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Foreign 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. Elites are institutions that determine the kind of the tenor of social expectations, don't value assimilation, and in fact, reject the idea of assimilation.
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This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. That was Mark Krikorian. He is executive director of the center for Immigration studies. More@cis.org you can also follow him on Axe Arc Scricorian. Mark joins us today to talk about an essay he wrote about assimilation here in the United States. Mark, thanks so much for joining us. Glad to be here talking today about an essay you wrote over at the American Mind. People can find it@americanmind.org the Americanization Challenge is real. So you argue in this piece that America's problem isn't so much immigrants failing to assimilate perhaps, but that America itself has stopped insisting on assimilation. Can you explain what you mean by that distinction? And why is it the core issue?
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Because my basic point is that immigrants, while different in a lot of ways from the past, really aren't fundamentally different. What's different is us. And as far as assimilation goes, there are two things that in modern America make assimilation more complicated. The first is a good part of the modern world, which is transportation and communications are much easier and cheaper than ever before. A century ago, you couldn't hop on a plane and go to your cousin's wedding in Palermo for a four day weekend and then come back to work. Nothing like that was possible. You couldn't facetime or whatever with your relatives back home. When you left, you left. Now some people turned around and came back because they failed here or whatever. But the fact is you couldn't live in two countries at the same time. In effect, well, now you kind of can. And that means that the necessary process of reorienting your emotional and psychological connections from one place to the other, from the old country to the new country, happens more slowly, less effectively, less thoroughly. And that's a real problem. The other problem is the kind of thing that, you know, the American mind focuses on more and it's an important negative element of the modern world. And that is that our leadership institutions, our assimilating institutions, including the government, but also schools, media, business, religion, you name it, no longer value or insist on assimilation because you kind of have to have a Broad social expectation of, you know, when in Rome, do as the Romans do, or when in America, do as the Americans do. Our elites, and I don't mean that because they all went to Harvard or Yale. I mean, I mean just our institutions that determine the kind of the tenor of social expectations don't value assimilation. In fact, reject the idea of assimilation. You know, this is multiculturalism, wokeism. It's expressed itself in a whole bunch of different ways. But just as one quick example, my mother is the daughter of immigrants and grew up outside Boston in the 30s and 40s. And she went to school and the school taught her that, you know, George Washington was the father of our country and they memorized the Gettysburg Address and sang Hail Columbia. They're not doing that in the LA Unified School District, that's for sure. And it's not the immigrants who are insisting on it, it's us. And until we get our house in order, it's just indefensible to be letting in a million plus newcomers every year who have to become. Who have to be Americanized.
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You describe in this piece assimilation as an organic process that can take some time. How do you define. How should we define successful assimilation? What does it look like in practice?
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The first parts of it are superficial and it's what everybody kind of sees. In other words, you learn English, you get a job, and you drive on the right side of the road. You know, I mean, basic stuff and that's important, but that's sort of the top of the iceberg. You know what I mean? The more profound aspect of assimilation is that you. And, you know, maybe this is the kind of thing that doesn't happen till your kids as an immigrant come to identify America as us. In other words, that you have become adopted by America and you have in turn adopted America. This is why the naturalization oath, the citizenship oath, says you renounce all other loyalties and allegiances. And in a kind of the way to think about that is if you're, say, the kid of an immigrant and you're reading in history class, assuming they even teach this anymore, about The War of 1812, for instance, is that us? In other words, do you say, oh, we fought the British in 1812, or is that all those, you know, dead, you know, white men were involved in this war? That has nothing to do with me. The first is assimilation. The second is a sign that you're not assimilated, even if you speak English without an accent and have US citizenship and what have you. And so that's the kind of Thing. I mean, John Fonte, who's a scholar at the Hudson Institute and actually wrote another one of these American Mind essays, refers to it as patriotic assimilation. In other words, you come to see yourself as a member of the American people, even if you eat, I don't know, whatever, rice pilaf with your turkey at Thanksgiving or whatever, who cares? But you emotionally identify as an American. That's what successful assimilation is.
