(RNS) — Charlie Kirk often dismissed college as a waste.
The far-right activist and Turning Point USA co-founder never earned a college degree, a fact he proudly touted in his 2022 book “The College Scam.” But in a February 2025 talk, he described one exception.
“There is no place like Hillsdale College,” Kirk said. “The students are different. They’re focused on the right things.”
It wasn’t just Hillsdale’s curriculum. The Christian school’s political influence, he added, had made it a “cultural powerhouse.”
“The philosophical basis of this new administration is largely an outgrowth from the hard work that Hillsdale has been doing over the last couple of decades,” said Kirk.
Months later, longtime Hillsdale President Larry Arnn praised Kirk at his September 2025 memorial service, noting that Kirk, who was assassinated on Sept. 10, 2025, had completed over 30 online Hillsdale courses. Arnn awarded Kirk and his widow, Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk, with honorary degrees. Now, Erika Kirk will deliver Hillsdale’s commencement address on Saturday (May 9).
“Hillsdale represents something rare in our time — a steadfast devotion to faith, learning, and the principles that sustain a free nation,” Erika Kirk said in the press release announcing she would speak at the college’s graduation.
In recent decades, Hillsdale, which has an endowment of more than $970 million, has gained recognition for its efforts to combat “activist,” left-leaning education on its own campus, in K-12 charter schools and in state-level education policies; just this week, Florida released details of a controversial Advanced Placement U.S. History alternative that exclusively recommends Hillsdale historian Wilfred McClay’s “Land of Hope” textbook. The textbook aims to acknowledge the faults of America’s past without making them defining features of the nation’s story — McClay has rejected the idea that slavery is “part of America’s enduring makeup.”
On the national level, Hillsdale has been repeatedly enlisted by the Trump White House to shape narratives about American history and civic engagement. As part of President Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 initiative, the school has worked with the Trump administration to produce “The Story of America” educational video series and to curate content for a fleet of mobile historical exhibits. The efforts frame the president as part of the lineage of American leaders who made the nation the “greatest republic ever to exist.”
Hillsdale spokesperson Emily Stack Davis attributed Hillsdale’s national influence to growing interest in the school’s mission, which she summarized as a commitment to “teach and defend the principles of the Declaration of Independence.”
“What has changed is that more Americans are now asking serious questions about education, citizenship, and the country’s founding principles,” she told RNS. “The College’s broader work, including online courses, Imprimis, K-12 classical education, our Washington, D.C. presence, and our 250th anniversary programming, grows out of the same conviction: self-government depends on citizens who know their history and can reason carefully about public questions.”
Some welcome Hillsdale’s burgeoning influence as part of a much-needed return to patriotic education, while others fear the school is endorsing an incomplete, ideologically driven version of America’s past. While observers debate the objectivity of Hillsdale’s curricula, they agree that Hillsdale’s intellectual reputation is part of its appeal to the Trump administration.
“They’re trying to bring some academic heft to the Make America Great Again movement,” said John Fea, distinguished professor of American history at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
Founded in 1844 by Baptist abolitionists, Hillsdale is home to roughly 1,600 undergraduates on a campus nestled in the hills of southern Michigan. It’s known for its rejection of both federal funding and identity politics and for attracting accomplished students interested in its classical liberal arts model, which emphasizes the “spiritual and intellectual inheritance of the Western Tradition.”
Caroline Welton, a 26-year-old Hillsdale alumna, described the school as “a place with serious people, with deep thinkers, with people who are good hearted and ambitious and generous.” She said the school’s embrace of primary texts and small, seminar-style classes is part of what enticed her to move from Texas to attend.
Despite its faith origins, Hillsdale long had a reputation for prioritizing its liberal arts and conservative identity over its religious ties. It has framed its rejection of federal funding as a way to avoid government control, and it doesn’t offer programming specific to women or racial and ethnic minorities. Per its website, the college rejects “the dehumanizing, discriminatory trend of so-called ‘social justice’ and ‘multicultural diversity,’ which judges individuals not as individuals, but as members of a group.”
Clarence Thomas, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, as the featured speaker providing the dedication of Hillsdale College’s Christ Chapel on October 3, 2019, in Hillsdale, Michigan. (Photo © 2019 Galvin Photo, LLC. Licensed to Hillsdale College)
But lately, Hillsdale stakeholders told RNS they’ve seen a renewed faith emphasis. In 2019, the school opened a $28.5 million, 27,000-square-foot chapel with a dedication that featured an address from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The school has expanded the Christian offerings in its free online course catalog, and in 2021 its chaplain, a minister ordained in the Anglican Church in North America and hired in 2016, went from part time to full time. While the school has no faith or chapel requirement for its students, it has the reputation of hosting a devout, majority-Christian student body — so much so that the school has attracted a church plant from Christ Church, the Moscow, Idaho-based church of stridently conservative pastor Doug Wilson.
