A hundred years ahead of our homonym

By: Daniel J. Williams

Posted: 4/24/08

When the staff at a small Oklahoma college tried to register the domain name for their Web site, they had to improvise - hillsdale.edu was already taken.

Such episodes can be expected when two schools share the same name. But in this case, it's intentional. The Hillsdale in Oklahoma is named after the one in Michigan.

"In some cases we may know more about your history than some of your students," said Timothy Eaton, president of Hillsdale Free Will Baptist College, a Christian liberal arts school in Moore, Okla.

While the schools share a name, Eaton said Free Will Baptist heritage and liberal arts pride is the real connection, despite geographic distance and a shroud of relative mutual unfamiliarity.

President Larry Arnn said he is aware of no active relationship between the two schools, and his own exposure to the Oklahoma Hillsdale has been brief.

"Once in Oklahoma, I met somebody who worked at that college," Arnn said. "And he was charming and nice and we had a conversation. And that's the first time I ever heard of it. And I later saw a sign on the highway, a billboard about it. And that is actually the only evidence of its existence that I've ever encountered."

Matt Baccus '01 of Hillsdale Free Will Baptist and a resident of Poteau, Okla., said he was mildly familiar with the relationship between the two schools.

"I had heard things about it," Baccus said. "I knew there was a connection."

Scott Blair, an Oklahoma City resident and a graduate student in the school's ministry program, said he was only "vaguely" aware of the Hillsdale connection.

The other Hillsdale formed as Oklahoma Bible College in Tulsa, Okla. in 1958, with classes beginning in February of 1959. After transitioning through several Oklahoma cities, the school settled into its permanent quarters in Moore, Okla., just south of Oklahoma City. It remained Oklahoma Bible College until 1970, when it changed its name briefly to Trinity College. After the Oklahoma Secretary of State vetoed the decision due to a name conflict with another Oklahoma school, the board of trustees settled in April of 1971 on the name of yet another school, this one further away, but historically close.

"We wanted to keep the historical connection," said Jack Richey, a retired Oklahoma minister and a member of that trustee board. "So we chose to go with the [name] Hillsdale."

"It's not hard to figure out that we do consider the connection pretty strongly," Eaton said, getting up from his desk to pull two histories of Hillsdale College - one written by college historian Arlan Gilbert - off his study bookshelf. "That volume and then the centennial volume are in my office."

Michigan's Hillsdale College, though founded by Free Will Baptists, has always been officially non denominational. Hillsdale dropped its Free Will Baptist affiliation in 1907 when the Free Will Baptists merged with the Northern Baptist Convention. Then in the early 1960s Hillsdale ended that final affiliation, becoming fully non-sectarian, Gilbert said. Financial concerns prompted the move.

Yet in 1971, though Hillsdale College was over 60 years removed from its Free Will Baptist affiliation, and nearly a decade from any formal religious affiliation, Oklahoma's Free Will Baptist trustees found affinity in the historical and educational connotations of Hillsdale's name.

Vice President for Institutional Advancement Bob Thompson said Hillsdale Free Will Baptist, which requires a core of humanities, sciences and social sciences, has taken pride in its liberal arts emphasis.

"We felt like going away from the Bible college concept name to Hillsdale Free Will Baptist College would give us a little more emphasis on that," Thompson said. "But we wanted to stay true to our heritage."

Eaton said that heritage also influences the principled philosophies of both schools.

"In many ways that is the link," Eaton said, "that affection we have for the historic founding of the church and the college, the antebellum abolitionist history that we all share in common in a time when it was not necessarily popular or politically expedient. We kind of like that, being ahead of our time."

"Here we are for more than half a century, both existing, and we don't have any regular communication between each other," Arnn said.

President Eaton said the lack of communication is not surprising, considering the differences between the two schools.

"Probably from my perspective it never occurred to us that there would be any interest, given the distance and given the fact that Hillsdale College is a more mature institution," Eaton said. "You're closing in on 150 [years] and we're going to have 50 next year. So as far as development as an institution, you're almost a hundred years ahead of us."

The shared history and name inevitably lead to other incidents, like the two schools receiving mislabeled applications.

"Kinda funny," said Ryan Giles, Hillsdale Free Will Baptist's admissions director. "Every once in awhile we'll get an application online, and it'll be like from Wisconsin or something. So I'll send them an email saying, 'Hey, I just want to make sure you're not trying to go to the Hillsdale in Michigan, because we're in Oklahoma.'"