Dr. Hight is Serious About Work and Play

Freedom to nurture stimulating intellectual inquiry. An environment that fosters intimate faculty-student relationships. A tight-knit community with opportunities for cultivating civic-mindedness. These are all reasons that students choose Hampden-Sydney. They’re also the values and characteristics that have kept Thompson Professor of Philosophy Marc Hight at Hampden-Sydney for more than 20 years.

After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in international affairs and philosophy from Florida State University in 1990, Dr. Hight began a doctorate program in European history at his alma mater. It didn’t take him long to switch gears. “I love history, but history is typically more narrative,” Hight explains. “The sorts of questions that I was interested in were more analytical in nature: What's the difference between a good explanation for a particular historical event and rival explanations? What's the status of past referring sentences and what does that mean? I started taking classes in the philosophy department, and the next thing I know I'm off to get a Ph.D. in a different discipline.”

Ending his graduate work in history with a master’s degree, Hight began his Ph.D. in philosophy at Syracuse University, from which he graduated in 1999. Dr. Hight taught at Hamilton College in New York for two years before coming to Hampden-Sydney in 2001, where he’s impacted, encouraged, and invested in students ever since.

“My favorite part of the job is watching the students develop and mature as intellects,” Hight says. “I’ve had opportunities to go to large research universities, but teaching a class of 400 undergraduates just isn’t the same. I like the working with the guys and having that hands-on relationship. I also enjoy the relative academic freedom I have in the classroom at Hampden-Sydney. No one is looking over my shoulder, and it’s really allowed my colleagues and I to develop a challenging program and push students to do things that I might not be able to do someplace else.”

Dr. Hight’s approach to educating his students is anything but standard. He routinely spends upwards of 15 hours per week just on leaving meticulous, typed feedback on his students’ papers—an undertaking he insists is entirely worth it. Dr. Hight doesn’t merely devote himself to students in the realm of academics, though. On any given day, you can find Dr. Hight spending hours of his free time advising student groups like the Union-Philanthropic Literary Society and World in Flames, hustling up and down the court in Gammon Gym with Student-Faculty-Staff (SFS) Basketball, bagpiping for College events, or running and resetting the Escape Room in Bortz. It is his belief that residential liberal arts colleges like Hampden-Sydney should promote engaging, unifying lived experiences that keeps Dr. Hight on the move and on the lookout for opportunities to help our young men become good, inclusive citizens in their communities.

“As faculty members, we worry about our students being good citizens just as much as good students, about things like how our young men treat women,” Dr. Hight says, “so what do you do to address that directly? You can talk about it in class, make them think about the issue. But there’s a difference between hearing about it from a professor and seeing it in action and having that lived experience.”

“When I first arrived at Hampden-Sydney, I noticed there was a divide between the staff and students,” Hight continues, describing the inception of what has become a time-honored, weekly game of pick-up basketball featuring students, faculty members, and staff. “I happened to make friends with some of the guys on staff who played basketball, so I started SFS Basketball because I wanted to bridge the gap between students and College employees. By and large, every Tuesday night I’m there for the last 22 years. We average around 20 guys regularly, which is pretty good. The students really enjoy coming out and making their old philosophy professor look bad.”

Another fun, practical way that Dr. Hight helps his students connect lessons from the classroom to real-world situations is through the military strategy game, World in Flames, that he leads from the basement of his Via Sacra home—affectionately nicknamed The Bunker. “World in Flames marries my interest in philosophy and history quite well. We get to talk about strategies, engage in careful critical thinking, and discuss how they’re going to prosecute their strategies in the game. It’s all part of modeling trying to be a reflective intellect,” he explains. The game also helps develop geography skills, a knowledge base that many of our students lack coming to college.

Played on 84 square feet of game board, World in Flames requires a serious time commitment from the students as well as Dr. Hight, as there are more than 100 pages of rules to learn and a full campaign can take 20 to 30 four-hour sessions to complete.

If you’re interested in testing out your strategic thinking chops but don’t have the kind of time World in Flames requires, come by Bortz Library and give Dr. Hight’s escape room a try. In 2015, while on their honeymoon in Bergen, Norway, Dr. Hight and his wife, Paula, first experienced an escape room. Seeing an opportunity for students and community members to gain valuable leadership and cooperation skills in a fun setting, Dr. Hight set to building his own escape room on campus when he returned to the Hill. Escape H-SC is now a well-loved part of Hampden-Sydney’s extracurricular offerings and is an integral event in Greek Week each year, with Dr. Hight leading a team that creates all of the scenarios and clues.

“That first year, I had an escape percentage of zero, so I had to back off on the intensity a little bit,” Hight laughs. “I expanded the room to be a little more traditional, so it’s a little more welcoming. Thankfully, the escape percentage has gone up, but it’s still challenging. Students still have to earn the bragging rights of ‘I beat Hight’s escape room.’”

Dr. Hight’s career hasn’t been all fun and games, of course. Somehow amidst all his extracurricular endeavors, Dr. Hight has still found the time to publish two books, upwards of 40 articles, earn a Fulbright Fellowship, and run a side gig consulting in the philosophy of economics.  

“Research is critically important to liberal arts professors because it’s hard not to become dead wood over time,” Hight says. “At this point in my career, I’ve published enough, so now I can do work in things that excite me. That’s important because if I’m excited, I can bring that energy to my students.”

Dr. Hight is the epitome of a Hampden-Sydney professor, pushing his students in the classroom, connecting with them outside the classroom, and creating opportunities for them to make vital connections between their coursework and the rest of their lives. In many ways a Hampden-Sydney student’s journey to becoming a good man and good citizen is shaped by the devotion and example of his professors, both in and out of the classroom. And both in and out of the classroom, Dr. Hight is a good man and good citizen who devotes his life to his students and the mission of Hampden-Sydney College. 

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