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Talking with Mark Corian, his piece at the American mind, americanmind.org, the Americanization Challenge is real. On our institutions that you mentioned earlier, be it schools or government itself or media, what could be done better to promote Americanization? What would a healthier set of institutions do differently?
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That's a good question, because I don't know that this is something that can be kind of forced on them. But I mean, government, obviously, if you have a new government, a new administration, you can have a real change. And we're seeing that. And that can set the tone. It can change the tone, as it were, sort of a vibe shift, as they say. And we're seeing that. And there's a lot of things the government can do. It's not so much passing laws, although maybe there's some of that too. But look at what the administration is doing with the Smithsonian, trying to de wokeify it so that it presents. It doesn't lie about American history or hide things that were bad in the past. But the general approach of it is celebratory that this is a great thing that our ancestors and our predecessors did. There is, you know, I think actually there is some legislative things that could be done. For instance, dual citizenship is, even though it's not like officially recognized in the law, it kind of is. And that needs to end. And, you know, say that, look, if you vote in a foreign election as a, if there's, you know, only citizens can vote in an election in Croatia or whatever, and you vote well, that's some kind of offense. In other words, you get whatever, you get some kind of thousand dollar fine or whatever it is sending the message that, you know, when you become an American, that's a real thing. And if you are, you know, you want a key, you want to run for office back in whatever, Malawi or Malaysia or something like that where you came from, well, then you may think twice about whether you really want to naturalize and become an American citizen. And that sends a broader message. It's sort of the magisterial function of the law, the teaching function of the law, not just for the people involved, directly but more broadly, sending a message.
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In the essay, Mark, you call for cultural self confidence. And I wonder if you think that it is in fact more difficult to Americanize our immigrants when at least a significant portion of Americans really are ashamed of being American.
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Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's the core problem. That's the source of multiculturalism and all the rest of that stuff. Which is why in getting to solutions, the first solution has to be dramatic reductions in new immigration. In a sense, sort of. The image I'd use is your bathtub is overflowing. The first thing you do is turn off the faucet, not start mopping the water while the faucet is still running. So I don't mean turn off immigration, but dramatically reduce immigration. 50, 60, 70% cut. That's a whole other show to talk about what that would be involved. But the point is fewer newcomers. And then we, you know, it makes it easier for us to sort of conduct a kind of cultural counter revolution against the poison that started to spread in the 60s and continues to spread.
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You'd mentioned earlier about technology, be it facetime or other apps or even just cheaper air travel, has affected the way that immigrants can assimilate. I wonder if there's a way to turn that into an advantage. Meaning can immigrants experience America and American culture more closely and easier through English language apps or greater exposure to US Media, easier connections to American culture? Could we make that happen?
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Well, that does happen. Anyway. I mean, some of it, in fact, people, I'd have to say immigrants probably coming here. In other words, new arrivals probably know more about America and American life when they get here than people did 100 or 200 years ago because they watch all our movies and all. I mean, it's just look at the, you know, the effect of this assassination of Charlie Kirk. I saw stories that people in Zimbabwe were talking about it. You know, nobody in Zimbabwe was talking about the assassination of President, you know, Garfield, because nobody knew about it. So, yes, technology can help in the sense of making it easier to acquire English, if you want to acquire English. But I don't think that's really an advantage. And in fact, in a sense, the familiarity with American life that foreigners all over the world have creates this kind of perverse sense that they also own American culture. In other words, that it's not something that is ours, it's something that's theirs. The foreigners who don't even come here, that it's theirs too. And so I think that's also a kind of a problem.
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We've seen through time, through our history, that immigrant groups have clung to enclaves and their own languages, be it Italians or the Irish or Polish. Why do you think perhaps today's assimilation challenge is harder? I know we've talked a bit about this, the conversation, but from then to now, is there a fundamental difference?
