WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Collegian Week in Review: March 27, 2025

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

This week, Caroline and Thomas are joined by Lewis Thune to discuss the need for an increase in state pride. Anna Broussard also joins to highlight her article on children's literature.

Welcome to the Collegion Weekend Review on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Here are your host, Caroline Kurt, Thomas McKenna, and Coleman Rowner. Welcome to Collegion Weekend Review, where we give you an inside look into Michigan's oldest college newspaper. We're your host, Caroline Kurt. And Thomas McKenna. And today we'll be talking to Lewis Thune about whose two opinions, one of them about why we should have more state pride. Then we'll talk to Anna Broussard, our culture editor about two pieces she wrote over there about children's literature and a Broadway performance artist who came to campus. And finally, we'll speak with Collegian reporter Grace Novak on her story about how more Hillsdale families are growing chickens and eggs in their own backyard.

But first, let's look at the front page. On the front page, we've got a piece by me on Bishop Robert Barron speaking on worship and contemplation in Christchaple last week. Then we've got news about this radio station. Radio Free Hillsdale won best station of the year for the third year in a row at the Michigan Association of Broadcasters College Awards. And we've also got a long exit interview with former mayor Adam Stockford about his time as mayor of the city of Hillsdale. We've got a quick piece on homestead, which is a farm just outside of Hillsdale. And finally, we've got a little piece about the new theater professor that the college just hired. We'll be speaking with Lewis Thune in just a moment about his opinion pieces this week, one of them on why we should have more state pride and the other on why travel culture is overrated. You're listening to Collegian Week in Review on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Radio Free Hillsdale's The Collegian Weekend Review continues. This is Collegian Weeker Review and we are here with Junior Lewis Thune to talk about two of his

opinions pieces this week. One on why we should have some state pride and the other on why travel culture is perhaps overrated. So Lewis, why don't you first go into your state piece? You are a proud Nebraska in some senses. In a certain sense, I'd say I am a proud Nebraska. Basically, the thrust of the piece is we think of our states like we think of our localities in our country and that we are very quick to point out their flaws. But we hate it when we're, other people do it, especially outsiders. But what I notice is a lot of us don't apply the same rule of states as we do to our cities and to our country, where if you criticize it, we're quick to defend it. And I want to see that because I really do love my state, even if I won't say it out

loud. Nebraska's a great place, and the people who criticize it are just uncultured and wrong. You went into, you know, very humorously, kind of, you know, weighing the Nebraska pros and cons. So, you know, how do you defend Nebraska? What, you know, do the haters, the Nebraska haters attack? Yeah, well, the basic, the basic attack against Nebraska is it's just a field and not a particularly interesting field because it's flat for half of the state and the other half of the state is like rolling 20 foot hills. Like, you could close. I'm a tree and see most of Nebraska. That's not entirely true because we do have Omaha, which is where I'm from, as well as Lincoln. They're on the far east side of the state. Omaha is actually an extremely large city. We have over one million residents. So if you Googled us on the Census Bureau, we'd be bigger than Miami, Orlando, Colorado Springs, so on, so forth. But to the other charge, which is that Nebraska isn't really a Midwestern state because it has that big city attraction, I'd say, well, well, you're just wrong. Obviously, big farming state,

big on corn. That's most of the state's identity. We make good corn, though. We make we make corn intended for people consumption, not animal consumption. All right, we're feeding you, not what you're going to eat. We also farm cows very well. Nebraska is a big beef state. Omaha is famous for its steakhouses and so on and so forth. And then of course there's one of my favorite things about Nebraska, which is the Ogallala aquifer, which produces some top tier water. I have traveled around the country and I just can't find myself tolerating the water in other places. Arkansas water does taste like rocks. Florida water tastes like a swamp. Nebraska, Alaska water tastes like water.