In a July 2025 podcast, Wilson said he hoped the church plant would reach Hillsdale students, though the church told RNS it has no affiliation with the school.
“They’ve definitely, over the past 10 years, turned more back to their Christian roots,” said Jennifer Burns, head of school at American Faith Academy, a Christian classical education online school that has sent a handful of students to Hillsdale.
Hillsdale’s religious turn happened under the leadership of Arnn, who was named president in 2000. Well-connected in right-wing political circles, Arnn is co-founder of the right-wing Claremont Institute and has served on the Heritage Foundation board since 2002. He has framed education as a “battleground” over the “American way of life,” and under his presidency Hillsdale entered the K-12 education space with the 2010 launch of the Barney Charter School Initiative, which enabled dozens of Hillsdale-approved charter schools to open across the U.S. These schools offer classical curricula and are often embraced by conservative groups as public‑school alternatives with stronger pedagogy and without what they see as left‑leaning approaches to race, identity, sexuality and citizenship.
Hillsdale also made its K-12 curriculum available to existing schools, and in 2011 started offering free, online, not-for-credit college-level courses that were famously advertised on “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” Its reputation as a curriculum builder paid off. In 2020, when Trump formed a 1776 Commission — an advisory board intended to combat critical race theory and the 1619 Project by “restoring patriotic education” — Arnn was tapped to be chair.
“The 1619 project became a kind of symbol of all that was wrong with education and American history,” said Fea, of the Pulitzer Prize winning project by The New York Times Magazine and Nikole Hannah-Jones that explored American history through the lens of slavery and the Black experience. Fea explained that Hillsdale marketed itself as a source of stability rooted in Western values amid a rapidly changing cultural landscape. “Hillsdale was uniquely positioned to offer an alternative curriculum.
The commission, though short-lived, culminated in a report that slammed “identity politics” and “group rights” as “dividing Americans into oppressed and oppressor groups.”
The following year, Hillsdale publicized its own free, K-12 1776 curriculum, which promised an unbiased treatment of American history.
The curriculum drew criticism for saying early‑20th‑century Progressivism “strongly critiqued the principles of the Declaration of Independence,” and for a 2021 version that said the Civil Rights Movement “almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders.” The American Historical Association has critiqued the project as “erasing the complex and contested voices that together made the United States,” though Hillsdale has defended its 1776 curriculum as “comprehensively” covering “points of shame.”
By Trump’s second term, Hillsdale had become the administration’s go-to academic partner. The college is part of the America 250 Civics Education Coalition that includes more than 40 organizations, including Turning Point USA, the Heritage Foundation and Moms for Liberty. Alongside the U.S. Department of Education, these groups aim to craft civics programing that will “reignite the fires of patriotism.”
Charlie Kirk, left, with Dr. Arnn from Hillsdale College during the National Leadership Seminar hosted by Hillsdale College at the Sheraton Phoenix Downtown in Phoenix, Ariz. on Feb. 18, 2025. (Photo © Hillsdale College)
As part of the Trump-aligned Freedom 250 initiative, Hillsdale has co-created the White House’s American history video series — which includes cameos from Trump, Arnn, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance — and provided input on the Trump administration’s “freedom trucks,” a fleet of mobile exhibits that presents the nation as grounded in Western and Judeo-Christian principles. In general, the Hillsdale approach to U.S. history favors triumphalist narratives that celebrate American exceptionalism and depict shameful episodes in American history as the exception, not the rule.
“I think Hillsdale has cornered the market on sort of the Trump version of conservatism, so that the White House trusts Hillsdale to produce ideologically convenient content, especially including history,” said Adam Laats, distinguished professor of education and history at Binghamton University. Laats said that when Hillsdale’s curriculum is backed by the White House, it legitimizes misleading historical interpretations.
“It’s really fundamentally dangerous to teach this kind of history and this kind of civics, especially when it is done as a patriotic alternative to the kind of teaching that allegedly goes on in most schools and colleges,” he said.
Those in Hillsdale’s orbit frame the school’s political partnerships not as political strategy, but as a natural outgrowth of its expertise. Burns described Hillsdale as “synonymous with a learned American citizen.”
“It doesn’t surprise me at all that the administration would look to them to be part of that conversation,” said Burns. She added that in her view, Hillsdale’s involvement in the Freedom 250 effort is about conserving American history, not partisanship. (Freedom 250 is the Trump-aligned initiative, not to be confused with the bipartisan America 250 efforts.)
As Hillsdale’s brand of intellectual patriotism continues to be platformed by the Trump administration, its rise and accelerated religious messaging seem parallel to the trajectory of TPUSA, which has also ramped up its faith programming in recent years. But to alumna Welton, Hillsdale is more about student impact than about political clout. And to her, that’s what makes Erika Kirk a logical choice for commencement speaker.
“Charlie and Erika represent a belief that young people can be serious, that they can make a difference, that there is hope for our future,” she said.