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Yeah, I mean, human nature isn't different, that's the same. And newcomers, people coming to a new country are going to want to stick together. I mean, it's just a natural thing because they're going to want to be able to, you know, speak the language that they grew up with and, you know, have access to the foods and the sounds and the smells and the tastes and everything of what they're familiar with. So immigrant communities are perfectly natural outcomes of human nature. That's not a problem. The problem is twofold. The thing we've been talking about in the sense that the non American culture is, you know, glorified and valorized and prioritized by us over American culture. But as a practical matter, numbers matter. You know, Germans were for a long time of almost a kind of parallel society within the United States. People don't remember that anymore. When numbers declined dramatically, the kind of the digestion process, if you will, was able to take place. Same thing with Italians. You know, the mafia was able to exist. I mean, it still exists, but it's not anything like it was because it had these incubator communities of people who were suspicious of the outside world stuck together. And within that, a kind of environment, organized crime of any kind, actually any ethnic organized crime is able to exist. Once numbers slow down, new arrivals stop coming in the same numbers. The process of kind of, of digestion and spreading out and the transformation of ethnic communities from ghettos to like tourist attractions is able to take place. But cutting numbers has to be the first thing.
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Mark, do you see, or are there examples of particular immigrant groups today or communities today that are still doing assimilation well, and if so, what kind of lessons can we learn?
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Well, I mean, I don't know there. It doesn't make sense to deny the fact that while most of the difference is in us, the place the immigrants are coming to, some of the difference is in immigrants. I mean, Muslim immigrants have, if you will, a larger cultural distance, a cultural gap to cross to become Americanized than Christian immigrants. It's just true. So, you know, Filipinos compared to, I don't know, Pakistanis have an easier time of accommodating themselves to what is, culturally speaking, a Christian country. So that's a real thing. And the other difference is big versus Small groups. Relatively small, especially relatively skilled or successful immigrant groups are going to be able to assimilate more easily. There's no question about that. But size, I think, of the immigrant group matters almost more than the particular characteristics of the group itself.
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Mark Krikorian is executive director of the center for Immigration Studies. You can find more@cis.org also on XARK S. Krikorian and his piece at the American Mind the Americanization Challenge is Real can be found@AmericanMind.org mark thank you so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
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Happy to do it. Thank you.
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Up next, Christina Lambert from Hillsdale's English Department joins us. We'll talk about T.S. eliot. I'm Scott Bertram. This is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
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Liberal arts college that operates independently of government funding and we want you or your son or daughter to apply.
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At Hillsdale, students grow in heart and.
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Mind by studying timeless truths in a.
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Hillsdale College costs significantly less than other nationally ranked private liberal arts colleges and receives regular recognition as a best value. And nearly all students receive financial aid.
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For more information or to fill out an application, visit Hillsdale. Edu Info. That's Hillsdale Edu Info.
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Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being and we can help reach out with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time, they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune into a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at Podcast Hillsdale. Eduardo that's Podcast Hillsdale Edu or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you find your audio.
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Welcome back to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. I'm Scott Bertrand. Be sure to find us on Xillsdale Radio and the Hillsdale College podcast network at HCpodcasts. We're joined by Dr. Christina Lambert. She is assistant professor of English here at Hillsdale College. Dr. Lambert, thanks for joining us.
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Thanks for having me, Scott.
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We're beginning a short series today covering the life and work of T.S. eliot, and we like to begin these with a brief bio background segment on our author. So do the same with T.S. eliot. Tell us, as we start, a little bit, about his upbringing, his education. How did it influence his later writings?
