, holding on grim set till Pallas Athena lured you off at last. It’s a very interesting response from Menelaus. Menelaus, like Helen, is telling a story of Odysseus greatness. This Odysseus cunning. The story of the Trojan horse, and also Odysseus self-control, his composure within it, keeping the men quiet when they think they hear their wives voices outside. But of course, at the same time, Menelaus is responding on a deeper level to Helen’s story. Helen had represented herself as the loyal and loving wife Life and Menelaus here, even at the moment of the fall of Troy, is telling a story showing how she in fact was not faithful. She was tempting the Achaeans to come out to their destruction. It’s interesting to see how Helen and Menelaus are using stories to give different representations of themselves and each other. Helen wants to show a certain aspect of herself through her narrative. Menelaus wants to do the same. As we proceed in the Odyssey, we’ll see that in the middle of the work, Odysseus will tell a great story about himself as well. Stories are ways of conveying meaning and understanding and in fact, of making arguments. Helen is making one here. Menelaus is making one, and Odysseus will as well. So in answer to our question, how is that marriage between Menelaus and Helen doing? It seems not great. We have drugs in the wine, and we have arguments being made through competing stories about the nature of Helen’s loyalty or disloyalty. Now, the final point I want to make is that it’s interesting to see how Telemachus navigates this awkward, unpleasant marriage situation between Helen and Menelaus. After Menelaus finishes his story, we hear. But clear sighted Telemachus ventured, son of Atreus, King Menelaus, captain of armies, so much the worse, for not one bit of that saved him from grisly death. Not even a heart of iron could have helped him. But come, send us off to bed. It’s time to rest, time to enjoy the sweet relief of sleep, and Helen gives the servants orders to make the beds. So Telemachus, here, caught in an awkward situation, is polite and tactful and turns to bed. Now book four of the Odyssey closes with something of a cliffhanger. Telemachus has learned that his father is still alive, but he’s in Sparta. He needs to make his way back to Ithaca. The suitors, having learned that Telemachus is at Sparta, have set up an ambush for Telemachus and are waiting to kill him with that sort of cliffhanger. Homer then finally turns and we meet Odysseus in the flesh in book five. It’s that we’ll look at in our next lecture.

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Once per week, Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss Great Books, Great Men, and Great Ideas.

Dr. Larry P. Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, joins Hugh Hewitt on the Hillsdale Dialogues to continue a series on The Second World War, Churchill’s sprawling memoir and history of World War II in six volumes.

Release date: 24 July 2026

Read more about Sir Winston Churchill including the official biography of Churchill by Martin Gilbert at the Hillsdale Official Store.

Every week. Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss great books, great men, and great ideas. This is Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you find your audio.00:30S2

Morning. Glory. Evening Grace. America. That music means it’s the last broadcast hour of the week. That means it’s time for the Hillsdale Dialogue. Doctor Ron and I are done celebrating the semi sesquicentennial, and we’re back into Churchill’s World War Two memoirs, volume two. Their finest hour. Last week, Doctor Arnn, you were talking about, um, Churchill’s comment to the French that those nations that die fighting rise again. And you’re also talking about how the French collapse may have been, in part linked to the exhaustion of the French Republic after World War One. I am curious, as it occurred to me when we were talking, I wanted to ask you about it this week. When Reagan arrived after Vietnam and after Carter, he had to start again to rebuild sort of American fighting will. And he did it with Grenada. And then George H.W. Bush did it with Panama and then George W Bush. We went to war for 20 years and were exhausted again. And we got out ignobly from Afghanistan in 2021 and a haphazard, disastrous and deeply humiliating retreat. What do you make of the idea that Donald Trump is rebuilding the American capacity for force with this battle with Iran in a way that is necessary, limited, precise, and deadly when it’s unleashed?01:57S3

Yeah. That’s it limited Um, uh, we we fell into a period, uh, unique in American history when we were the only superpower. And so we thought we could do anything. And you mix that up with the principles of liberal imperialism, which include statements like, we can’t be safe until the world is free. Uh, my favorite is Colin Powell saying, when we invaded Iraq the first time, after they had attacked a neighbor and the neighbor appealed to us for help, it means we can do that if we want to. But he said, if you break it, you own it. And, uh, that means that we have to fix it, right? Well, Trump hasn’t said anything like that. What he said is we’re going to stop them threatening us and our neighbors, and we’re going to do what it takes to do that. And, uh, that means that it’s up to us how far we go. So that’s limited, Right? Because you can’t study Churchill carefully without understanding his constant reluctance about and fear about war. Uh, he you know, you don’t you don’t do it for a demonstration. You do it because you have to. And you’ll be less likely to have to if you’re ready to do it. So that’s the old wisdom, right? And I think.03:27S2

It’s interesting that you bring up and that’s not in our notes or our outline. Uh, General Powell, who of course became secretary of State Powell, but he was a general. He was a military man because Churchill has a not a jaundiced eye, but a skeptical eye about generals making policy. And it comes up in this chapter, chapter ten. General Weygand, who is their their boss of bosses, their number one general, he decides, he decides. The general decides that it’s time to quit. And Churchill says he used his supreme political position far beyond the limits which his professional responsibility, as great as they were, were justified or required. He asserted. The right of a soldier to dominate the duly constituted government of the Republic, as did Marshal Patton. And I sense in Churchill a. I don’t sense, I read in Churchill a great skepticism of generals stepping into the role of statesmen. AM I right about that? Oh, yes.04:25S3

Well, if they get elected right, they have to become statesmen. Right. But the idea that they get to decide. Remember, that’s a that’s a thing in human affairs. In every human organization, people have a job and they think because of that job, they can control more than that job. And they try to control things for which they don’t have responsibility. Nobody gave general responsibility for the future and being of France, but he effectively exercised that authority for a time. And that was just wrong. And what Churchill thought was, you know, Churchill is a follower of the principles of the Declaration of Independence. And what do they say? The purpose of a government is to defend the rights of its people, and it gets its authority from their consent. Well, nobody consented to Vigan making those decisions. He just happened to have supposedly at least control of the military. And so there was nobody I mean, I mentioned last week that Victor Hanson writes about the amazing effectiveness of Britain in the Second World War, how much they got out of themselves. Right. And they mortgaged their future to do it. And Churchill didn’t want to do that and always called it the unnecessary war. But now you’re in the gang war, and somebody’s got to command all the efforts of the nation toward victory. That’s what he did. Well, there wasn’t anybody at the top ready to do that? Uh, Churchill meets the son of Clemenceau from the First World War. The tiger, they called it. And at the end of the First World War, Clemenceau took power. And he did do that. And Churchill marveled at that and admired that very much, and did that himself later. Well, the son of Clemenceau Churchill Records, in these chapters that we’re reading, he had the spirit of his daddy in him, and Churchill thought that was missing at the top.06:29S2

Well, he said Renault was not up to it. And this is a quote, uh, France would have needed a Cromwell, a Clemenceau, a Stalin or a Hitler. It’s a and that’s a silent reflection on himself. Capacity married to Will, married to, um, a country that’s got the ability to rise to the occasion. As Victor Davis Hanson noted, he’s not complimenting Stalin or Hitler’s moral character. He is recognized. And I’m sure he’s not a big fan of Cromwell, but is recognizing, uh, data, uh, there too. Um, what what Machiavelli. Well, put down as the essential ingredient. Sure.07:09S3

Uh, there’s that charge against Donald Trump, the old one about the Playboy interview where he congratulates the Chinese on their strength. Well, he also says in that same interview that they’re horrible. Their policies are horrible. But. And see, here’s what I think is the distinction. Strength is urgently necessary. But Churchill was fond of saying, kindness is better than strength. But you actually need some strength in order to be kind. And so, you know, when you take a responsibility like that, if Hillsdale College fails, it’ll be my fault, right? And that’s why that’s where I get my authority from the mission of the college, from its well-being, and from the people I work with. And I have to use it only for that. And it means that while I have the job, I’m stuck. Something goes wrong. It’s my fault. Well, if you take that attitude, then you might be capable of command in an urgent situation. I’ve never been in a situation as urgent as the ones we’re describing here, but all of us face in life urgent situations, and we have to discharge our responsibilities. That’s what our authority, whatever it is we have, is for.08:31S2

That’s so yeah, that’s well put. Let’s talk now about the the French fleet because it’s a little known aspect of the war. But Churchill had spotted it not long after he became prime minister after Chamberlain stepped down. He begins to lobby Darlan, who’s the the chief of naval operations. He’s in command of the French fleet. But he’s he’s an admiral. He’s not a minister. And he says to Darlan, we got to have the French fleet. We got to have the French fleet. And Darlan says to him, of course you’ll get the French fleet. Well, France is collapsing and Churchill sends out his IOU for the fleet and Darlan doesn’t deliver. He said I’d become the Minister of Maritime. What does that mean? What was he trying to do?09:14S3

Their bargain. So, first of all, a very pregnant letter in these chapters is the letter that Churchill wrote to Roosevelt on the 15th of June.09:24S2

