Hartford Doesn’t Need To Be a “College Town” for Trinity. Trinity Needs To Be a College for Hartford.

Leon Hu ’29

Staff Writer

In September, new College President Daniel Lugo was interviewed on “This Week in Connecticut” about the future of Trinity under his leadership. It was a promising conversation, covering the difficulties of a first-year class who entered high school during the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of AI in education, difficulties with the Trump administration’s demands, etc.—all standard debates in higher education today. However, President Lugo also mentioned wanting Hartford to become a “college town.” Specifically, he said he “think it’d be fantastic if Hartford became explicitly identified as a college city.” 

This rhetoric is problematic, but unfortunately, it’s nothing new; former President Berger-Sweeney had mentioned the same idea during the beginning of her term as College president. The reasoning is obvious: as Lugo admits, Trinity’s location in Hartford is often seen as a drawback. Hartford is stereotyped as an unsafe place, one undeserving of a quality institution like Trinity. Following this logic, to improve the student experience at Trinity, changes need to be made regarding the city of Hartford.

But is Hartford actually the problem? Frankly, it isn’t. Our homicide rate last year was one of the highest for cities with populations below 250,000, but this masks the real issue: the rampant class-based injustice in Hartford. The Hartford Foundation reported last year that 27% of Hartford residents live below the poverty line, compared to the national average in the same year of 10.6%. Additionally, about 20% of Black and Latino children in Greater Hartford live in poverty versus about 1% of white children. It is well-established that poverty correlates with higher crime rates. Thus, the root of the issue is not crime in Hartford; instead, it is the gross class divide that underlies all the structural flaws of our city, a class divide Trinity only serves to perpetuate. 

26% of our students come from the top 1% of families, the highest rate in the country. We are a predominantly white institution with only about 25% of our students hailing from historically marginalized backgrounds compared to a city that is 45% Hispanic and 33% African-American. We are a highly prestigious institution and have the resources to back it up, but we literally fence ourselves off from the rest of Hartford. Our presence, one of wealth, whiteness and elite status, is a constant slap in the face to the people of Hartford that we are literally and figuratively divided from. We are not the solution to Hartford’s problems. We are a cause of it. 

Even though we have community outreach in Hartford (i.e. CHER), it is currently performative. We tout ‘community engagement’ and involvement, but what does this really mean? A single Do-It Day out of 365 days of the year? Trinfo across the street from Vernon? These are indeed helpful, but our other actions regarding Hartford say otherwise. If we cared about community outreach, why did we close Vernon Street? Why did we evict residents of Crescent Street to make way for more student housing? Why did we fence off our entire campus to separate our students from the people of Hartford? A lot of our school’s history points in the opposite direction of President Lugo’s message: we do not care about Hartford, and we want to be separate from it. With this in mind, what would it mean for us to make Hartford into a “college town?”

To me, this suggests that we would essentially colonize Hartford and transform it from a city into merely a place where colleges are. Making Hartford into a “college town” would imply replacing its existing cultural vibrancy with that of our college and others: predominantly white children from wealthy, elite families who see Hartford as nothing more than a place to get an education. Trinity has faculty like Professor of American Studies Davarian Baldwin who have regularly advocated against the growing power of universities in urban settings, including in an interview with the Tripod last month, and our administration needs to move with this activism, not against it. 

There are still many ways for us to achieve a more constructive relationship with Hartford, just not through the creation of an artificial college setting. As President Lugo said during his inauguration on Saturday, “[t]here is no fence high enough to separate Trinity from Hartford, and no reason we should ever need one that could.” Then let’s live up to that. Reopen Vernon Street. Engage in open discussions with the people that live in our community. Tear down the literal and figurative fences between our school and the community of Hartford. We can become known as more than just a rich kid’s school, a “Little Ivy” populated by the elite. We can recruit a wider diversity of students, not just of varying races, but of varying socioeconomic backgrounds. We need talent from all sources, including from the city we desperately try to reject. In President Lugo’s words, we can help achieve “Hartford’s next renaissance”—one truly intertwined with Trinity. Still, at its heart, our biggest problem is its elitism, and we can only progress once we admit this crucial fault.