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Great. So, as an Americanist, I'm always glad to inform people that T.S. eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, not in England, in 1988. His father's hydraulic brick company helped build the city. We see this in his poem Durantean. His mother's women's society there in St. Louis implemented social reforms. We see these women drinking tea and reforming in Prufrock, the Mississippi that runs through St. Louis. That river comes into play in dry salvages later in his work. And the place where he went sailing off the coast of Boston, Cape Ann figures into that poem as well. And so, although T.S. eliot becomes a British citizen in 1927, he says that it's the American landscapes that remain largest in his poetic imagination. He attends Harvard for undergraduate. He's a mediocre student, kind of famously good news. He studies there also for a PhD in philosophy. And it's really his work at Harvard that gives him his extensive knowledge of ancient languages, his interest in anthropology, and also, I mean, all the information he has about ritual and myth that play so largely into his work. He studies abroad in Paris and at Oxford, and he's collecting all these images that are going to show up later in his poetry. But then, of course, he lives primarily in London for the majority of his life. He loves the beautiful Christopher Wren churches that pepper the landscape in London even before he becomes an Anglican. And he loves the culture of London. So he loves attending the theater, the ballet, the comedy and music halls. A little known about Elliot is that he loves pop culture, and all of these different scenes and images and landscapes are gonna factor into his poetry and plays.
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B
We'll talk deeper about this aspect as we continue our conversations. But religious imagery, what role does religious imagery play in his poetry? How does it evolve over time?
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Great. So religious imagery just permeates the work of T.S. eliot, both before he joins the Anglican Church and later. He's born into a Unitarian household, and he's never fully satisfied with how this faith tradition answers the question, particularly of suffering. The work of Dante actually plays a really formative role in Eliot's religious imagery. And over a decade before he becomes Anglo Catholic, as he describes it, he acquires a copy of Dante's Divine Comedy. He actually teaches himself to read Italian while reading the Comedia, which is a little daunting. And he includes lines from the Comedy throughout so many of his major poems and many of his essays. But he's Most struck by this Image In Canto 26 of Purgatorio, of Arno Daniel, who speaks to the pilgrim Dante of his sins, and then he returns to the fire that's this purgative fire in the text. In a 1929 essay on Dante, Elliot translates this particular line and he capitalizes it in the essay, and he translates the line as, then dived he back into the fire, which refines them. And if you actually look at a translation of the text, it's actually then he hid him in the fire that refines him. Eliot's imagination is so captured by this idea that there could be a form of suffering that's purgative and for you and good for your sanctification, that he really just holds onto this image, even in how he translates it. Right. You could dive back into this suffering. So Dante becomes this companion and conversation partner throughout his poetry. And then, of course, in 1927, he joins the Church of England, describes himself as Anglo Catholic. He loves the liturgy of the High Masses that he attends in London and remains attending those churches throughout his life.
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B
We've danced around this a little bit, but what is Eliot best known for? How might our listeners have encountered his works?
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Sure. So the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, that famous man who wonders if he can dare to eat a peach or wear his trousers rolled. That's one of. It's really the poem that launches Eliot's career. It's published in 1915, the Wasteland in 1922, another one of his most famous works. Normally, folks have heard of the Four Quartets. So if the Wasteland's around the First World War, Four Quartets is around the Second World War in terms of timing. And then a lot of people have heard actually of Murder in the Cathedral, this 1935 play about the martyrdom of Thomas Beckett.
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Talking with Dr. Christina Lambert from our English department here at Hillsdale College, as we introduce you to T.S. eliot. How does Eliot's poetry reflect some of the modernist experimentation with language and with form?
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Yeah. So there's so many directions that we can go with this. Eliot exemplifies so much of modernist form, so I'm gonna stick with three here. The first, free verse. Right. So not traditional formal verse. He and Ezra Pound write a lot of theory of this particular kind of free verse that's breaking with form for really intentional, in really intentional ways in order to convey a new kind of meaning.
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Right.