Oh, yes.09:25S3

And I invite people to read that and see that Churchill appeals to Roosevelt entirely on the basis of the interest of the United States of America. Yep. He says if their fleet goes bad, that’s a grievous fact. But what will be become of our fleet? I would never surrender our fleet to the Germans. But will I be in charge if there’s an invasion? You have to think about that, because the British fleet was bigger than the American fleet at the time. And if you put it together with the French fleet, and he points this out.10:05S2

And the German.10:05S3

Fleet, that would.10:07S2

And the German way bigger.10:09S3

That’s right.10:10S2

And so don’t go anywhere, America. We’ll come back and talk about FDR, Churchill, the considerations that went into everything. The dialogue is underway. All things [email protected]. And everything. All the Hillsdale Dialogue at Q four hillsdale.com. I’m Hugh Hewitt with Doctor Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, talking about Winston Churchill, World War II memoir. We’re talking about the fleet and the very delicate dance of memos between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt at the time. Doctor Arnn.10:41S3

Another very delicate thing, because, you know, first of all, these memos are really great to read because you’ve got to remember Churchill’s writing these things when he’s traveling four times to France during the collapse of France and after he’s been prime minister since the 10th of May, and all this is over by the middle of June. And he writes these memos to the French and to Roosevelt. The most important memos he wrote were to those two parties. And and, uh, uh, the French say to him, we want you to release us from our obligation not to make a separate peace. That’s that’s hard. You know, we’re collapsing. We’re suffering there. We’re disorganized. They’re going to take over France and subject the whole of France to the Gestapo. And we don’t want that. We can make a deal to prevent that. Release us. Think of the strength of that appeal. And what does Churchill reply? Once he gives, he gives the reply twice. He gives it once. And he says, we are never going to waste any time recriminating against France, whatever it does. But this is not the last battle that will happen in England, and you should exhaust your resources all the way down to North Africa, if you must, to carry on the battle. Then they retire and. And Churchill. And who’s with him? Beaverbrook, his good friend, who he gives him a huge Churchill compliment in this chapter. Always a good man under pressure. And Lord Halifax, a reformed appeaser there with him, and they retired to the garden and talk for half an hour and then come back. Churchill comes back and gives the same answer, and he gives that answer in writing again later. And then he tells Roosevelt. He gave that answer, that, in other words, I didn’t agree with them, to release them from a pact that we made a blood pact, not to make a separate peace because we’re going to fight on. And they should too. And that, you see that’s. Aren’t those.12:57S2

They are.12:58S3

Cataclysmic.12:59S2

What do you make of of FDR in this exchange for the benefit of the audience? Um, FDR writes France, encouraging them not to surrender and not to give up the fight. And Churchill, although it’s very I went full Strauss in here, tried to read it 3 or 4 times to figure out whether or not Winston Churchill was willing that FDR had agreed to publish the telegram, or whether FDR had actually agreed to publish the telegram and changed his mind. I can’t decipher it. I so I can’t say for certain whether or not FDR said, go ahead and publish my telegram, because Churchill thought it would buck up the French and Reynaud thought it would buck up the French, because FDR is saying, fight on, fight on. And FDR says, oh, the State Department says, I can’t publish the Telegraph. What did you make of that by FDR? I thought it was disappointing.13:51S3

No, it’s a good thing. uh, that, uh, we were reluctant to go into that war. Uh, we were reluctant to go into the First World War two. And, and we went into both of them upon being attacked. Right. And that’s, and we didn’t have agreements in advance of either of those wars that we would come to the defense of those countries. Roosevelt wanted to. And, and the reasons he wanted to are in that memo that Churchill wrote him. When Churchill and Roosevelt began writing each other, they write each other as former naval persons. Roosevelt had been assistant secretary to the Navy. And see, you have to make a link if you can, between the thought of the American founders, the authors of the Declaration of Independence and this policy in the Second World War. And that link is broken in part because Franklin Roosevelt was a modern liberal reinterpreting the Declaration of Independence into something else. I argue right? That’s a big argument, right? We’re not making it here, but it’s also maintained because Roosevelt reads about what’s going to happen to America if the seas are dominated by hostile powers. And that becomes a prospect that’s open. Right. Roosevelt was. He was assistant secretary of the Navy. And, you know, the great, the great. What the great explainer of British power is a man named Alfred Thayer Mahan, who was a late 19th, early 20th century figure at the Naval Institute in America. And he wrote The Influence of Sea Power on history. And he it’s a very powerful book, and it’s still fundamental to strategic thinking in West today in China, too. Yeah. And what does it say? It says the cheapest, fastest way to to move goods. Goods around the earth is by sea. And so sea power matters a lot. It mattered very much to the founders of the country. And so, uh, Roosevelt knows that, right? And we’ve always been for freedom of the seas. We always had serious navy from the Revolutionary War on. And, and so to have that under the hands of a continental power, I mean, it’s just a fact that the Chinese Navy is bigger than ours today. And China has a multiple of our shipbuilding capacity today. That’s a serious fact.16:36S2

And did you notice, though, doctor, that when our Apache helicopter went down, we dispatched a drone made by Saronic. And it looks like, God forgive me. I hope I don’t offend the PT boat people. It looks very much like a PT boat from World War Two or a swift boat from Vietnam, but it doesn’t have anyone on it. It just goes and picks up our pilots. That’s a revolution.17:05S3

Well, there’s a very good. I just got it this morning. I haven’t read it all yet, but there’s a man named Dennis Blair who was a big naval commander in the Pacific. And he published an article about the question, Can China take Taiwan? And he says there’s just a lot of developments that make that very doubtful now. And we can’t rest on our laurels. But, you know, I mean, one of the things that’s been displayed in Iran is that we have made a lot of progress against these. And with these drone weapons and in knocking them down, not having to spend a $2 million weapon to knock down a $30,000 drone. And so there’s a lot of innovation going on right now. A lot of it comes from Anduril, and that’s Palmer Luckey’s company. And that’s just awesome to me.17:55S2

It’s awesome to me too. And there in Ohio, doctor or not. Michigan. There in Ohio. We’ll come back. Hopefully I’ll evade some anti Ohio talk from Doctor Arnn. Don’t go anywhere America. Welcome back America. I’m Hugh Hewitt talking with Doctor Larry Arnn about the new technologies of war everywhere. A lot of it comes as well from Ukraine I’ll remind you. Four years ago when the Russians invaded and we thought it would be a two week war, you made the comment. And then history has surprises like this. Zelensky fellow. Ukraine’s a surprise. And the ability that they have demonstrated with drones is a remarkable surprise. I mean, world changing. Yeah.18:32S3

Yeah. And they’re getting a lot of help.18:34S2

And we’re helping them.18:37S3

You know. Yeah. Well, a lot of people are. And I probably especially us and you know, we’re learning from that and, uh, uh, it, you know, we, it is a sad commentary. That we’re in danger all the time now, right? And for much of American history, that wasn’t true. And we’re safer than anybody, at least anybody powerful. But we’ve got we’re subject to immediate attack. And that means being ready and having a superior military at the cheapest possible cost is urgently needed to any republic like ours.19:27S2

Let me also, we’re talking about naval power. And man, uh, the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates again that, uh, what seems like a fight far away with a country we know much about Oman and UAE and Iran is actually about the world’s health. You can’t allow international waterways to be dominated by a malign power by by any power, unless it’s the Panama Canal and they own it, or we own it and gave it to them. You can’t let the Straits of Malacca or the Strait of Hormuz or any of the narrow waterways, the Taiwan Strait, be dominated by one power, or the whole world suffers. That’s why I think you mentioned that our Constitution specifically doesn’t say anything about a standing army says we are to provide and maintain a navy that’s in the Constitution.20:16S3

Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. We didn’t see that’s and see put a point right. First of all, as I say, all proper reasoning about international security and foreign policy begins with the interest of the United States. Well, we’re a net oil exporter and we hope to remain so. I hope we do. But we’re also a huge oil importer, and that has to do with refining capacity and kinds of oil and which kinds we can refine and which kinds we produce and don’t produce. And those are sticky problems, right. And so, you know, the world has a world price and we got to buy a lot of it. And so, yeah, the interest of the United States is wrapped up in this. And, uh, the Strait of Hormuz turns out to be a very sticky problem. Uh, and, uh, we will see because we haven’t, we haven’t, we have won the war in Iran so far. We will see how it comes out.21:18S2

Let me go back to last week and then bring it forward. Uh, you mentioned last week that Churchill wrote the prime Ministers of the dominions. In that letter, he wrote, uh, to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, quote, Hitler will have to break us in this island or lose the war. He then on June 18th, gives this remarkable speech. We don’t have the audio of it. Um, uh, which is the finest hour speech? Do you have an account of how the British people reacted to that speech?21:52S3

