In our newsroom, accountability is non-negotiable. We don’t publish anonymous columns, and we only grant anonymity to sources only when publishing their name would cause them demonstrable harm. We believe that if you have something to say, you say it with your chest — because free speech means nothing if you’re too afraid to use it. Our words carry weight, and as the voice of our peers, we have a responsibility to speak freely.
That same belief underpins higher education. Universities should be spaces where students and professors can question, challenge and speak freely without fear of retribution. But the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education threatens to erase that freedom entirely. It will force signatories to hold their breaths — to wait for approval before they utter a word. It frames its conditions as something that will ensure academic excellence — but how can excellence exist in silence?
If signed, the compact would practically mandate the policing of speech on campus. It would punish universities for engaging with topics of identity, politics or power. And if that doesn’t terrify you, it should.
There are multiple areas of concern in the compact, many of which impose upon student, faculty and staff’s free speech and put them at risk of losing their jobs, departments and organizations. We have chosen to highlight a few of the most concerning areas.
The compact espouses rules that require schools not to consider religion, race, sexual orientation or any part of someone’s identity, “explicitly or implicitly, in any decision related to undergraduate or graduate student admissions or financial support.” It asserts that they must transform or abolish “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
The Trinitonian proudly hosts an opinion section, and some of those columns criticize “conservative ideas,” or arguments that the Trump administration may consider conservative. To be clear, all columns are more than welcome — so long as you sign your name to it — and we encourage students across a wide range of ideological backgrounds to share their thoughts. That being said, we worry that the compact polices student voices to ensure that they fit whatever the current-day definition of “conservative” is.
A “conservative idea” means nothing. Someone on the far left may view country borders as conservative. Someone on the far right may think legalizing gay marriage is too liberal. It’s all about perspective; it’s all about who’s in charge.
There is no way to measure if an institution has “implicitly” considered DEI factors in their admissions, just like there’s no way to stop one from platforming hate speech if it’s branded as a “conservative idea.”
And it doesn’t stop there. Beyond admissions and hiring, this ambiguity directly affects classroom speech. When professors and students have to guess what counts as ‘acceptable’ political discourse in a university context, self-censorship becomes the default. Professors will avoid teaching topics like immigration, policing or reproductive rights; not because they are academically irrelevant, but because they fear the repercussions of promoting non-conservative ideas. Students will also have to silence themselves rather than risk being reported or disciplined for speaking up. The classroom, once a place for lively discussion, inquiry and debate, turns into a space of propaganda and quiet compliance.
At the Trinitonian, we’ve already seen this in action. Alumni request that we take down columns from our website if they project political views now deemed questionable. Potential sources refuse to be interviewed because they’re afraid they’ll be placed on a government-sanctioned hit list. The chilling effect is here, and it’s already freezing life and speech on campus.
The compact only accelerates that freeze. It states that signatories must recognize that “academic freedom is not absolute,” and that all university employees must abstain from “actions or speech relating to societal and political events” unless doing so in an individual capacity. But when those same societal and political events are inseparable from the material being taught — history, law, political science, ethics, business and others — the compact effectively demands silence when conversation is most essential.
As multiple speakers — specifically from student organizations at Trinity such as Revolución Violeta and TULA — at the AAUP teach-in preached, all speech can be political. Our lives are political. To silence political speech is to silence identity itself.
Let us be clear: If our administration signs this compact, whoever is in office will police the speech of every single person at Trinity. From this point forward, it won’t just be Trump’s administration that polices this; it will be all administrations.
We are terrified for the future of the organizations at Trinity. Cultural, political and identity-based clubs exist because students need spaces to express themselves and build community. Under the compact, their very missions could be deemed “political” and therefore be dismantled or defunded. Campus organizations that advocate for marginalized groups — whether LGBTQ+, immigrant, religious or ethnic — would be left vulnerable to scrutiny, their existence hanging on the whims of whichever government is in power.
The Trinitonian is independent and student-run. We get our funds from SGA, which is financed through the student activity fee in our tuition. While our content is protected by the First Amendment, our operations are not immune to administrative pressure.
Do not think that this would not affect you. It will. Censorship is an issue in the U.S. We want to assert that this will affect everyone. It will affect international members of our community, domestic members, liberal members and conservative members. The entirety of the compact is ambiguous, and for good reason: To make any accusation fit.
Just this month, Indiana University told their student-run paper to stop printing news coverage, then fired their adviser and then cut all print papers they produce.
The Indiana University Bloomington Chancellor David Reingold told the Indiana Daily Student that the decision to cut the print editions concerned distribution, not editorial content. Mia Hilkowitz and Andrew Miller, co-editors-in-chief, wrote that the decision was “clear, blatant reaction to [their] protests.”
Despite the Trinitonian being a student-run paper funded by the student activity fee, Trinity has that same power over us. If they ever decided to, they could pull our news stands, remove our funding safeguards, encourage SGA to fund us less. They could do it under the guise of budgeting concerns. If the annual surveys and federal government determine that the Trinitonian is not a space conducive to “conservative ideas,” the university is required to do something — required to “transform or abolish the paper.
The compact’s language about “protecting demonstrators from heckling or accosting individual students” is alarmingly vague. Would our Friday morning ritual of handing out papers qualify as “heckling?” It wouldn’t be up to us to decide. It would be up to whoever interprets the compact.
Censorship on campuses is dangerous — and selective censorship is even worse. The compact doesn’t protect free speech; it protects favored speech. It elevates conservative ideas while policing all others, turning free expression into a fundamentally partisan privilege.
If Trinity signs the compact, our voices won’t be directly affected, and students who write in will be protected by the First Amendment.
We still urge our university administration to stand alongside the universities refusing to sign the compact. We ask that Trinity defend the rights of their students and publicly reject the compact.
We recognize that the administration will likely not sign this compact. Trinity has an advantage over many of the public universities being asked to sign it. We have the privilege of being privately funded in many cases, and we do have trust that the administration will not sign it.
But we don’t want the rejection to happen silently. As the American Association of University Professors’ teach-in demonstrated, the community does not trust that the administration will act in our favor; there needs to be a statement. Over 200 students, professors and staff members attended that event. Not out of obligation, but out of conviction.
They surrounded the magic stones, shared powerful speeches and made one thing clear: The Trinity administration needs to announce, publicly, that they are not signing the compact. The community needs to know that the administration is signing it because it harms both free speech and academic freedom. Don’t let us believe that it’s because the compact bars all signatories from raising tuition for the next five years.
We recognize that to make such a statement is a big ask. Trinity has successfully flown under the national radar, and to join other universities would mean inviting national attention — and, inevitably, scrutiny. But courage means choosing principle over comfort. The Trinity community deserves to know where Trinity’s administration stands, not to be left guessing about what goes on behind closed doors.
