Leon Hu ‘29
Executive Opinion Section Editor
There is change happening all around us. A walk around campus is dominated by construction: the Elting Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is taking solid form, scaffolding rises to the top of Seabury, work on the water pipes and various renovations continue and construction around the arch of Hamlin Hall continues. Our campus is changing before our eyes; we are building ourselves into the rest of the 21st century.
Yet, with physical change comes symbolic change. Institutionally, we are not the same college as we were last year — let alone before the turn of the century. In the past year, Trinity renamed its office of DEI to comply with the demands of the Trump administration, changed protest policies following pro-Palestinian demonstrations and only removed hourly reductions for dining hall workers after a week of strikes. We pride ourselves on creating “bold, independent thinkers,” yet struggle to wrestle around the nuances of political demonstrations and controversies.
Meanwhile, we live in an era where higher education itself is threatened by the meteoric rise of AI — the usage of which continues to be debated at the highest levels of education. If facts and practical advice on innumerable topics can be provided with a single prompt, what use is there for education if the only result is the illusive end of ‘knowledge?’ What skills can a college degree provide that cannot be made obsolete by another four years of AI development? Where is the role of the human in the modern American university? Who are we as an institution and what justifies our continued existence around this literal ivory tower atop a hill? Ultimately, who we choose to be in the coming decades is inextricably tied to the physical places we create and inhabit.
What can this historic campus become that will withstand the test of time?
The near-catastrophic state of American higher education demands we revisit our mission and how we choose to materialize it on this campus on top of a hill. Consider the in-progress Elting Center: located next to three aging residence halls and an Ogilby that has been unused for years, this addition is devoted to entrepreneurial studies at a preeminent liberal arts institution. Historically, studies of business are not included in the liberal arts and yet we will receive a building dedicated to it prior to any new buildings for the arts, humanities, sciences or (God forbid) workable residence halls for a school that now costs close to $100,000 a year to attend.
On the other end of campus, the buildings housing our sciences and our Carnegie-recognized research remain aging and dull. Besides the Crescent Center for Arts and Neuroscience — which, admittedly, is a fantastic recent addition to the south end of campus — no buildings for the sciences have been constructed since the 20th century. The LSC still haphazardly houses three departments so poorly that the construction of CCAN was necessary to surrogate one of them, and yet no talk of a new home for the sciences has even been floated in recent years.
Whereas Wesleyan recently completed a new science building to replace its aging biology and chemistry buildings, the most recent academic building completed at Trinity was CCAN in 2018. Before that, it was the expansion to Raether in 2001 and construction of MECC in 1991.
Despite this, all of our newest additions to campus are those which are flashy — a new gym, an expansive admissions center and a center for entrepreneurship. The latter harps on the value of “experiential learning” without helping to dramatically improve the student experience provided by Trinity’s campus. It simply makes Trinity more appealing to prospective students without furthering the educational mission of the college.
What we need instead is an investment in what makes us who we are and an emphasis on the development of inextricably human skills that will enable our students to thrive in the new millenium. AI can make the product for us. What it cannot do, however, is provide the thinking about why that product exists and how it came about to us. That is left for us; the foundational knowledge provided by the liberal arts is the means to which we can think deeply about what large language models choose to feed into us.
Our campus still thrives on the laurels of the old days of Trinity — the Long Walk, the Chapel and Downes — yet fails to provide support for the academic mission that justified the creation of these buildings to begin with. We must preserve the best parts of our history; however, we must also invest in new spaces that advance our mission to develop individual, intelligent thought in every Bantam.
We are running out of space on this hill. We must make choices, difficult choices, about what buildings to prioritize and what to sacrifice as the world of higher education undergoes revolution. But what we will always need is the liberal arts that define the model of our college. We need space and a new home for that which matters most for the college in the age of AI: the ability to think. A modern, well-equipped building for the sciences or renovations to the aging facilities of the humanities would allow our academics to remain at the top of higher education and signify that we still value the liberal arts. What justifies our place in the ivory tower atop a hill is precisely that we preserve, advance and share the collective wisdom created by the power of a Trinity education.