Yeah, many. It was, uh, that that is the one where like it is first of all, he did broadcast the speech. That is the one where people were now focused on the problem. Uh, you know, in other words, uh, when the war started, nobody knew what to expect, you know, and then to be losing on such a scale and so fast that violated the pace of the First World War, which, you know, they lost some battles in the beginning, but within three weeks that settled down into trench warfare and France didn’t surrender. And what, six weeks, how long it took. So they’re getting used to that. And then he gives the speech. And it’s worth noting, you know, the peroration of the speech at the end is, uh, if the British Empire should last a thousand years. Men will still say this was their finest hour. Remember that? That’s kind of a doleful prediction, too. This is the peak. What comes later is lower. And that means the Churchill against its will and never willing to do that. Another time in his life was putting all the chips on the table. Uh, that when he said to the French nations that die fighting, rise up again, those that surrender tamely are gone forever. He was prepared to live by that creed himself.23:23S2

And he, in fact, did live by that creed. He put all the chips on the table. More with doctor on coming up on the Hillsdale dialogue, all things [email protected]. Stay tuned. Welcome back America. I’m Hugh Hewitt, we’re talking about the French Navy with Doctor Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, which is why he then goes on and he’s very harshly critical of Admiral Darlan and very, uh, full of praise for de Gaulle. De Gaulle, he calls the Constable of France. It’s a fine turn of phrase. He also says about Darlan. And he’s such a beautiful writer. I had his great grandfather. Darlan is the admiral of the French Navy. His great grandfather had been killed at the Battle of Trafalgar. October 21st, 1805. So we’re going back a long way from 1940, Churchill says. I therefore thought of him as one of those good Frenchmen who hate England, which is a fine turn of phrase, but it’s a nice way to distinguish between French, who are who are defeatist and French, who just hate England. But he has to bomb, and I don’t think many Americans know this now. Larry Arnn, the Brits had to destroy the French navy. They had to seize it wherever they could and scuttle it wherever they had to. It’s really kind of a remarkable episode in history.24:40S3

Churchill was very reluctant to do that. Remember, the British Navy and the French Navy have been training in common for Since 1905, roughly. So there’s no there’s no British officer who doesn’t know the French Navy and regard it as their closest ally, and now he’s going to sink their ships. And Churchill tells in this book he tells the story in the in the French North African port of Oran is where the French navy went to under Darlan’s orders. Churchill tells about the negotiations between. Is that in this chapter I’m kind of lost where we are now.25:24S2

Yes.25:25S3

Yeah. So it’s in the book, um, he tells the story of the negotiations and the British commander comes and says, I need you to give us these ships or scuttle them. And the French, and it’s very civil, their allies and they negotiate for several rounds, and the French admiral is conferring back. And then he tells him. Not going to do it. And the British says, we’re going to sink your fleet. And they do. And that’s a terrible thing. Churchill regretted it deeply. On the other hand, there’s a lot of evidence that it had a big effect on Franklin Roosevelt because he remember in that thing we talked about where Roosevelt won’t publish his statement. Well, he really couldn’t, you know, because he, he he didn’t have the authority to go to war. He didn’t have the authority to help. But he’s also hearing from the French. And the French don’t sound like people are going to keep on. And they didn’t. Right. And so when he sees Churchill and he later sent Harry Hopkins, who lived with Roosevelt in the white House for many years, very close to him when he sent him to talk to Churchill. And when he saw this destruction of the French fleet, he thought Churchill hinted that they were going to keep fighting. And therefore this is a enterprise we might invest in.27:08S2

Page 213 he writes, the elimination of the French navy had, as an important factor, almost at a single stroke by. Violent action produced a profound impression in every country. Here was this Britain, which had so many had counted down and out, which strangers had supposed to be quivering on the brink of surrender to a mighty power arrayed against her, striking ruthlessly at her dearest friends of yesterday, and securing for a while to herself the undisputed command of the sea. It was made plain that the British War Cabinet feared nothing, and would stop at nothing. This was true. He’s right about that. If you kill all your friends, you’re not going to. You’re not going to stop.27:54S3

Yeah. Here we go. It, uh. You know, uh, I used to keep on my wall a war photograph of of Abraham Lincoln. And next to it, a war photograph of Winston Churchill. And beneath each of them quote. And the quote from Lincoln was, you don’t fight wars by throwing by blowing rose water through elder stalk squirts. And the quote and the quote from Churchill is in the Canadian parliament. He in the middle of the war, he said, uh, we have not traveled all this way across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy. And, uh, in other words, yeah, this guy is formidable. This guy is conquered Europe. We’re not nothing either. And, uh, that is very important. After Alamein first really big land battle that the British one. Churchill celebrated that and said, you know, we know that our soldiers are prepared to die for their country. They can also kill for their country. And that, in other words, you’re going to have to act like a winner if you’re going to win.29:03S2

You do indeed have to act like a winner if you’re going to win. Stay tuned. Doctor, I’ll be right back after the break. All things [email protected], including their fabulous new course on the Odyssey. Welcome back America. I’m Hugh Hewitt. Doctor, we’re about to talk about the rhetoric that is used deployed by Churchill. Well the the ability of his to message is really quite extraordinary. Uh, the gift of rhetorical flourish. Boy it’s rare. FDR had it. Reagan had it. I think President Trump sometimes has it in conversation, but not in set piece rhetoric. Do you disagree with that? He’s not a set piece, rhetorician.29:45S3

Yeah. Churchill. That’s right. Churchill is, uh, I mean, there Churchill prepared everything, right? But he prepared it. But then in addition, there are these many times when he just waxed eloquent, like, here’s a phrase that I liked. He writes to some of his colleagues. I really think that you, Lloyd and Amory, ought to be able to lift our affairs in the East and Middle East out of the catalepsy by which they are smitten. Who writes that? You know.30:19S2

Last thing I want to mention this week he writes to Smuts. A day or two weeks after his finest hour, Smuts is running South Africa. If Hitler fails to beat us here, he will probably recoil eastwards. Indeed, he may do this even without trying invasion. I just wanted to point out he’s a brilliant man. He’s forecasting the future in their darkest hour might be their finest hour, but he’s saying, you know what? If he doesn’t get this island? He’s going to attack Stalin. And he’s exactly right.30:50S3

So the. So this chapter ends. I’m going I’m going to go find it. The sentence really great. I can’t find it, but it’s. And it would all come to be just what he predicted.31:05S2

All right. We will come back next week to talk to Winston Churchill’s. A remarkable gift of prophecy and rhetorical skill, but most importantly of statesmanship. Doctor Oren, thank you.31:19S1

Thanks for listening to the Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you find your audio. For more information about Hillsdale College, head to hillsdale.edu.

The post Churchill’s The Second World War, Part Twenty-Nine appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Rosa Kubala, kindergarten teacher and student leadership advisor at Founders Classical Academy of Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nevada, joins host Scot Bertram to discuss how parents can help to prepare their child for success before they enter the classroom, the role of parents in education, and the many lessons she has learned in her time as a kindergarten teacher.

Learn more: https://k12.hillsdale.edu/

A 20-minute podcast featuring professors, K-12 teachers, and friends of Hillsdale College, all speaking about classical education—what it is, why it’s still relevant today, and what makes it unique. Hosted by Scot Bertram.

Welcome to the Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula, and teacher led classrooms. Now, your host, Scott Bertram.

Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show at our website, k12.hillsdale.edu. We’re joined by Rosa Kubala. She’s a kindergarten teacher and student leadership advisor at Founders Classical Academy of Las Vegas, also part of the committee that formed the first governing body of the school. Rosa, thanks so much for joining us.

Absolutely. I’m so excited to be here this morning.

Talking about partnering with parents to ensure student success today in classical education. We do hear that parents are the child’s first teachers. And you’re a kindergarten teacher. You’re the literal first teacher inside the school. When we say parents are a child’s first teachers, what does that mean in practice, especially for those students that you see for the first time?

So parents are the models and the teachers for students from birth until basically oftentimes the first time they bring a child to someone other than themselves, which is usually me, the kindergarten teacher. So it’s kind of a pass off. And I like to say that once that is made, we are co-parenting and they are co-teaching because now it becomes a partnership between the two of us.

How can parents help to prepare their child for success before they enter the classroom.

This is something that comes up quite often in kindergarten, especially. Parents are usually surprised when I tell them that it’s not an academic answer. It is more of a social answer and learning how to go to school. Students need to learn to listen and ask questions. In turn, they need to raise their hand before they use the restroom, which is huge. Nobody does that at home. And so as far as kindergarten, that is something that’s really important. At our school, we wear uniforms and those require belts. So students sometimes learn that they don’t know how to use a belt. The first time. They’re finally at the front of the line to use the restroom. So things that you don’t necessarily think about are things that, especially in kindergarten, they need to know. And this changes with the age of the child. Of course, when we have students coming in at different levels. They need academic help, and usually the school will help counsel students when they enter our school. Because we are such a rigorous program and different from the mainstream. There’s a lot of foundation academically that the students will need, and the teachers are a fabulous resource for that.

So you mentioned that it’s a bit of a surprise when they find out it’s kind of social things, not academic things. Are there any other misconceptions or surprises that a lot of parents have about kindergarten?

