Think Again: Revising Trinity’s Flag Policy

Eric Johnson-DeBaufre

Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian

In a Sept. 16, 2025 opinion piece, I criticized Trinity College’s recent decision to lower the flag to half-staff in “honor of the memory of Charlie Kirk.” I have since learned that this was not the result of a decision at all, but merely Trinity’s adherence to its policy to follow the practice of the Connecticut state capitol and the determinations of the governor. 

While this information provides helpful context, it arguably places the College’s action in a worse rather than a better light, since the policy surrenders two activities—thinking and judging—that lie at the heart of the liberal arts. In their place it substitutes the easier and simpler path of external compliance, the result being an act that can quite literally be described as thoughtless, since thinking played no part in it. 

Such thoughtlessness is, or ought to be, a cause for grief at a college of the liberal arts, since it signals a failure to live up to our mission of producing “bold, independent thinkers.” For the political thinker Hannah Arendt, thinking and judging for oneself were not only essential elements of all human activity and necessary for any conception of a good life; they were safeguards against doing harm, since all genuine thinking and judging demanded not only that we attempt to think from the standpoint of another, but that we stand apart from the pressures of social conformity. Arendt knew well the dangers posed by thoughtlessness, having witnessed as well as suffered the painful consequences of a time when submission to the thinking and judgment of others had led Europe into a catastrophe. 

Given the times in which we now live, when obedience to authority and deference to its directives are increasingly unquestioned, we must demand and assert the right to think and judge for ourselves. For that reason, I urge the executive leadership of Trinity College to revise its policy on flag observance and replace it with one that preserves our independence by placing deliberation at its center.