Hillsdale takes no federal or state money.

The Wall Street Journal reports.

Liberal Arts for Conservative Minds

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 to know it.’ ”