Absolutely. I have some really, really great parents who send their students to really, really great preschools, and the students will come knowing how to count to 100 and they’ll know their ABCs. And in our program specifically, those things don’t necessarily help students get farther along. In our case, our explicit phonics program is so basic. We start from the beginning and a child that knows letter names for letters is actually sometimes a detriment, because we want those students to know the sounds those letters make instead of their letter names, because when we’re reading, that doesn’t really help them. Mhm. I like to tell parents, as far as academics, numeracy is the best thing that they can learn. If the students can understand the concept of what numbers are. And this doesn’t mean counting to 100. This means counting to ten, but understanding what ten really is instead of saying, yeah, I can rattle that off. Well, how much is ten? How many fingers do we have? How many more would I need if I only have eight? In order to make ten. So it is somewhat surprising. Even students that can read coming into kindergarten are not necessarily ahead of the the rest of the group, because none of them really have the foundation that we’re going to set.

Mhm. So what do parents need teachers to know about their student entering kindergarten?

Parents need to know that teachers are going to take care of them. It’s a very huge leap of trust to let your child be in the care of somebody else. And so what I like to do, especially in kindergarten, is I’ll have parents fill out a getting to know your child’s sheet. It has everything from fun facts to health concerns. And that way they know that I am listening and paying attention. Once I have that information, I’m going to make sure that I am a good steward and take care of their children more so than just academically. But I have their wellness in mind as well.

And on the flip side, other than some of those surprising things, misconceptions, what do teachers need parents to know?

Parents should know that foremost, separation anxiety is natural. It’s normal for children and parents to experience anxiety during the first weeks of school, tears that dropped off do not necessarily mean a child is unhappy or unsafe. Consistent routines and confident short goodbyes help children adjust more quickly. Parents need to know that teachers will care for their children. We are concerned with teaching them all the things we want them to know, and we want this for the whole class. Nobody likes to think of themselves as selfish, but as a parent, I know I’m going to pull my child out of a fire first. That’s just human nature. Parents want us to have this level of care for their children. As a school, we have procedures and rules to make sure that everybody is safe. But also parents need to know that we think about these things, and our actions have reasons behind them that are meant for the good of all students. We understand that students overall wellness is part of our responsibility. We need to show the parents that we are paying attention and we take this responsibility seriously.

So what can parents do to support a child if he or she is struggling in that first year of kindergarten.

Yeah, this is a real fear for parents when their child’s not doing well. Things get a little tricky because it’ll often get emotional and rightly so. Teachers should be a parent’s first resource. Parents have every right to ask for a conference if they feel something is going wrong. Our program is rigorous and different by design. A teacher is likely to identify why a child is struggling and offer suggestions. Students that transfer from Non-Classical schools need time and support to adjust to their new situation, academically and socially. Parents who want a classical education for their child do not always recognize what a significant academic and cultural adjustment this can be. Teachers can offer suggestions and help pinpoint the specific support needed for their child. This is a huge education investment. A child who struggles will inevitably start to feel unsuccessful, and. This is damaging to the spirit Without awe and wonder, education becomes a dry obligation.

Are there particular aspects of classical education, as you find at Founders Classical in Las Vegas, that naturally reinforces the role of parents in education?

I think we do offer some unique opportunities for the parent to be involved with their child’s education. We often invite parents to come in and observe lessons because they are again co-teaching, and the more they understand what we’re doing and the reasoning behind it, the better off we are all together. We have even parents come in to support our curriculum. Sometimes if they do something that is well within the boundaries of what we’re teaching. They can come in and do that. And I think our parents are a little bit more understanding of what we do at a classical school, because I know in our K 12 Hillsdale schools. We are all schools of choice. So parents research us hopefully, and they are bringing their child to us. I like to say on purpose, you guys are here because you have a reason to be here. They’ve read our mission statement. They understand that we’re going to talk about civics. We’re going to talk about virtue, which is not always accepted in the mainstream schools.

Rosa Kubala is with us, kindergarten teacher, student leadership advisor at Founders Classical Academy of Las Vegas, talking about partnering with parents to ensure student success. If there is a little bit of contention, if there’s a contentious feeling between teacher and parent, why is that usually so, and is there a best way to help with that between parents and teachers?

Yeah, this is definitely the elephant in the room. We all kind of worry about this on both sides. We both have the same goal. Parents and students, parents and teachers both want success for the students. Teachers want all the students to succeed, and parents in general have their eyes on just their child because that’s natural. I have always advocated for my children. In fact, that is largely why we have a Hillsdale K-12 classical school in Las Vegas. But as you might imagine, this can sometimes cause that friction. In my kindergarten class, I often make the point that students need to learn an entirely new set of rules and procedures for school. Children do not need to raise their hands at home or wait in line to use the restroom. In my classroom, there are 29 other students to consider. So this unnatural procedure needs to be learned. And from the parent perspective, it can be frustrating to realize that students don’t always have their needs met. As soon as we would all actually prefer during the school week, our students are with teachers for about the same number of waking hours as they are with their parents. So this partnership needs to be strong and honest. Communication is key. Personally, I try to put myself in the shoes of the parents and answer questions they’re likely to have before they have them. I really appreciate when my parents voiced their concerns. I can’t repair a situation that I’m not aware of. The sooner I know of an issue, the faster it can be addressed. Clear and honest communication, I think, is the best answer for these kinds of situations.

Communication is key. What are those sorts of things that you as a teacher, need to know about over the course of a school year, be it academic, social. What are those topics that will be helpful to you as a teacher in the classroom?

This is great. Yeah. A lot of times parents don’t think about telling us, you know, our pet died last night, or if there’s an extenuating Situation that might cause a child to not be up to their best, because we get to know their children quite well. And if something is off, we can usually tell pretty quickly. And having that knowledge beforehand can help us support the child emotionally, which is usually the difference. Academics kind of roll forward in a very steady progression unless something comes up. And most often those things are emotional family things that we wouldn’t be aware of.

How do you deal with a child that is perhaps overly disruptive inside the classroom?

Well, this depends on the type of disruption that the child is causing. Basically, we all love our children, but we know they are not flawless. And in the parent teacher partnership, this is where we most need to be on the same page. Strategies are going to differ by grade level in school. Teachers and parents both need clear guidance from school administration as to how these situations are handled. Depending on the severity of the disruption, the answer may include a quiet moment with the teacher to de-escalate the situation or the assistance of a counselor or administrator. I personally love praising the children who do things correctly. If there’s a small disturbance in my classroom, I’ll look for a child that is behaving properly and let them know what a good job they are doing. Children generally want to do well, and when they see someone succeed, they will usually do their best to follow suit. If this does not adjust the behavior sufficiently, I’ll ask that child to stop and think about what choices they’re making. For anything more than this, I’ll send a note home to the parent. Support from families can make a huge impact. Sometimes parents will let me know of extenuating circumstances or there’s, you know, all kinds of things that can cause this type of behavior. Often parents will reinforce classroom rules, and then the child gets a clear understanding of the importance of the standards of conduct. I’ve actually had some parents tell me that they implement our rules at home and the whole household benefits.

I think we touched on this a little bit previously, but explicitly. More specifically, is there a difference in the relationship between parents and teachers at a classical school than perhaps something that a parent might be might be more accustomed to?

Yeah. Again, our parents are choosing a specific type of education that we spend a lot of time preparing and delivering. Most parents who come to our school recognize this and support what we do. On occasion, parents jump into our program without doing their research, and this can be problematic. Our websites abound with information about who and what we are and what we do. We. We are dedicated to delivering a classical education to those who want it. This includes Socratic seminars and a robust list of classical literature under government and political thought. Our program guide reads, and I have a little quote. The sixth grade history curriculum introduces students to moral and political philosophy, and thus should inform how they think about government by focusing on the ideas of Judaism, Christianity, ancient Greece, and ancient Rome. Students should begin to see the ideas undergirding their own country. The mission statement at the Hillsdale School, where I teach reads, we aim to train the minds and improve the hearts of young people through a rigorous classical education in the liberal arts and sciences, with instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue. For comparison, the current mission statement at the County middle school where my children would be zoned to attend reads. We challenge students to explore their curiosity through hands on, inquiry based learning in science, technology, engineering and math. We empower them to navigate real world problems with critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity. We inspire them to excel academically, socially and personally, preparing them for success in high school, college and beyond. Current educational offerings are quite diverse. Parents who know what they have signed up for are poised for success.

And are there ways. Simple things parents can do at home that have an outsized impact on student success, perhaps specifically with homework, or those tasks or duties that you are expecting those students to complete?