Now, Lewis, other than kind of the fun of, you know, having state pride and maybe a rivalry tossed into the mix, what's the deeper reason to be proud of your state, to be proud of, yeah, your locality, your city? Well, states, as I talk about in the article, are the most American part of America. They precede the United States, which is why we're called the United States and not the United. They gave us the America, we know, all right, they gave us the federalist system, the Senate. Growing up, I knew my senator, which contributed heavily to my state identity. They also are the source of some conflicts in our history, as you probably know, there was the whole Toledo affair between Michigan and Ohio, a minor war fought between the two states. But there was also the civil war, which is obviously a touchy subject because of slavery. But there was some great Confederate soldiers, general statesmen who have been memorialized all throughout American history because they fought out of loyalty for their homeland. And that's something we can all respect as Americans because we're supposed to feel that for our home. The only issue is they felt that for their homes and that caused them to side for slavery, which is, you know, we've seen that

entire debate rehashed over the past decade. But we all realized that they were fighting out of an honorable desire, even if they sided with the wrong people. So states really are a piece of our American identity. And because we love our country so much, I would argue, we should love our states because they're a piece of the history. They unite and divide us uniquely as Americans. And so for that reason, for the same reason you love your country and you love your locality, you should have that sort of love and pride and defense for your state. Yeah. And also quickly, your other piece for me this week goes hand in hand with the state pride piece, I think. Make the case for us briefly. Why is travel culture overrated? What should we do instead, perhaps?

Yeah, so I say travel culture, I don't hate it. Travel is exciting. People have been doing it. It's becoming cheaper and cheaper and more plausible. And I love going around the country and around the world and I've enjoyed the places I've been. and I've learned a lot, but the desire to travel more, I'd say, is a misguided one. And that's simply because, like any good, there's a time and a place for travel. And that's to help yourself out in times of extreme distress or tiredness. It's getting a much-needed break. The problem is we don't necessarily need those breaks. I think what we need as Americans living in a consumer culture is we need to teach ourselves to be content with where we are.

And so how I would say we ought to combat travel culture and that push to go around and see more of the world is you need to see more of the world around you because there really is stuff there to excite you and tire you out. I point to volunteering opportunities all throughout high school that were really instructive in me learning to be content with Nebraska as flat and occasionally boring of a state as it is. And then there's also a lot of natural beauty in the world, which I never saw growing up. And then just on this spring break, I finally realized, oh, I get it now. It's a lot of tiring bike rides, tree climbs. But when you get to a high point, and that's something I'd really encourage, people growing up in the mountains have it easy us growing up on the plains. You've got to work.

You've got to work to get up high. But once you reach that high point and you look down, in my case, looking over just a vast swath of the Missouri River, Valley hundreds of square miles. I was like, this really is beautiful. And I can see the entire city and all those 1.2 million people I grew up around. And that's something I can get used to and I need to look for more in life. So yeah, I'd say travel culture, it's a good thing, but it's also a thing you need to teach yourself to resist to some degree and teach yourself to be content with what you have and where you are. Wonderful. All right. Well, thank you, Lewis. It's been wonderful talking. This is Collegian Weekend Review. You're listening to Radio Free Hillstill, 101.7 FM.

This is the Collegian Week in Review. Welcome back to Collegian Weekend Review. We're here with Culture Editor Anna Broussard. We're talking about two pieces that she wrote for her section, one of them on Acting the Song, a new production. Anna, tell us about this piece. Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to talk about this. I had such a good time. This was on Saturday, March 22nd. Malcolm Gets is a Tory nominated Broadway performer who came to teach a masterclass with the Theater 393 ensemble, who the normal instructor is Dr. Matzos, Tori Matzos. So he came and taught, they like go back at the University of Florida. Like Malcolm was a colleague with both Dr. Mr. Mr.

Matzos, Christopher Matzos, and then Dr. Tori Matzos. So he said when I talked to him, he was like, I just fell in love with them. They're wonderful people. And he had originally come up with the idea to do an acting the song. So basically it's where students are able to bring like musical theater into more acting. And you learn kind of how to like take a song and really story tell it with paired with acting. So one of the things that the students kept saying that Malcolm kept bringing up throughout the whole course was this really famous quote from a renowned choreographer, Elysius Dove, nothing to prove only to share. And so he kind of said that that was the entire approach to the course, just that you're teaching that you don't have to be this super serious, perfect performer always.

