Behavior Consistent With Our Values 

Alex Gervais ’28

Executive Opinion Editor

I wanted to be a President Lugo fan, I really did. I thought that he had true liberal chops after a promising presidential stint at Queens University that included addressing the University’s historic links with slavery. I was proud of the work he did in navigating inherited financial headwinds against the College. I was relieved that we had a president that seems happy to spend time at Trinity and be a visible presence on campus. I was excited for him to be our president. I had hoped we as a community had moved past the years of President Berger-Sweeney, that we could create a campus environment that was no longer afraid to discuss politics openly, even if it meant having hard conversations. But President Lugo’s email, “Behavior Inconsistent With Our Values,” gives me serious qualms for the future of political thought on our campus.

His email was a response to Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine (SFJP) writing “overtly political” messages on chalkboards in Seabury Hall calling for the College to divest from Israel and for Palestinian liberation. The messages were chalked the night of Thursday, Nov. 6 and seen by the community on Friday, Nov. 7. They contained sentiments that have been expressed repeatedly on campus over the last two years. In his email, President Lugo claims that these chalkings violate the supposedly content-neutral manner and place restrictions in the Student Handbook. He also says that members of the community felt “unsettled” by these messages, that they were “harassment.”

I too sometimes feel “unsettled” in our classrooms at Trinity. I feel unsettled that our school employs a Heritage Foundation fellow. I feel unsettled that our school couldn’t say no to conservative donor money, creating the Shelby Cullom Davis endowment and the formal organizations department. I feel unsettled that I could write an idea on a chalkboard that is supported by a majority of the American public one night and the next day the entire school could get an email condemning my act. Yet, I know — or at least I thought I knew — that I would always have a recourse against my unsettlement. I believed that, if I wanted to, I could protest freely on campus, I could write freely in the Tripod’s opinion section, I could always freely express my views no matter how far to the left of the status quo they seemed; I feel less confident in that instinctual freedom today.

We are on a campus where political speech and protest absolutely is consistent with our values: our students sat-in for integration on campus, protested against apartheid in South Africa and are now calling for divestment from Israel. Our administration actively flaunted and embraced our campus’s protest history when it was convenient for them during our bicentennial, even when the highlighted acts of protest violated campus policy at the time. I ask them to see that the chalking on Thursday night was not just consistent with our campus’s values, but was a true demonstration of them. 

Time and time again, our administration has made it a point to suppress student protest. I must ask if they understand the expectations and implications that come with suppression of student voice. Each time Trinity condemns, controls and chastises student protest, it makes it harder for political speech to flourish on our campus. When we are in an environment that feels controlled and sterilized, the rare speech against the status quo comes under a microscope. This tends to create an implicit content restriction on student protest where we self-censor and don’t speak out. If I had written endorsements for Vermin Supreme in every Seabury classroom because I believe administration should be doing more to platform him, would I be in violation of our protest policy? Would that even be considered a protest by the school? Would it have warranted a campus-wide email at 10 p.m. on a Friday night? I would have done a clearly political act in an allegedly academic setting, but its content would make it seem inane. It seems to me that we draw a line of seriousness on this campus; that when our administration deems speech antithetical to our “values” we tend to impose de facto content restrictions. 

I will continue expressing my political opinions on our campus, and I encourage my fellow community members to do the same. We’re in an era of resistance, a time when disruption is absolutely consistent with protecting the liberal arts values that we so clearly see as our ethos. This means protecting disruption and protest on campus. It means working constructively with our student leaders, not publicly humiliating them. I think President Lugo said it best when discussing the school’s evolving relationship with the federal government in an interview with the Tripod published in September: “all of these things are [going to] make us better. That’s what disruption does: it makes us better.”