This is actually more of an important question than it seems. Teachers teach and students learn in the classroom. Homework is intended for practice, habit building, and reinforcement. Parents should not be expected to teach new concepts. Parents can best support their child by providing a well-lit space where student has uninterrupted time to work independently. This time should be scheduled into the daily routine, not necessarily right after school, and definitely not in the car on the way home or on the way to an activity. Homework time should be treated as a valued and necessary component to the school day. It should never be a punishment or a prerequisite for a reward. I think it’s also important to keep in mind the purpose of the homework. Sometimes life happens and there is no time to fit everything in. Let’s say a child in my class is up late at a ballpark because a sibling is in a playoff game, there are choices to make. This is a great time to remember the partnership. I would allow a student to submit an assignment late if the parent reached out in this situation. Sadly, sometimes parents can only see the missing grade and they themselves will complete the assignment just to turn it in on time. I would much rather have the assignment late or even missing, because this is definitely not a good example for the child. I like the notion of letting children know that they can still be successful without being perfect all the time. Knowledge, mastery and understanding are the goals of education, not perfection. Good grades will follow when the children learn with wonder or joy and integrity.

Is there anything in particular that you have learned from parents, or perhaps just through your interaction with parents over the years, that you think maybe has made you a better teacher?

I think overall, just being, being open to listening what every parent says, every new. I’ve taught kindergarten, I just finished my 11th year and there is a new surprise every year. Parents have different, um, a lot of it honestly stems from fear. Once a parent tells me what their their needs and concerns are, we can deal with that. And that really supports the partnership.

Rosa Kubala is a Is kindergarten teacher and student leadership adviser at Founders Classical Academy of Las Vegas. Also on the committee that formed the first governing body at the school governing board at the school. Talking today about partnering with parents to ensure student success. Rosa, thanks so much for joining us here on the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education podcast.

Thank you so much. It’s my pleasure.

I’m Scott Bertram. We invite you to like us on Facebook. Search for Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education. You also can follow us on Instagram at Hillsdale underscore k12. That’s Hillsdale underscore k12 on Instagram. Thank you for listening to the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. [email protected] or wherever you get your audio.

The post Partnering with Parents to Ensure Student Success appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Guests: Donald P. Hodel and Stephanie Lauback

Host Scot Bertram talks with:

Donald P. Hodel, former secretary of energy and former secretary of the interior in the Reagan administration, about the leadership lessons he learned working for President Reagan, as well as his new biography, Called to Serve: My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond.

And Stephanie Lauback, associate professor of physics at Hillsdale College, discusses her research into nanotechnology and magnetism.

From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true and the beautiful are taught, nurtured and honored. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.00:25S2

He was the most congenial man, but also a man of firm convictions. And I think that amazed the press. Their feeling was that a man who was that congenial wouldn’t be tough. He was tough.00:40S3

This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. That was Don Hodel, former secretary of energy and secretary of the interior under President Ronald Reagan. He has a new memoir called Called to Serve. We’ll talk in depth with Don in just a little bit. And later in today’s program, Doctor Stephanie Laubach from Hillsdale’s physics Department tells us about nanotechnology and magnetism. First, we’re joined now by Don Hodel. He is a former secretary of energy and former secretary of the interior in the Reagan administration, also served in leadership in the Christian Coalition and focus on the family, among other things. Throughout his long and distinguished career, he has a new memoir out. It’s called called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond. Don, thanks so much for joining us.01:35S2

It’s my pleasure. Thanks, Scott.01:37S3

You serve as secretary of the Interior of Energy, Undersecretary of interior. I mentioned your leadership roles elsewhere throughout your life. You say early in the book that you always felt led to take on new assignments, new challenges from time to time throughout your life. Our leaders like you born that way. Do you feel like you were always supposed to be in that sort of position inside whatever environment you were in.02:03S2

You know, Scott, I really don’t know. But as I wrote this book, I realized that in my life I had not sought these positions over and over. Positions seemed to seek me, and I responded positively on most occasions. Occasionally I felt I was not called to do something, but most of the time I didn’t seek the position. But when it came knocking, I rose to the challenge.02:38S3

You also describe your leadership style as collegial. How would you describe that for the audience, and how does that perhaps contrast to other types of styles that you served under during your life?02:51S2

Well, it was interesting. Again, as I wrote the book, something came rather sharply into focus, which was that my preferred role was as the assistant or the number two man to a decisive leader. So I had the experience several times in my life in the legal department at Georgia Pacific and again at Bonneville Power Administration, and again with Jim Watt at the interior. And President Reagan to serve decisive leaders, people who seemed to know what they wanted to do instinctively. And they they made that decision decisively. My approach to a decision when I became the number one man, when I became the secretary or the head of the Bonneville Power Administration, or president of Christian Coalition or president of focus on the family, my approach was to bring in the key people involved in that matter and discuss with them what our objective was, what our alternatives were, and glean from that process a consensus decision as to what we ought to do. And that was much more gratifying and effective for me than trying to make a decision on my own part, and then just tell people what they should do.04:22S3

Don Hodel with us. His book is called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond. We’ll take a few stops along your long career. I want to start back in the late 1960s and your career in politics, when it started working in 1968 for Oregon, Reagan for president, and being involved in the Reagan campaign at that time. What was politics like in the late 1960s, and how did you find yourself attracted to a candidate like Reagan in 68.04:55S2

Well, my as I relate in the book, I think my interest in politics was triggered partly because my father was impressed when I was age five at having met a state representative and I followed politics. Read about it, listened to it, and was active in college in the Young Republicans. And, uh, at that time in Oregon in 1964, we went through a very hostile campaign in the Republican primary for president between Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. And my goal was to try to fill precincts at a time when people were polarized, which is akin to what we see today. But it was within the party.05:53S3

Mhm.05:54S2

Very disruptive. A disagreement between them. And I found myself having to play the role of a peacemaker. And it was only marginally successful in in doing that.06:07S3

You go on to work for the Bonneville Power Administration, and as part of that position, end up testifying in Washington, D.C., in front of congressmen and senators and inside call to serve. You say you learned that however thin your knowledge of the subject matter might be, you almost always knew more than the senators or representatives asking questions. Do you think, or at least feel that’s still likely the same case today in our politics? Is it something that we should be concerned about?06:40S2

I don’t think it’s something we should be concerned about. I think it’s a very natural aspect of the process. The congressman or the senator has before him one of many agencies that may report to his committee. His knowledge is going to be relatively superficial, except in special cases. Staff may have deeper knowledge, but the person from the organization, the agency that’s testifying to him, ought to have a great deal more knowledge about the agency because he’s working in that one agency. So I think that’s a very natural accompaniment to the system that we have.07:20S3

Don Hodel with us, his book called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond. You’re at Bonneville Power Administration through the end of 1977, and we perhaps pick things back up with the beginning of Reagan’s first term, when you are serving as the undersecretary of the interior, eventually you’d be secretary of energy, eventually secretary of the interior. How does one become a cabinet secretary or a cabinet undersecretary? What is that process like?07:51S2

Scott. There are as many paths to a cabinet position as there are positions. Some people have excellent personal relationships with the president, and he turns to them for the expertise that he knows they have. Other people are well connected with key senators or congressmen who push for their nomination. Others, as in my case, I was known to somebody that President Reagan trusted and relied upon for an for recommendation for the Secretary of Energy’s job, gained my position as the number two man, the undersecretary of interior, because years earlier I had worked with Jim. What we had become close personal friends, had great respect for each other’s abilities, and he recognized that I had management skills that would be very helpful to him as secretary. So he pressed to have me become his undersecretary, even though that was not one of my aspirations. So my path to being his, his undersecretary, was because of our experience. My path to being Secretary of Energy was because I had met and worked with a man named Tom Reed when he was running the Reagan campaign for president in 1968, and I ran the campaign for him in Oregon.09:25S3

I want to ask a number of questions about this particular time in in the book. And I want to start, I guess, with with Jim Watt, who you knew very well and served under and with throughout your career in a couple of places. And the Reagan administration. And what specifically had a reputation was criticized in the media during this time for not supporting the environment. And you were there with him along the way. What was wrong about that characterization of Jim Watt and the Interior Department at that time, and how did you consider environmental questions during that time in the Reagan administration?10:07S2

Very interesting question, because under Jimmy Carter, the Secretary of Interior, Cecil Andrus, announced publicly that whenever the environment, as it was involved in an issue, the environment. One period, end of discussion. And we came in with an absolutely different attitude, which was that environment was one of the many important things that needed to be considered. But we really believed that a balanced approach made great sense and that we did not have to choose between an improving environment and an adequate economy in this country. But it meant making decisions from time to time, specifically on what environmental matters had to be protected and what non-environmental matters needed to be protected or advanced. By the time we left Washington, I was pleased to see that even the Democratic National Convention recognized that we did not have to choose between the environment and economics. So we were successful to that extent. But the single issue environmental approach was in the Carter administration. And after the Reagan administration, it began to show up again in the national process.11:37S3

