What Is the Point of a Liberal Arts Education? A Response to President Lugo

Emmanuel Gezahegne Mitikie ’26

Contributing Writer

Trinity College is an institution undergoing massive transformation. It may not seem like it, but a decade or so ago the Trinity brand carried with it a reputation of white northeastern academic mediocrity. The New York Times article “What College Admission Offices Really Want” offers great analysis into the financial situation surrounding the diversification of Trinity College. The article discusses the increased financial costs associated with bringing in talented, often low income, and international students. Today, we must discuss the necessary friction between these students and the changing face of the administration. In many ways, this friction can be understood as the price we pay for having a more diverse student body.

I am not American, I am an Ethiopian Student. I know what it is like to grow up under a totalitarian government. There is no freedom of speech where I come from. So, I am used to silence for the sake of peace — communal and your own. I have also lived in Singapore where you can only protest on a single street and with permission from the government, does this not remind you of Trinity?

On the night of Friday, Nov. 7, President Lugo sent a stern email aimed towards SFJP for their chalkboard messages that called both for Trinity to divest from Israel and for a free Palestine. The email mentions a deviation from the student policy on demonstrations and protests that broke trust across communities and made community members feel unsafe. I find this whole line of thought to be farcical. Trinity asks its students and faculty to be complacent towards the genocide in Gaza simply to maintain an air of “openness and inclusivity that define[s] Trinity College.”

I disagree with the framing and the request from the administration. They fail to see the pain caused by the war and continued displacement of Palestinians. We have Palestinians on campus — students and teachers who are asked every day to remain silent as a genocidal war against their people is waged. All of this is asked of them in the name of comfort, to maintain an air of calm. It is asking for peace while denying justice. How do you have the gall to talk about inclusivity when our colleges invest in the military industrial complex that kills our brothers and sisters of the Global South? The push to diversify Trinity has also made it international. We now have students from all over the world and particularly students from the Global South, which is a reminder that Trinity does not only serve the core of empire anymore. Trinity is not just Boston or Stamford, Connecticut. Trinity is diverse and holds students from all over the world that came here to be educated. And so I ask: what even is the point of a liberal arts education? What is the purpose of having a human rights department if not to identify human rights abuses and aid their cessation? You are educating a group of students to recognize societal patterns of abuse while reprimanding them when they move from ink to real life. The cost of having proactive students is that they are proactive: we recognize the cognitive dissonance between alleged community values and what happens on our campus.

Trinity has always been a radical school: the conservativism we are known for outside is a representation of its predominantly white history. However, students were still protesting South African apartheid as it happened, and lest we forget the 1968 “lock in” where students held trustees captive to make them reconsider having Black scholarships. Dear Trustees, I would not wish that upon you today. This is simply a reminder that Trinity has always been radical; we have always had teeth. Yet, today we stand feckless, always a follower of macro trends, lagging behind our peer institutions before we make any real statements worth a risk.

Dear President Lugo, I ask you not to ask complacency of us simply because we are smart and because we are adults. I expect the administration to continue making statements like these. I ask only that you expect students to continue agitating, for that is the purpose of a liberal arts education. Not to simply be producers of knowledge and goods, but also human beings concerned with dignity. When you see these acts of defiance do not look over in disdain instead rejoice knowing that our college is working. Otherwise, what the school will have to show for after 200 years will be Shake Shack and two conservative media pundits that amplify and perpetuate the same cycles of violence I criticize. Can we be open to that?