Professor appointed to board of NRA

By Catherine Maxwell Collegian Reporter

Professor of History David

Raney was elected to a threeyear term on the board of the National Rifle Association and will be sworn in on Saturday, April 15, with duties beginning the following Monday.

Raney has taught at Hillsdale for almost thirty years and has written extensively about firearms and the Second Amendment.

“I began teaching at Hillsdale in 2005,” Raney said. “In 2013, the college awarded me an endowed chair — the John Anthony Halter Chair in American History, the Constitution, and the Second Amendment.”

Raney has also lectured on the Second Amendment for various Hillsdale summer programs.

“I lecture every summer for the firearms/Second Amendment-themed ‘Liberty & Learning Youth Conference,’ sponsored by the Admissions office,” he said. “I also speak for the Institutional Advancement office’s ‘Ladies for Liberty’ and ‘Couples for Liberty’ programs each summer.”

At a young age, Raney became involved with the NRA.

“I decided to join at the ripe old age of 14,” he said. “I scraped together money from a paper route that I had.”

Raney said he became a lifetime member in college and a benefactor member — the highest tier — in the 1990s.

As a board member, Raney said he will have the opportunity to serve on at least one of various committees ranging from legislative policy to college programs.

“Before I was elected to the board, I was asked to serve on the Collegiate Programs Committee which deals with shooting programs and college competitions,” Raney said.

Raney said he would like to remain on that committee but would also like to explore the popular legislative policy committee.

“Everyone wants to be on that one,” he said. “Some nationally known politicians are members of that committee, and they know a thing or two about legislation. It's a hard committee to break into.”

Raney said he appreciates

There’s a lot of broken science, according to former CrossFit founder and Broken Science Initiative founder Greg Glassman. On April 11 Hillsdale’s Academy for Science and Freedom hosted a two-speaker event in collaboration with the initiative.

In 2022, Emily Kaplan and Glassman founded The Broken Science Initiative. According to the initiative’s website, it seeks to “call attention to the current state of modern science” which they describe as “broken,” “void of validation,” and has a “deductivist approach” which “stimulates results that cannot be replicated.”

Glassman founded and owned CrossFit, Inc. — a branded fitness regimen that involves high intensity movement — until 2020. The company is affiliated with about 13,000 gyms in 158 countries, and its worth has been estimated to be about $4 billion, according to an article from BBC News in June 2020. Glassman stepped down and sold Crossfit after he received backlash for various tweets and comments about the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

Glassman began his speech saying the core values of science have shifted.

“I don’t think science is broken, but I think there’s a lot of broken science,” Glassman said. “Typically when you see that, you can find some kind of regulatory capture and a government agency — people are no longer in the business of providing remedies but of persuading the gatekeepers.”

“You might look at a penny and say, is the 50/50 of the coin toss or the one in six of a dice, is that baked into the object?” Glassman said. “Or is that a reflection of our minds? We know it’s not an easy thing to learn, but we do know that probability is an objective measure of your level of knowledge.”

The Broken Science Initiative collaborator William M. Briggs spoke after Glassman. Briggs was a former professor at Cornell Medical School, a statistician at DoubleClick—an internet advertising company, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service, and an electronic cryptologist with the U.S. Air Force.

Briggs agreed with Glassman’s critique of science having similar problems, referring to his point about replication as a “replication crisis.”

“Doing science is easy,” Briggs said. “Creating models is easy. Positing theories is easy. It’s really easy to do this, and that’s part of our problem right there. We’ve gotten so good at this that we’re doing too much of it.” ionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn toward darkness.”

Citing “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time,” an article published by Nature this January, Briggs discussed “disruptive science” and how revenue in every field from physics to psychology had plummeted since 1960.

The invite-only occasion garnered the attention of many professors in Hillsdale’s STEM departments including Dean of Natural Sciences and Professor of Chemistry Matthew Young, who received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Northwestern University in 2007.