That’s Don Hodel, former secretary of the interior and secretary of energy under President Ronald Reagan, will continue with his story in just a moment. First, I want to remind you about the new Hillsdale College online course on The Odyssey. Find it at hillsdale.edu/new course NEWCOURSE. Maybe you’ve already seen the new adaptation of The Odyssey in theaters, or you’re planning to see it. It’s even better to read it. In the words of Homer, the father of Western literature, Homer’s epic poems like The Odyssey look at the noblest ways of life for man. The Odyssey itself contains themes about love, marriage, fatherhood, kingship, duty, loyalty. Now’s the best time for you to learn more and to read The Odyssey, along with Doctor Ben Whalen, your teacher for this course, The Odyssey, right now at hillsdale.edu/course. hillsdale.edu/ewcourse for the Odyssey. We continue with Don Hodel, former secretary of the interior and secretary of energy under Ronald Reagan. His memoir is called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond. Don, we had just talked about Jim Watts and some misrepresentations, misunderstandings about him and how he ran the department. I’ve got to ask about the Beach Boys. I’m a music fan and a great music lover, and it’s, of course, a story that music lovers know or think they know. And even those who aren’t perhaps know the story about the Beach Boys and the 4th of July shows in the early 1980s. And the story goes that Jim. What the Interior Department band, the Beach Boys from performing on July 4th in Washington, D.C.. Unsavory characters. You were part of the department as this was unfolding. What do we have wrong? What do most people have wrong about the story about the Beach Boys? on the 4th of July.13:44S2

Well, I go into quite a bit of detail there, because neither Jim Watt nor I were fans of that kind of music. We had no idea who the Beach Boys were. The National Park Service decided on its own while he was secretary, that it would not have that type of music. It wasn’t even the Beach Boys who had performed, but that type of music was bringing a drug culture, violence. We had rapes occurring during these performances. It was a mess on the National Mall, and so the Park Service, on its own, announced that we would not be having these performances in the future. Well, the Washington Post wrote an article that The Beach Boys had been banned by Jim Watt, and this was a big deal. And I walked into his office that morning and and he looked at me and he said, who are the Beach Boys? And I had to say, I didn’t know. However, there was a furore over it and the story ran and the press pushed it. Nancy Reagan commented how she had raised her kids on the Beach Boys and, uh, Jim took a real beating over that. It was apparent to me later that it was because they were looking for something to beat him up with. Because when I was secretary, the Beach Boys were once again banned, and this time the Beach Boys specifically were banned by the National Park Service. And I didn’t get a question about it for two years. So it was not the decision. It was the decision maker that was the target. So but it’s become it’s become part of the history that he took the decision to ban them, which was never true.15:42S3

Don Hodel with us, former Secretary of the interior. Secretary of energy under the Reagan administration. His book is called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond. I want to ask a question or two about your beloved wife, Barbara, who passed away a few years ago. At this particular time. And throughout the book, there are so many allusions to consulting her, talking to her about what your job might be or where you’re going to move, or when you’re going to, how long you’re going to serve in a certain place. And you say you included your wife as much as possible, the secretary of Education, meaning you wanted her to be along on on trips. I think later as secretary of Interior, she was actually in some of the meetings but not talking in the meetings. She said hello. And then and then that was it. Didn’t want to seem like she was involved, but you wanted to have your wife as close to you as possible during your service and during these years in Washington. is that common among secretaries, at least in your experience? And did you need to ask for approval to make this happen? How family friendly is a position like Secretary of the interior, Secretary of Energy?16:54S2

It’s not. It is very uncommon. I don’t know of anybody else who did anything like what I did. My wife and I had an unusually close and warm and loving relationship. She had no interest in outside activities. She was very interested as an observer in things, and she was willing to adjust her life activities in a way that would allow her to come into any meeting of mine that I would include her in. As secretary, I had great latitude in who I would include in meetings and for meetings where they were with staff. She would come anytime she had the time, which was a lot with outsiders if she knew them or there was nothing sensitive about the meeting. I would include her. She agreed that the one thing she couldn’t do is talk about a substantive matter in the meeting, because that would confuse people as to where the decision was coming from. But she was perfectly comfortable with that. And so, as far as I know, nobody else did what we did. But nobody was critical of it. And it was a great relationship for us. And I worked when I was undersecretary, I worked from 730 or 8 in the morning until 11, 1130 at night. She would come in after hours and sit in my office and, and do cruel work or read while I worked on stacks of paper. And it was like me being at home, working on something and in our living room.18:41S3

Your wife is also involved in what I think is a pretty interesting piece of advice, or one that I had not considered before. As you were in the cabinet, you said that you figured out you weren’t really happy something was wrong. You figured out you couldn’t feel good about your successes because you didn’t want to be too prideful, but you could feel bad about your mistakes or failures, so there was no upside at all. It was only only bad. And you talk to Barbara and said, I need someone that I can brag about without trying to, to, to hide my pride without trying to be modest. And she filled that role for you as you worked and continue to work in DC as at Interior and Energy. What did that arrangement allow you to do? How did that change the way you felt.19:26S2

In my head? Scott. I always heard my mother when I was a young boy, when I got a little happy about something I had done, she would say, don’t get a big head, baby. So I would hear that as an adult. Now I’m in the president’s cabinet. I do something that I’m pretty pleased with. And I hear that voice. And so I don’t allow myself to feel pleased about it. That’s getting a big head. But if I do something for which I get hammered or I’ve made a mistake that I can, that I can do. So all I had was downside. And I realized the job was becoming burdensome because I could not enjoy successes when they occurred. So because of a wonderful relationship I had with Barbara, I just went to her and laid that all out and asked if she would be willing to play the role of a listener who would not be critical and not suggest that I was getting a big head if I wanted to brag about something that I thought I had done well. And it worked beautifully. Yeah, she was wonderful at that.20:37S3

A few more minutes here with Don Hodel. His book is called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond. As I’ve mentioned, you served then as Secretary of Energy for a few years and then came back as secretary of the interior for President Reagan’s second term. It was during that second term that you describe perhaps the biggest crisis you attended to during your time in D.C., and those are the 1988 Yellowstone wildfires. For those who don’t remember, or even those perhaps who weren’t around. Tell us a bit about why that was such a big deal and how the Department of Interior could or could not respond to that sort of tragedy.21:14S2

Well, Yellowstone National Park is about 2 million acres, and it is largely covered in forests. There are some incredibly beautiful areas and wildlife in that park in the summer of 1988. Very dry. I. Several fires were started by lightning. A couple of fires occurred outside the park caused by. In one case, a logging operation, another a human action and fire campfire or something. The Park Service standard. The routine was that they would not fight naturally occurring fires because fire was a natural part of the habitat, but they would fight. A man caused fire. Well, very rapidly these fires merged and pretty soon a large part of the park was burning. mid-July, I was informed that they had gotten the fires under control, and that very day, the winds came at in excess of 50 miles an hour, and we had the fires jump all the fire lines, and pretty soon the fire was completely out of control. At that point, we had help from the Department of Defense with 9000 soldiers on the fire lines. We had 400 fire trucks from all over the west in the park trying to help fight the fire. And all we could do at that point was try to protect buildings and bridges infrastructure, because there was just no way to get out there and stop the forest fire. At one point, somebody suggested that we needed to bulldoze a fire line. But the problem was two things. One, the winds were such that the sparks from the fire would jump hundreds of feet, so that the fire line would have had to be wider than a six lane highway, and that fire line would be a visible scar on the landscape for the next 200 years. So we decided against doing that. The net result was that there was nothing really we could do to fight the fire until September came and the air got cooler and we got some. Finally some snow to help dampen the fire. And finally it went out.23:40S3

MM. At the end or near the end of President Reagan’s second term, you helped describe what it’s like to be a lame duck secretary as that second term comes to an end. And there is literally, as you point out, in call to serve nothing for you to do. There are cabinet secretaries and President Trump’s second term who are about to experience this. Do you have any advice that you might like to pass along to them?24:05S2

Well, my advice is don’t kid yourself that you’re going to have a great deal of influence after the presidential election. And in fact, your influence will decline as you get closer to the election. And once the election is over and any policy decisions that you can still make have been made, there’s nothing left for you to do. Nobody really cares at that point what you think or what you’re going to do. Unless I would think somebody like the Secretary of State might be in the middle of a negotiation, but even there, his hands are substantially tied by the fact that his president is outgoing and the new president is coming in regardless of party. So you just power moves quickly, and the bureaucracy quickly recognizes there will be a new sheriff in town. And you’re not that guy.25:02S3

Don Hodel with us, his book called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond a few minutes on the beyond, because there’s there’s more there are additional chapters after your service in Washington as you become involved in the Christian Coalition with Pat Robertson, focus on the family as well. You have public service and now private service as well. I don’t know if it’s a stretch to say that that the private service. I don’t know if you were more unhappy during that time, but both seemed to end in ways that weren’t quite satisfactory. How would you how would you contrast your time in public service and your time in private service with Christian Coalition and focus on the family?25:43S2

As I say in the book, I did not do my due diligence before going to Christian Coalition. Had I done it, I really would not have gone.25:54S3