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So for them, free verse has a lot of constraints because you're breaking for a specific purpose. We also See in Eliot's work this fragmentation that's so famous in modernism. You might think of the novels of Virginia Woolf. He's famous for these quick breaks from one image to another, leaving the reader to parse out the logic of how his poetic images go together. And Eliot really believes that this difficulty is a part of the experience of poetry. And this fragmentation is really important to him and other modernists. And I think another thing he exemplifies is this, of course, incorporation of myth. We see this in the poet HD Ezra Pound, the novelist James Joyce and so many others. And Eliot comes up with the term the mythical method. Right, this phrase. He says it's simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. Those are Eliot's words. And he says, instead of a narrative method, we now have a mythical method that gives an ordering structure to poetry.
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Eliot often depicts urban landscapes as bleak and alienating. You grew up in St. Louis. He chose to live in London.
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So why?
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Why does he do that?
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Great question. So famously, in part three of the Wasteland, we find a typist, Tometi, in a dingy apartment laying out food in tins. This is new technology after the First World War. We have canned food. And Elliot is commentating on how the industrialization of everyday life hurts individuals. From the violent sexual encounter about to happen to this typist to the food that she eats. Eliot's trying to say something like, we eat like machines, we have relationships like we're machines. This permeates everyday life. In the 1930s and 40s, he was very involved with the British organicist movement, who was invested in the health of the soil, agrarian lifestyles, healthy food. They're critiquing these unhealthy rhythms of life that cities seem to perpetuate. It's really something that links Eliot to our own time in a significant way. But for all this, Elliot never leaves London. He loves the landscapes of these cities. And I think it's important in two ways. He's always interested in how we create rhythms and cycles of health for people living in urban environments. And he also sees these images of urban living as the sources for his art. So as dirty as the streets are that Prufrock walks, it's those streets that get to be transformed into the poem that we still are reading today.
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B
We're going to talk specifically in the future about the Wasteland and about the Four Quartets. Looking forward, though, how do we see Eliot's poetry influence later poets and perhaps even movements in literature.
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D
It's almost impossible to measure the reach of Eliot's poetry because it's so vast and also because, as Eliot himself practiced and said, immature poets imitate, mature poets steal, right? So so much of the influence we don't even realize is from Eliot. But a couple examples, just his use of free verse, of breaking forms for particular reasons and effects. Of course, we see this in the work of 20th century poets. The poet Denise Levertov, an American poet, writes an oratorio about the martyrdom of Oscar Romero, and it's based off of Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral about Thomas Becket. Muriel Rukeyser, another 20th century American poet, incorporates the Egyptian Book of the Dead into her gorgeous poem about the Hawks Nest disaster in West Virginia. And she's using Eliot's mythical method in this new form of docu poetry. You might also think of Gwendolyn Brooks, a famous poet of the Black Arts movement. She says that she studies Eliot and she reviews one of his books early in life to think about her progression of how she's learning about form before she develops her later style. And of course, we might think of Russell Kirk, who famously didn't love the wasteland at first and winds up becoming friends with Eliot and writing a whole book on Eliot and the influence of his work. So one thing's for certain, a lot of thought about poetry and culture is not the same after Eliot.
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B
Let me ask quickly here as we wrap up this conversation. Eliot can be challenging, daunting to read. Is there a particular place people might want to start? Or alternately, is there a particular place people don't want to start their work?
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D
With Eliot, so often what I say, reading Eliot is, the best place to start is with something that you're interested in, and there's really slim volumes of his work. So you can have just a single poem, just the wasteland, just the Four Quartets, perhaps. And the key here is repetition. Read the poem, read it again, Choose a selection of 5, 10 lines. Ask why. Why does he use this language in the first line? Why does he pivot to a new Image in line 4? After you've read it a couple times, try listening to it. There's great recordings on Spotify of Eliot himself reading his poetry, and then follow up on a couple images or illusions that you don't understand, and then return to read the poem another time. Repetition is key here.
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All right. Dr. Christina Lambert, assistant professor of English here at Hillsdale College, as we begin our entry into the world of T.S. eliot, Dr. Lambert, thank you so much for joining us.