“I was disappointed that the speakers did not focus more on constructive ideas for how to improve science,” Young said. “Science has been incredibly successful at understanding the natural world and providing the basis for a wide variety of life-improving technologies, so the claim that science is broken carries a high burden of proof. I was not convinced, but the more interesting question to me is what are the specific ideas for improving the way that science works?”

Some students attended the event, including senior biology major Sydney Slepian, who expressed frustration with the speakers.

Investment club creates new site

By Emma Verrigni Collegian Reporter

The Hillsdale College Investment Club introduced a new website to boost the club’s recognition, provide members quick access to the club’s portfolio, and increase outreach to potential members.

The club released the new website on March 9.

According to its website, the investment club manages a portfolio of U.S. equities and specializes in five different market sectors. Club meetings are dedicated to discussing different investment opportunities.

Features of the club’s new website include member biographies, a “join” tab for interested students, and a new password–protected portal only accessible to club members. The site also provides basic information about the investment club, links to the club’s Instagram and LinkedIn pages, and a new “contact us” feature.

both the history and the purpose of the NRA.

“It's the oldest nationwide civil rights organization in the country,” he said. “It was founded in 1871 by Union veterans and was primarily oriented toward improving marksmanship skills on the part of the citizenry.”

During the second half of the 20th century, the NRA began to focus more on protecting Second Amendment rights, according to Raney.

“The NRA has the name recognition and the ability to mobilize resources to defeat these serious challenges to the right to bear arms,” Raney said.

Students said they are excited to have a Hillsdale professor on the NRA board.

“He really understands the history of the right to bear arms in America and cares a lot about protecting that right in alignment with the Constitution and the Founders' ideals,” said Hannah Tully, a freshman in Raney’s American Heritage class.

Another freshman from Raney’s American Heritage class, Porter Jihaad, said Raney’s knowledge of the Constitution prepared him for the board position.

“Dr. Raney's passion and vast knowledge of the American Constitution and early American history make him, in my view, more than qualified for the job,” Jihaad said.

Students outside Raney’s classes said they are excited as well.

“It shows how our faculty overall are very supportive of originalist interpretations of the constitution,” said Anna Teply, a freshman who has become involved with the college’s shooting center.

Raney encourages students who are passionate about the Second Amendment to consider becoming involved with the NRA..

“You have to protect the means by which you secure that right to life, and that means is the ability to possess and to carry firearms for your own self defense,” he said. “It's my hope that students would appreciate that, and I would encourage them to seek out additional information about the association.”

After detailing some of the challenges he faced with media and regulatory bodies while running CrossFit, Glassman said faulty definitions are the fundamental issues with “modern science.” He gave his own definitions of terms like hypothesis and law, while mapping out four factors of how science is supposed to work. These factors, all of which he also described, are observation, measurement, prediction, and validation. Glassman also said probability is a crucial idea that has been debated since the Tower of Babel.

“So it’s impossible to look across the science that we’re seeing out there and think that all of it or even most of it is any good or of any real use,” Briggs said. “There’s a tremendous problem out there. And there’s no symmetry. Even if half of science is right and half the science is wrong, the half that’s wrong takes much more energy and effort to combat the battle, especially because science is now run by the bureaucracy.”

Briggs also quoted Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet.

“The case against science is straightforward. Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half may be simply untrue. Afflicted by small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fash -

“The main theme I got from the talk was to encourage skepticism of science in an audience that was already skeptical,” Slepian said. “They spoke about the flaw of confirmation bias in research, yet here they were doing the exact same thing in only searching for and explaining studies that show some inaccuracies in science and experiments rather than exploring the benefits and great strides seen in scientific research.”

Junior Victoria Kelly expressed similar sentiments.

“After everything we’ve seen especially over the last few years with COVID, I think there is a discussion that should be had and I’m interested in seeing what, if anything, the initiative grows into,” Kelly said. “That said, I don’t necessarily think last night was helpful. I walked away confused about why I should think the speaker was an expert on the topic of science, and I don’t think his message could convince anyone who didn’t already agree with him.”