Mhm.25:55S2

And, uh, in the long run, Pat and Robertson and I simply were not a good, good match. Uh, so that was not, in my view, a very productive or successful effort. By the same token, I did what I did because I felt called to serve. And so I, you know, things came out of it for which I was better off. But it was not a high point in my life when I went to focus on the family because of my tremendous respect and admiration for Doctor James Dobson, and I had served there temporarily as a volunteer, and in 96 we’d established a wonderful relationship, and later I went back when he was finally willing to relinquish the presidency. And I went as president. And I went knowing that there was a substantial chance that in that role, the relationship, the wonderful relationship we had, would be damaged. And of course, it turned out to be in that case, it was, I would say, an inevitable side effect of taking on that role. He was a founder, a very decisive man, incredibly gifted, great Christian leader. But as a founder, He just had a terrible time relinquishing his baby, and that’s totally understandable. And my love for the man never changed. And I was very regretful that in the end, we had a somewhat ruptured relationship.27:45S3

We spent some time with Don Hodel. Haven’t talked about Ronald Reagan, the man, the president, the person you served under for, I believe, all eight years of his time in office. What qualities did you experience first hand that Ronald Reagan possessed that made him an exceptional president?28:07S2

You know, Scott, I don’t think most people recognize the importance of his Christian commitment. You go back historically, and his mother was very staunch, and he accompanied her to her witnessing. And that was a part of the man he was. He was the most congenial man, but also a man of firm convictions. And I think that amazed the press, because I think their feeling was that a man who was that congenial wouldn’t be tough.28:43S3

Mhm.28:43S2

In fact, he was tough. He knew what he wanted to accomplish. He had a vision for America. He was wonderful at casting that vision for the American people, the shining city on a hill. And he really understood the importance of his vision to helping the country move forward. And I think he did that remarkably well.29:08S3

Stories about Ronald Reagan and much more in the memoir by Don Hodel, it’s called To Serve by Path to President Reagan’s cabinet and beyond. Don, thank you for your service to the country, And thank you for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.29:26S2

Scott, thank you for giving me this opportunity to be with you.29:29S3

Up next, Doctor Stephanie Laubach from Hillsdale Physics Department tells us about her research into nanotechnology and magnetism. I’m Scott Bertram. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour. Welcome back to the Radio free Hillsdale Hour. I’m Scott Bertrand. Be sure to check out older episodes of this program, plus tons of other fantastic Hillsdale audio presentations and podcasts on Hillsdale College Podcast Network, podcast.hillsdale.edu, or wherever you get your audio. We’re joined by Doctor Stephanie Lorbek. She is associate professor of physics here at Hillsdale College. Doctor Lorbek, thanks for joining us.30:20S4

Yeah, thanks for having me on.30:21S3

Talking today about your research and work into nanotechnology and magnetism. Interesting stuff. When people hear nanotechnology, they might imagine some sort of science fiction novel. What does it really? And how small are we talking about when we talk about nanotechnology?30:40S4

Yeah. So nanotechnology is just any sort of a system that is manipulating matter or material on the nanoscale, which is between 1 to 100 nanometers. I’ll give you an idea of what that size is. It’s very small, but there’s lots of different places where these are used. My a lot of the applications that I’m more familiar with is in medicine. So just to give a couple examples, if you there’s labs that have built little boxes out of DNA and they’ll put drugs inside and the lid of the box can be closed and have a key on it. That’s a receptor that will only be opened if it has another different receptor on it. And cancer cells have certain receptors that are different than other receptors. So essentially, they can admit this drug and it will directly open once it hits a cancer cell. And so that’s a way of doing direct, um, drug drug delivery. Um, so a lot of different drug delivery methods that people use. Um, I love another one. And Doctor Castro’s lab, which I collaborated with when I was at Ohio State. Um, they had a cool system where bacteria basically had become resistant to drugs and the, um, they would hide basically the drugs inside of a DNA, uh, structure. They called it the Trojan horse. And it wasn’t shaped like a horse, but it was called the Trojan horse because essentially it would trick the bacteria that it would trick the bacteria into thinking that it wasn’t a drug and it would just take it in and think, oh, this is just some DNA, and it would bring it in, and then it would break down and deliver the drug to it. So it was like a way of directly delivering drugs to resistant bacteria. So there’s lots of different uses in nano like in medicine, but even in like material science, you can use it to change properties of things. So like, for example, graphene is a really big hot topic, one which is basically a 2D layer of carbon that you can make, say nanotubes where you roll the carbon on itself to make a tube, or you can make nanoribbons where they’re just cut in strips. And if you add this to materials, you can strengthen the material. People are using it in concrete and things like this. You can also change the electrical properties of it because it’s very conductive. So there’s lots of ways that you can change basically material properties using this. And then even in like computers and electronics, nanotechnology is a huge part of this. Making transistors smaller, which makes a computer run faster, helps us to store more information, process things at faster speeds. So there’s lots of different areas that’s being used.33:12S3

And as far as size, when it comes to this nanotechnology, how small exactly are we talking about?33:19S4

It’s anything that’s on the nanoscale. And to give you just an illustration, how small this is. If you had if you imagine one nanometer being the size of a pea, like a pea that you eat, a school bus would be what we’d consider a micrometer. Okay. A micrometer is 1000 times smaller than a millimeter. So if you think of your ruler, you have millimeters on your ruler. Those are the smallest division. So a thousand times smaller than that is micrometer. That’s your school bus. And then the, the meter, which is, you know, how long your meter stick is. Your arm span is like one and a half to two meters, depending on how tall you are. A meter when one nanometer is a pea would be driving from LA to New York and back again. So you can imagine that pea to that meter. Um, and as far as like on the biological side, your hair is actually, you can see the diameter of your hair. I mean, it’s obviously pretty small that you can’t. Yeah. It’s, um that is about 0.1mm. So that’s a 10th of that division. Your white blood cells or cells in general are more like on the micrometer region. And then the proteins, which are the things that do all the work inside your cells. Those are on the nanometer size. So you can imagine the P is sort of like moving around inside of the school bus. And that’s the cell, right? Which we have to look under the microscope in order to see. Yeah.34:47S3

Let’s talk a little bit more about this DNA work. A lot of your work involves building these little structures out of DNA. How does DNA become a building material for machines?34:58S4

Yes, that’s a good question. Picture would help with this, but I can give a little bit of an illustration. So I mean, essentially you build you can build material machines out of anything, right? You can build out of wood, you can build out of metal. Our building material is DNA. And the reason why DNA is so helpful on the nanoscale is because it has these small base pairs that interact or bind with one another. And so most people are probably familiar with the four bases adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. Adenine and thymine will bind together with two hydrogen bonds based on their chemical structure. And guanine and cytosine will bind together with three hydrogen bonds. And um, essentially these base pairs will form a sequence. We call it single stranded DNA. And they don’t like to stay single stranded. So they naturally want to find that other base that will compliment them. And when they do that, they form the double stranded DNA, which most people can know that forms a helix, a helix. And so that helix is essentially what we view as our building block. In that helix has a very specific diameter. It’s about two nanometers across. So you can imagine it’s sort of like a cylinder. It’s two nanometers across. And as far as how tall it is depends on how many base pairs you put in. So let’s say you want to make it to be 3.4 nanometers tall. That would be ten base pairs that you stack on. Every base pair you add is a 0.34 nanometer increase. So you can imagine you have the precision. Unlike if you’re building out of wood or metal, you can’t cut down something to the nanometer scale, right? This one allows us to be with precision of 0.4 or 0.34 nanometers. So so that’s that’s the basic right is essentially we have these helixes that are just rods. And we can change how long they are. And you might say, well, what if I want to make more than a rod? Well, let’s say you want to make a platform, a 2D platform. Well, then you just put the rods or the helixes side by side and you can make a bigger platform. And let’s say you want to make something 3D. Well, you can stack those platforms on top of each other and you can make it more of a creative shake. Of course, you can imagine a cube pretty easily, but I can make it into a football shape by changing how long each of those rods at each of those places are at. And so that’s essentially what we do. We use a technique called DNA origami, which came out in 2006. And that actually was what sort of revolutionized a lot of building structures out of DNA because we were able to actually, we were able to self-assemble them, meaning that we could encode all the information of exactly what we wanted it to build and design into. And then by applying some heat, some salt, it actually forms into that structure itself. So and it’s very reliable. You get a very high efficiency. So forth. And so it’s about 2006 when sort of this DNA nanotechnology actually sort of took off because of this technique.37:48S3

Stephanie Lobeck is with us, associate professor of physics here at Hillsdale College, talking about nanotechnology and magnetism. So again, some of your research here uses magnetic fields to move some of these DNA structures. So how does magnetism help to control something again that is so small.38:06S4

Yeah. So the magnetism allows us to apply what we’d call magnetic forces. And of course you say, well, DNA doesn’t seem very magnetic. Right. And it’s very true with with weak forces, you’re not going to magnetize DNA at all. And so what we actually do is we use magnetic particles. So a lot of times there’s beads, there’s ones that are on the micron size. There’s also ones on the nano size that you can attach to the DNA nanomachines. And then by applying an external magnetic field, essentially, you can think of this bead as being like a little bar magnet that wants to line up with the field, just like a compass needle. So if I point the field in one direction, the needle will turn to line up with that field. And so if it’s attached to our structure, it will then move our structure. So if it’s a hinge and you have a bead on the end, you can open and close the hinge just by sweeping the field across. And essentially you’re just allowing it to apply a force directly through the bead onto the nano structure itself. So it’s actually, it’s, it’s really cool. That was one of honestly, the, the big questions when first people started building these nanomachines was actually like, these are really cool, but how do we move them? Sure. And, um, that was yeah, a big question for a while. And the cool thing about using magnetism is it actually allows us to do direct actuation. Most methods, there’s only one other one that is a direct actuation, which is using electric fields. But all the other ways are indirect. They’re probabilistic. And they they take more time oftentimes to do it.39:33S3