You need to just like understand what you're trying to convey to the audience and then learn how to share that. And the remarkable thing about this performance as a master class is the students have just a week. to put it together and perform it. Did you get to watch the performance? Yes, I did. I got to go on Saturday, and it was just like absolutely amazing. I was so enthralled. I was telling a senior Fiona Mully, she sang the first standalone performance, 100 Ways to Lose a Man. I believe that is from Wonderful Town. And she was just fantastic. I said that I laughed and I cried throughout the performance because it was just so, she was so engaging and then she was so passionate about it and you could just tell it meant so much to her. They all said, so I got to talk to Emily Griffith, who's a senior,

and then Kevin Pines, who's a junior, and they all took the course along with four other students. So it was seven in total. They all said that it was just life-changing. They said that he was so invested in them and he just wanted to be able to push them. His big thing was like, I want you guys to find your own voice and kind of learn how to convey who you are. You don't have to be a certain type of mold to fit in the performance world, but that you can just really be your unique self. And that's what stands out the most. And so they all kind of said, and you could especially tell this with the performance, with Emily's performance and with Kevin's performance, they just were so themselves. And you could see with each of the pieces that they performed, it was so evident of like who they are as people.

And I think he really pushed them to work on that and find that within themselves, which was super amazing. Awesome. And then you wrote another piece for your section this week. Tell us about that one as well. Yeah. So Aaron Zenz, he is an alum from 1998. He is an author and illustrator. He has authored and illustrated nine of his own books and then illustrated 36 more books. I got to go to the Hillsdale Academy as he was presenting to the high school body, which was amazing. That facility is really cool. So it was cool to go and kind of get to have a presentation on what his kind of career is. And just as he was sharing his story, what I thought was really unique about him and the work that he does is he was super pro his own family. and he was saying how much inspiration he gained from his family.

And I didn't really have enough time in the piece to reference this as much. I referenced it a little bit, but they have a family blog called Bookie-Wogie, I believe. And it's basically where they would read books as a family and then their kids would write reviews on it. And then they would also pair it with their own illustrations. So he would pick a couple of books. He would say, like, what, tell me what this book makes you feel in a drawing. So he really just was able to foster this creativity in his own family that then inspired. One of his books, it's featured in the picture on the actual article called Monsters Go Night Night.

It's about, obviously, a bedtime story for kids about monsters. And all of the illustrations were inspired by his son. one of his sons who loved drawing monsters, which was just super fascinating to me that just one small kid could inspire like a whole career like that. Did he talk about his assessment of where children's literature is right now and what he wants to bring to it that he thinks it might be missing? Yeah, he said, because I also was really wondering what his perspective was on what the state of children's literature is. And he said that it is thriving. He said that there is so much creativity because of multimedia, like especially using technological media now. There's so many opportunities to convey stories that might not have been as easily conveyed through conventional ways.

So he said that it was thriving. And then he also said that as a whole he wanted to inspire more young people to pursue careers like that. because he felt that he felt that sometimes with the art world, and like Caroline, I feel like you probably understand this a little bit with your artistic experience, that people will go into it without training a lot of time and how it is really essential to have a basis of learning how to do things well. And he was saying how the liberal arts schools like Hillsdale Academy

and then Intel's College really help to foster that like principled way to learn how to do art and how it can be the most freeing and creative way to do it and not as constraining as it would be if you just independently go into it. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Anna, for coming on. Thank you, guys. This is Collegian Weekend Review on Radio Free Hillsill 101.7 FM. We'll be back in a moment. You're listening to the Collegian Week in Review. Welcome back to Collegian Week and Review. We're here with Grace. Novak, a collegian reporter who went out and talked to Hillsdale families who keep backyard chickens,

especially among rising egg prices right now. Grace, tell us about what you found with these families. Yeah, so it was so interesting. With most of these families, you would think that the correlation would have a lot to do with the price of eggs rising so much, but it seemed that the main takeaway point was that these families wanted the chickens mostly for the extra benefits they added just in the daily life in the wholesome, more nature-focused lifestyle that it added to that. Yeah, one quote here from Jonathan Smith, who's the college's senior director of continuous improvement. He said a lot of people tend to be pretty mechanical in their calculations about these things. It's a value proposition of dollars and cents.

