Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Kyle Peterson that appeared in The Wall Street Journal. One of his observations is that Hillsdale College takes no federal or state money—but bureaucrats are still plotting ways to regulate its affairs. Hillsdale may well be one of the few colleges throughout the United States at which the liberal arts really are alive and well. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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If it weren’t for Plato, Larry Arnn would have been a lawyer—though it is difficult to imagine him in a courthouse filing terse procedural briefs. The president of Hillsdale College for 15 years, Mr. Arnn seems like a born professor. Ask about the 2016 election or the state of higher education, and it isn’t long before he’s quoting, in a soft voice with a hint of southern drawl, Winston Churchill, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, or the book that changed his life, Plato’s Republic.

It was 1974, and Mr. Arnn was a senior in politics at Arkansas State University, down the road from his small hometown. He was required to take a course on political thought taught by a professor with a reputation for toughness. The two got into a philosophical tangle. “He wiped the floor with me—and showed me that the most interesting things in the world were not of interest to me, and I felt terrible about it,” Mr. Arnn says. “I can remember he said to me, ‘By the way, this thing justice, don’t you care about it? Does it not interest you at all?’ ”

Mr. Arnn says he began thinking about the higher questions—and he wanted more. “Instead of going to law school, I called my dad and I said, ‘Dad I’m going to go to graduate school,’ ” Mr. Arnn recalls. “He said, ‘What are you going to do with that?’ And I said, ‘I’m going toknow it.’ ”

That ethos, of seeking knowledge for its own sake, is what has guided Hillsdale College since its founding in 1844. The liberal-arts school has about 1,500 students and is located a couple of hours west of Detroit in Hillsdale, Mich., a town of 8,000. Two things, primarily, brought the college to prominence: its refusal to take any money from the state or federal government, and its classical curriculum based on great books, the Western tradition and the American founding.

There was a time when studying such things was synonymous with a university education. But nowadays they are often shunted aside in favor of technical training, or they are treated as optional, choices no better than any other at the curriculum buffet. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni reported in April that English majors at many top schools aren’t required to take a class on Shakespeare, though they are often forced to study what the colleges term “diasporic literature” or “non-canonical traditions.” At Hillsdale, every student takes two great-books courses that run from Homer and Aeschylus to Whitman and Frost.

“The overwhelming argument now for education—at all levels and from the government—is that it’s a preparation to make you a better factor of production,” Mr. Arnn says. By way of response, he quotes Churchill, which he can do better than most. From 1977-80, while studying in London, Mr. Arnn assisted Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s authorized biographer, with research, conducting interviews and sorting through official papers. As we sit in Hillsdale’s office in Washington and Mr. Arnn relates Churchill’s thoughts on education, the British statesman glowers down at us from a large painting on the wall.

“Engines were made for men, not men for engines,” Churchill said at the University of Miami in 1946. “Expert knowledge, however indispensable, is no substitute for a generous and comprehending outlook upon the human story with all its sadness and with all its unquenchable hope.”

Yet the humanities have fallen on hard times. Unquenchable hope is all well and good, a critic might say, but it doesn’t pay the electric bill. This spring Sweet Briar College, a century-old liberal-arts school in Virginia with about 700 students, announced that it would soon close its doors for good. The college’s president lamented that financial obstacles couldn’t be overcome, and that too few young people were interested in attending a rural school in the Blue Ridge Mountains. “We are 30 minutes from a Starbucks,” he said.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article

Mr. Peterson is associate editorial features editor of the Journal.