One application that people hear about is targeted drug delivery. Can nanotechnology help to change the way that medicine works?39:42S4

Yeah for sure. So one of the big things that we’re sort of working on in my lab is moving towards trying to make nanomachines that will be used for medicine. And one of the. So there’s sort of two main things. So one is bacteria that have become resistant to our antibiotics. So we start to call these super bacteria. Once they start to become very resistant to drugs, they it’s hard to kill them. And so a lot of our drugs today are basically chemical reactions that are taking place. And bacteria easily change can more easily morph to change, to react and not to resist basically those chemical reactions. And so what the Nanomachine would allow us to do is actually a mechanical mechanism to kill the to kill the cell instead of a chemical one. And so an example of this would actually be one, a professor actually at Rice University. His name is Doctor Tour. He has developed machines not out of DNA but just from molecules. They’re nanomachines. And some of them are like a jackhammer. Mhm. And what he does is he can actually shoot light, different wavelengths of light at it, and it causes it to sort of vibrate up and down. And if he can basically put a molecule on there, so it finds this bacteria cell, he can then jackhammer and destroy basically the membrane of that cell. And then it now it’s either killed or now you can administer the drug and it can get inside. And so what we’re looking at doing. I was like, that’s a really creative idea. So I thought we could do something like this to light, of course, can’t pass all the way through your body, but magnetic fields do and they’re very safe. We apply very large magnetic fields, say for example, in an MRI. Right. And so this would be a great way of if we could build a machine that would essentially, you know, be like a jackhammer or hammer or something like this that would basically mechanically destroy a cell. And again, you can target it by putting certain receptors on it that would, you know, respond to only cancer cell receptors or these bacteria receptors and so forth. You’d actually be able to target them and destroy them directly instead of killing other things. So that’s, um, those are sort of yeah, cancer cells. And then these super bacteria, sort of two big topics that that people are working on doing.41:54S3

Doctor Stephanie Lobeck is with us, associate professor of physics here at Hillsdale College. Nanotechnology and magnetism. When you’re working at this tiny scale, how do you observe what’s actually happening? What does what does a lab look like?42:08S4

Right. That’s a really good question. So you can actually look at something on the nanoscale in a microscope. So a lot of people sort of maybe picture us looking down in a microscope that actually only sees or can only resolve on the micron level. So what you have to do is actually label these nanostructures with something that we call fluorophore. And a fluorophore is something where when you shoot a certain wavelength of light, it will emit a different wavelength of light. It will it will excite the electron, and it will then emit a different wavelength of light. Essentially, what we can do is we can label our structures with different fluorophores, and then based on the light signal that they’re emitting, because light spreads out, we can see the light that it forms even though we can’t see the structure. And so that’s one way visually, like if you want to see it happening in real time, you actually have to use fluorescence essentially. So that’s a big one. But there’s other ways like right now, um, a lot of the structures we’ve been working on, we actually been using micron sized beads to attach to these nano structures. And you think, how can that happen? That’s like a huge scaling difference. We use these nanorods that are micron in length but have nanometer thickness. And so they can attach to the nanomachine, but also reach out to the micron sized rod and the micron sized beads we can see. And so it’s very interesting. You’ll see a bead moving in a certain way, but you can’t see the machine itself. But because it’s constraining how the bead moves, you can actually observe exactly what’s happening to the bead. So that’s another way. Now if you want to observe like a static, like you don’t need to actually see it in action. You just want to like image, get a nice good image of it. You can use things like an AFM. We have one of those on campus, which is basically like a way of seeing like the height profile, essentially of the structure. It shoots a little cantilever and it shoots a laser down at the cantilever. And as it goes across the surface, it has to go up to go over the surface. So the laser beam goes up and it sort of traces out the structure of the surface. So that’s one way. So we use an AFM to visualize. People use other things like a Tem which is using electrons to visualize stuff. But there’s there’s many different ways. But you those are just some examples.44:21S3

You have students who have worked on some of these projects who are working on some of your projects. What do Hillsdale College undergraduates get to do with this kind of research?44:31S4

Yeah. So they get to do a lot of a lot of stuff. Like pretty much they’re involved in every step of this, this part of the project. So my students will build the structures in the lab, which involves a lot of biological techniques using pipettes and thermocyclers and centrifuges and all this stuff. So they get to learn the DNA origami technique. They will run experiments where they’re applying the magnetic fields and watching the structures change, looking at them under fluorescence or observing the micron sized beads in bright fields. And then they’ll also do the analysis like normally afterwards. We’re analyzing, we have to analyze the videos and things that we’re taking. And so there’s a lot of, you know, maybe even coding and just analysis that goes involved in that. So there’s like a whole stretch of what they do, but they, they get to be a part of, of all of it.45:20S3

As you’re talking, I’m thinking back to a conversation I had with Doctor Russell from the biology department about bacteria and films. So does your research ever cross over with work that other professors here at Hillsdale are doing?45:34S4

Yes, that’s actually a great question. So actually this summer I’m collaborating with him on a project and we have a student. He actually reached out to me because he’d seen a presentation I gave at a faculty meeting. And, um, he was like, hey, I grow these biofilms. And they are very resistant sometimes to drugs. And so we have to get the drugs past the biofilms. Can you use your machines to drill into them? And I was like, well, I don’t have the machines yet. We’re still working towards that. Probably in the next couple of years, we’ll have the machines that we can drill into these. But I said we could try just some preliminary testing with the beads. So there are actually people right now that have used, um, nano sized beads as well as micron sized beads to either drill into, you know, materials or plaque or things like this. And so I said we could just try the beads. And I have two, I have a nano sized beads and I have a micro sized bead in my lab. And so we are doing very early on experimental result tests. Right. And we have a student working with us. I’ve showed her she’s growing up the bacteria, and I’m also showing her how to run the magnetic fields. And so yeah, we’re early on in this stage, so we’re excited to see. We either expect that the beads might just the larger beads might just swipe the films off the surface, which would be good. It would be also a good way of getting rid of them. They actually do this right now with like dental stuff. Like they actually it’s actively being used. And then the other one with the, with the nano sized beads, we think that one has more potential to actually drill holes through the the biofilm. So. So we’ll see what we get. But we are actively working on doing a project based on this.47:05S3

So are we in the early days of this research meaning nanotechnology. Are we already starting to see changes or impacting everyday technology.47:15S4

Yeah. So I would say it’s definitely already impacting the technology. People probably just don’t realize where it’s all being used. I mean, even in medicine, it’s already there and probably a lot of your materials and stuff and even computers. So just people don’t realize it’s there because you just don’t see it, but it’s making things more efficient and better. But I would say there’s still a lot of growth. And even in the DNA origami community. I mean, 2006 was when it first that technique first came out. And people could make, you know, simple structures. They would make 2D static structures. Then they made 3D, you know, static structures. Then by like about 2015, we started seeing more like dynamic structures, but no one knew how to move it. And so now we’re starting to get into the time where people are like, oh, we can actually move the parts on these machines. And in order to use a machine as a machine, right, where it can do work, you have to be able to move them. And so we’re really just now starting to see that. And of course, especially in medicine, there’s a lot more higher standards you have to do before it gets into it. So a lot of even the stuff I was mentioning in like Doctor Tours Lab, that stuff is all things that like they’re doing clinical testing in mice and things like that or doing, you know, tests on petri dishes. You know, we’re going to test it with bacteria that’s grown on a film, right? But not in a body or anything like this. There’s so much testing that you have to do initially before it gets into there. But even in medicine right now, like, I mean, they use nanoparticles for MRI contrast and things like this. You probably didn’t realize maybe you got contrast and you didn’t know, oh, there’s nanoparticles in there that allowed them to image this better. So it’s definitely already affecting our society. But I do think there’s still a lot of growth and potential that it has.48:56S3

Doctor Stephanie Laubach is associate professor of physics here at Hillsdale College. Talk about her work in nanotechnology and magnetism. Doctor Laubach, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.49:08S5

Yeah, thanks so much.49:10S3

That will wrap up this edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Our thanks to Don Hodel. His memoir called To Serve My Path to President Reagan’s Cabinet and Beyond. And Doctor Stephanie Laubach from Hillsdale Physics Department. Remember, you can hear new episodes every week on this station. You also can find extended versions of some of our interviews, or listen any time to the podcast. Find [email protected] or wherever you get your audio. Until next week, I’m Scott Bertrand, and this has been the radio free Hillsdale Hour.

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