Hillsdale College Hosts Tunku Varadarajan as Spring 2025 Pulliam Fellow
Wall Street Journal contributor Tunku Varadarajan gave a lecture titled “Is India Lost to the West?”
HILLSDALE, Mich. — Hillsdale College hosted Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal contributor, as the spring 2025 Eugene C. Pulliam distinguished visiting fellow in journalism from March 24 through April 2. While on campus, Varadarajan taught a one-credit journalism seminar for Hillsdale students on “The Art of the Review.” Varadarajan gave a public lecture on April 1 titled “Is India Lost to the West?”
Varadarajan said that India is abandoning Western values like religious tolerance, the rule of law, and democracy even while being strategically closer to the West than ever.
“It is my fervent hope that Indian Americans, who are successful, persuasive, eloquent, self-confident citizens of a powerful, persuasive, assertive nation will form a cohort of political and cultural advocates who keep India, the land of their ancestry and in some cases of their birth, honest, who keep India from slipping out of the moral and cultural sphere that makes the country still a principled partner of the west into an anti-Western space — that keeps India from slipping into an anti-Western nationalistic vortex in which India comes to reject the values that we in America and in the West more broadly hold to be dear, to be fundamental and to be non-negotiable,” Varadarajan said.
Tunku Varadarajan is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, for which he writes op-eds and book reviews, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute. He earned a B.A. from Trinity College, Oxford University. He previously worked as the op-ed editor for the Wall Street Journal and as editor of Newsweek International. Varadarajan has also served as the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter research fellow in journalism at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, contributing editor at Politico Europe, executive editor for opinion at Forbes and bureau chief at the Times of London in New York and Madrid. He has taught as a clinical professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University and as an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism and at CUNY’s graduate school of journalism. He was also a lecturer in law at Trinity College, Oxford.
As a Pulliam fellow, Varadarajan joins a list of notable journalists who have lent their skills to Hillsdale College, including Alexandra DeSanctis, Andrew Klavan, and Kimberley Strassel. Pulliam fellows enjoy a two-week residency on Hillsdale’s campus and teach a week-and-a-half, one-credit course in the Journalism Department. This semester, nine students took the course, titled “The Art of the Review.” Fellows also consult with students who work on The Collegian, the College’s student-run newspaper.
For photos from Varadarajan’s appearance on the Larry Arnn Show, click here. For photos of Hillsdale College, click here. For a high-resolution copy of the Hillsdale College clocktower logo, click here.