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D
Thanks so much.
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Up next, John Seifert, associate professor in Computer science, joins us to talk about Hillsdale's revived computer science program. I'm Scott Bertram. This is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
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This show is a part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to your favorite. You'll get brand new episodes of all your favorite shows sent right to your device and you'll help us know that you're out there listening. Never miss another episode by going to Podcast Podcast Hillsdale Edu subscribe. That's Podcast Hillsdale Edu subscribe or click.
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Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being. And we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time, they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at Podcast Hillsdale. Eduardo that's Podcast Hillsdale Edu. Or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your audio.
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Welcome back to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. I'm Scott Bertrand. Be sure to check out the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. You can do so at the end. Podcast Hillsdale Edu and find our episodes wherever you get your audio. There you'll discover older editions of this program, plus other great Hillsdale College shows like the Larry Arn Show, Hillsdale Dialogues Imprimis, The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, and the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast where you can take our online courses wherever you might go. Find more at Podcast Hillsdale Edu or wherever you get your audio, including YouTube. We're joined by Dr. John Seifert. He is associate professor of Computer Science at Hillsdale College. Dr. Seifert, thank you for joining us.
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E
Thanks for inviting me.
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B
Appreciate it. We talked today about computer science here at Hillsdale College. You've described the computer as a canvas for creation. How does that perspective perhaps influence your approach to teaching computer science programming here at Hillsdale?
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E
I'd like students in the intro class to look at it almost as a fine art, where what they're doing in the machine is creating something. They're able to actually go in there like a artist on a canvas. And what they come out with is their own creation.
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B
Are there a few examples where perhaps you've seen a student's creativity play a key role in coding or in their work?
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E
Yeah, one of the things about giving more open ended assignments is some of the students will really get into it and add features to it. We'll be programming an interactive game and one student will just take it in wild directions. That really fulfills them creatively. And so it's a joy to see all that. And that's really what the introduction to the discipline is at Hillsdale College is what I want people to see that what computation is, what this business is all about is creating things and finding joy in it.
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B
What's the argument for the inclusion of computer science within a liberal arts curriculum like the one we have here at Hillsdale?
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E
Yeah, there's a sense that computer science is this remote technical discipline that you only enter if you want to be a software engineer. But it's more like the fine art or writing where you're going to draw and you're going to write. Not only if you want to be a professional artist or professional novelist, you're going to do these things as an expression of who you are as a person. So on the creating side, there's that argument. Also, when we get to more of the science of the discipline, it really is part of the intellectual language of our age. And as we want to have a wide view of what a person is and what reality is, these kinds of deep questions, these perennial questions that we encounter all throughout the curriculum here at Hillsdale. Computer science, if you're answering these questions in the 21st century, computer science is helpful.
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Talking with Dr. John Seifert, Associate professor of computer science here at Hillsdale College. You've been here for a couple of years now, and part of the mission is to rejuvenate the computer science program here at Hillsdale. What challenges have you faced? What opportunities have you been able to take advantage of during this time?
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I've been pleased by the interest in the students. There had not been computer science offerings for a number of years before I came, and there's a lot of students, not only in the science division, but across campus. I've had art majors as well as economics majors, as well as the mathematics majors. Take these classes for a variety of reasons.
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B
What are you hearing from some of the students who have taken courses inside the program? Any success stories, notable projects that we've seen come through so far?
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Yeah, in my student evaluations I get comments like, this is the funnest class I've ever taken for some of the students who get really into it because it is so creative, because it is so much about making a thing and they don't necessarily see the essays they're writing. Other classes in the same ilk, they can get really into it. Now, not every student, some people take the intro course and by midterm they're kind of getting ready to bow out. This isn't for them and that's fair and that's fine. But that's one of the things about a liberal arts education where we kind of encourage people to take a variety of courses and see what might be up their alley.
