Lesson number one: Prudence is better than rules. By John-Henry Keenan
We have converted America from a bottom-up to a top-down country. Rules proliferate. Expense piles up,” said Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, addressing a gathering in San Diego. Hillsdale, Arnn explained, operates differently. “We have few rules. Goals freely adopted are better than rules and enforcement.”
Arnn’s preference for goals and freedom over written rules is mirrored in Hillsdale’s curriculum at its Van Andel Graduate School of Government, or VSG. VSG’s unifying theory is that prudence is the highest virtue of a great statesman. This prudence is not mere caution but the virtue of perceiving the unique potential to achieve good within the given moment and acting to bring it about.
Hillsdale is based in Michigan, but its graduate school is in Washington, DC, close to the levers of power. VSG’s own goal is to instill prudence in its aspiring statesmen, but beyond the curriculum itself, the very structure of the school is a timely lesson on prudence in action.
By contemporary standards, VSG operates with practically no administration. In fact, there are fewer full-time administrators than there are words in its full name—three. They assist six tenured and tenure-track professors, several of whom also act as part-time administrators, including the dean and associate dean. Together, the group supports around a dozen fellows, lecturers, and adjunct professors, teaching 60-70 or so graduate students and hosting many additional lectures each month attended by alumni, government staffers, and interested citizens. They are currently engaged in massive renovations that will expand their campus to cover much of a city-block on Capitol Hill.
At any other institution, these efforts would probably be administered by 15 or more people. Over the last two decades, administrative staff in public education has expanded at 10 times the rate of students and teachers. Private education isn’t any leaner. Forbes reports that the top 50 colleges boast one instructor for every 11 students, but one non-faculty employee for every four students. Meanwhile at Harvard, which Trump has stripped of federal funding, there are 2,600 more administrators than students. Ivy League excess aside, VSG would still need five times more administrators just to be average. What makes Hillsdale different?
“Hillsdale isn’t unusual,” Matthew Spalding, dean of the graduate school, told me in an interview. “It’s still just a college.” He explained that Hillsdale has avoided the mission drift which has engulfed most of higher education, saying that even though the school is a non-profit, it is run with a business mentality. “We’re always asking how to maximize our product, which is instruction. So the best way to promote our brand is to teach well. There should be no leaders who aren’t also practitioners. In our case, that’s teachers.”
While Spalding’s businesslike mentality has served Hillsdale admirably, it is increasingly anachronistic compared not only to other colleges and universities, but to the world of business itself. Already in 2016 the Harvard Business Review reported a combined public and private sector average of one manager or administrator to every 4.7 employees, an arrangement which they estimated was costing America $3 trillion in lost productivity every year (they did not mention how much it was costing Harvard). Big business is becoming as inefficient as big government.
With DOGE making efficiency top of mind in the national discourse, Hillsdale’s countercultural example provides key insights into the root cause—and cure—for America’s over-managed malaise. Critically, even DOGE’s cheerleaders need to realize that stopping the flow of billions to leftist pipedreams is only the first and arguably easiest step towards restoring a truly efficient and responsible government. The deeper task is to uproot the rigid, rule-and process-driven concept of administration that has become embedded in Americans’ approach to work of all kinds, but government work above all.
During my time as a staffer on the Hill, I saw that mentality firsthand in an interaction with the Senate printshop. My office requested a blank piece of posterboard for a senator to use during a floor speech. The printshop replied that they could not give us a blank board because they were a printshop, not a raw materials depot. After some back and forth, they offered to simply print white on the white board. I duly submitted a blank image of the right proportions, the taxpayers paid for a large, invisible, print job, and the bureaucrats rested easy. The critical point here is that the printshop paper pushers were not being difficult because my office was Republican or because they had an ideological urge to waste ink. They were simply following the rules, and nothing would convince them that in this case, the rules could be modified. “Rules are rules,” as the prim tautology goes.
Therein lies the main difference that has made Hillsdale so much more efficient than its competitors. While the rest of society has chosen to place processes and rules over human prudence, Hillsdale prioritizes prudence over process. Emily Weston Kannon, one of VSG’s three administrators, told me that Hillsdale’s conservatism “is not just a mental philosophy, but a philosophy of action.” In the classical tradition, authentically human action is rationally ordered towards a moral end. That could be as basic as making a peanut butter sandwich to nourish oneself or as lofty as jumping on a grenade to save one’s comrades. The proper action is determined by the intersection of the final end and the circumstances of the present moment, which can never be fully anticipated or provided for by rules.
In practice, Kannon noted, Hillsdale’s philosophy of action translates into broad delegation and minimal oversight, an arrangement which works because the few people in administrative roles were chosen not for narrow technical expertise, but for their ability to prudently handle any number of tasks. Naturally, much of her work involves well-worn procedures, but she manages the process rather than the process managing her. She is free, indeed expected to deviate and improvise as necessary. Importantly, even if her judgment fails in a given case, her freedom to judge is not cancelled and replaced by an inflexible rule for the next case. Moreover, Kannon understands that Hillsdale’s final end is to teach, and so she evaluates her own actions in light of that goal.
The direct connection between final end and current action is fundamental to Hillsdale’s success and should be imitated wherever possible. If human action is rationally ordered towards a moral end, obscuring the end makes prudent reasoning impossible. In the absence of personal reasoning, the only fallback is to cling to rules and processes and assume they are having the effect intended, whatever it may be. More often than not, rules and processes become ends in themselves, divorced from real-world outcomes, like so much white ink being applied to white paper. When the flaws inherent in this approach emerge, the only imaginable solution to the bureaucratic mind is a revised process with additional oversight to ensure it is followed.
John-Henry Keenan is a student at Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government and the founder of Archetype Media, a conservative visual productions company.
To read the article in The American Conservative magazine, click here.