But I think the reality is that it's more than just a dollars and cents function. It's also the health and intangible values that it brings to the family. what did you see about these intangible benefits that it brings to these families? Yeah, so it was so clear even just from going to their houses, their kids were all, I got to the Smith's house right as the kids were coming back from school, and they immediately all ran out to go do their chores and collect their eggs. So there definitely is an element of just taking part in providing for their family, even at a young age, and that pride, and they were able to give us eggs that they themselves had harvested from the chickens.

So definitely there was like the discipline, the structure of the daily routine, and just like the pride of the accomplishment and seeing where your food directly comes from. So I would say especially with the families with the young kids, that seemed to be a huge factor. So one of the families that you talked to is that they have a particular chicken who is now gone, but he had a certain name

and there were a lot of stories about him. Who was this? Yes. I talked to the Jordans, a couple who was near College Baptist and they had quite a few chickens, but Mr. Fine Feathers was their rooster who was quite notorious for, their descriptions. Apparently he was, he was very aggressive. And so amongst their kids, he would

sometimes be very confrontational and it would take Mr. Jordan would have to go out and defend the family from Mr. Fine Feathers. So that definitely made some entertaining stories. He said that he and Mr. Fine Feathers had one, no, four or five epic battles. And some of them on the sidewalk with other people there. So I guess that's one hazard that comes along. Yeah. I don't know if that's a typical experience, especially since most of these families are raising hens, so they're way less aggressive than the roosters are, but definitely it can happen. Well, something that both Smith and Jordan mentions

is that sometimes the chickens die. Either they die from some kind of disease or a raccoon or a fox gets to them. But Jonathan Smith says something interesting about this. What did he say? He said that this can actually can really help to teach the kids, especially just about mortality and life or death. It's very interesting just they were, both of the Smiths, we're talking about how our culture can be so removed from these real things of life that sometimes it can cause just a distance in our world that's focused on media and social media and just a distance from all these things. It's really, really positive, even in the more difficult elements of connecting close to nature, such as death can just provide such helpful learning experiences for the kids.

And Grace, going back to the eggflation, shall we say, did the families find in, you know, over the course of, you know, months or years, they've been raising these chickens that it did save them on eggs? Yeah. So it seems that it can. It mostly just depends on how you do it. It can be done that way. Absolutely. Neither of the families I spoke to had specifically calculated it out, but they both estimated it was probably breaking even. But one thing they did emphasize, though, was that having chickens, it's kind of the first step is challenging.

But once you have them, adding more chickens is not difficult at all. So especially if you establish good routines, it can be very easy to turn it into a much bigger production with minimal effort. And then that would absolutely be a means to save money for sure. And I know, I mean, I'm from the Chicago suburb. So I know that a lot of, you know, cities and suburbs around the nation have pretty strict laws on raising, you know, lives. stock or chickens in your backyard. It doesn't seem like that is the case for Hillsdale. Is that correct? It seems to differ depending on where you are. So I talk to the Smiths live outside of the Hillsdale city limits. So there are different regulations out there. It definitely, the closer you

get within the city and the laws are much stricter there, but there are still ways to go about it. But it definitely is more of a challenge. And one of the people that you talk to is said that there are some people trying to change the laws in the city. The law in the city is something like you can't have more than six chickens. Yes. It's something like that. It sounds a little bit ambiguous. Like it's, they're trying to decide like whether chickens count as livestock or pets. So there's a different, it gets a little tricky to maneuver. But definitely people in the legislature are aware of the benefits that this is bringing and at least getting that idea out there. It's something that's being talked about. Understood. Well, Grace, thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, thank you for having

me. You're listening to Collegian Weekend Review on Radio Free Hillsdale, 11.7 FM. We'll be back in a moment. You've been listening to Collegian Week and Review on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Caroline Kurt. And I'm Thomas McKenna. You can find the Collegian Weekend Review online at cwir.transistor.fm. You can find more news at Hillsdale Collegion.com. You can find us on Instagram at Hillsdale Collegion. We'll see you next week.