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I teach journalism here at the college and it's a process where you start with nothing and end with something. Right. And computer science is somewhat similar. You start from scratch during class sessions, write programs. How does that approach and the hands on approach to actually creating something benefit the student? Learning and engagement.
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It gives them an immediate sense of confidence that I can do this thing. You start with literally a blank canvas and by the end of the hour you've made a machine do something you never thought you could make it do before. And it's really wonderful.
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B
How do you foster an environment of, say, open discussion, spontaneity? It's a subject, computer science, that's sort of perceived as being rigid or very technical. How does the classroom experience with you sort of compare to what they might see in other classes?
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There is a lot of choice, especially as the first semester course progresses in what directions one could take when designing a solution to a particular problem. So while the early going is really, as you say, technical and nuts and bolts, you have to learn how to use the tools right like you would learn how to hold a brush in an art class. By the second half of the course, there's different paths to solving the same problem and different student solutions will look radically different. And so it's really good to be able to talk about that, to talk about which choices were made and why so that they can see a wider perspective and learn from each other as well.
- [38:36]
B
What was your path into computer science? What were you doing before you landed here in Hillsdale?
- [38:41]
E
I started programming when I was 12 years old because we had video games were starting to be a thing and my friends loved the video games. I was more interested in how they worked, so I would gravitate to programming. I was at a place out east called Providence College before I came here there working on computer science there. I'm originally from Missouri and I've taught at several institutions there.
- [39:03]
B
When we see perhaps some people losing jobs in this economy, there's kind of a, not a pejorative, but people shout out, learn to code. Right? This computer science, this ability to code, sort of open up a lot of doors for potential jobs, professions, ways to think about what you're doing next in life.
- [39:26]
E
I think it's certainly helpful overall as a person. I think the marketability of the ability to code is something that waxes and wanes like a lot of things. So I've had people come into my office when I taught at places that a computer science major and they were there crying at their junior year. They just hated coding. So it's not for everyone. It's not something that you just go into and are going to force yourself into it, but it certainly can open up a lot of doors. It's a lot like mathematics, right? There's a reason it's in the mathematics department as well. You don't have to necessarily be producing code for a living. What it does is it really helps you understand what software is. And we're going to be. I mean, unless you're blessed enough to be some hermit off in the mountain, you're going to be interacting with software and computers every day, constantly the rest of your life. So having some sense of what it is and what's going on is tremendously helpful.
- [40:23]
B
What's your vision for say, the near future and maybe the distant future of computer science here at Hillsdale?
- [40:30]
E
I would really hope that I'm able to communicate broadly to the campus that it is not just a techie only field for people whose goal in life is to be a software developer. We have that path within the curriculum. But this intro class, I really hope I can frame it as a one and done course. People can come in there and gain some wonderful experience, be able to do a new kind of thing and be able to see the world in a new kind of way. So if I can have that be the impression of what the beginning of the computer science program is here at Hillsdale, I'll count that as a win.
- [41:05]
B
Dr. John Seifert is associate professor of Computer Science here at Hillsdale College. As we talk about, well, computer science here at Hillsdale. Dr. Seiffert, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
- [41:19]
E
Thank you.
- [41:20]
B
That will wrap up this edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Our thanks to Mark Krikorian from the center for Immigration Studies. His Essay is@AmericanMind.org the Americanization Challenge is real. We also talked with Dr. Christina Lambert from Hillsdale's English department about T.S. elliotts and John Seifert from Hillsdale's Computer Science department, talking about the revival of the computer science program at Hillsdale College. The Radio Free Hillsdale Hour is recorded at the studios of wrfh, the student run radio station at Hillsdale College. Remember, you can hear new episodes every week on this station. You also can find extended versions of some of our interviews or listen anytime to the podcast. Find it at Podcast Hillsdale or wherever you get your audio. Until next week, I'm Scott Bertram and this has been the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.