Conservative Students Striving to Have a Voice on Campus

The homepage of The Tower

By Will Hinman

In 2017, Manfred and Jonah Wendt, then Trinity sophomores, distributed flyers advertising an upcoming talk by conservative filmmaker, Dinesh D’Souza. Taking issue with D’Souza’s provocative conservative ideology being put on display at Trinity, some students collected the flyers and appended them to the Wendts’ dorm door with a variety of handwritten additions. The notes ran the gamut from politely critical to simply rude. Taking the notes as harassment, the Wendt brothers filed a complaint with Trinity University Police.

Receiving coverage in not only the Trinitonian, but also the SA Current, the Rivard Report, and even the far-right outlet, Breitbart, this incident was one of the most public examples of the disparate political views on Trinity’s campus.

The Wendt twins, who graduated from Trinity in 2018, employed an inflammatory voice in Trinity’s political discussion, bringing controversial speakers such as D’Souza and Milo Yiannopoulos. Such speakers were “agitators,” as Dr. David Crockett, head of the Trinity University Political Science Department, dubbed them.

As the Wendt brothers left campus, the tension between conservative and liberal voices on campus, it seems, did not leave with them.

In a recent Trinitonian column, Isaiah Mitchell, president of the Trinity branch of Young Conservatives of Texas, called on liberal students to “be cool” towards YCT members. Although the article was tongue-and-cheek, some of Mitchell’s claims were quite serious. He states that most liberals are respectful. However, citing examples of YCT members being yelled at and even once spit on, he points out a mild hostility towards members of the YCT.

Though there isn’t available data to substantiate a claim, it appears that Trinity is a liberal-leaning campus. At a 2018 event hosted by Dean of Students David Tuttle, titled “Being Right: Living--and Living with--the Conservative Viewpoint on the Trinity Campus,” only two of the 16 attendants identified as conservative, although the event was meant to attract conservative students.

Through surveys of his courses over the past 20 years, Crockett noticed a significant move from evenly split republican-democrat results to heavily left-leaning results (these surveys are not strictly scientific). “The student center of mass simply assumes that certain things are the way things ought to be, and that the alternative is at best wrong, if not evil,” Crockett says about his impression of the shift to the left. “Either you’re a social warrior or you’re a force of evil.”

But the polarization at Trinity seems less intense comparing with other liberal arts colleges. “My observation is that Trinity students are relatively polite,” he says. When students go to talks of speakers they disagree with, “they will ask questions politely, and haven’t gotten to the point of shutting people down and just sort of disrupt meetings,” as has taken place at other schools.

Luke Ayers, Trinity senior and current editor of a fledgling conservative online publication, The Tower, shares the view that Trinity is largely an accepting campus for conservatives. “There are some people who stop talking to me after they find out my political leanings, but those are few and far between,” says Ayers. “Most people at Trinity are fairly intelligent, and intelligent people are able to understand that people who disagree with them have come to those conclusions from different sets of premises or logical paths.”

Not everyone agrees that Trinity is a majority liberal campus. Senior Calista Struby was hesitant to take a stance, “I feel like it's hard to tell because the only people that express their politics really clearly are either extremely or openly liberal or conservative.” To gauge from a public perspective, she argues, is too difficult as both sides feel “that the odds are stacked against them, and that they’re the minority.”

In her mind, this environment discourages political engagement, leaving only the bold and impassioned to display their views. Beneath the surface, she believes a different political landscape exists. “I think if you were to force people to label themselves as one or the other, there would be more conservatives than liberals,” she says. At the same time, she doesn’t “necessarily feel like there's a lack of a liberal voice at Trinity.”

While Struby doesn’t feel a lack of a liberal voice, Ayers believes that prior to the genesis of The Tower, there may have been a lack of conservative voice not only at Trinity, but in San Antonio as a whole. As he states in a mission statement, “For whatever reason, no right-leaning paper in San Antonio has gained traction yet, and I think [The Tower is] excellently positioned to fill that void.”

It’s a void that Crockett says should be filled. “When you read some of the arguments that were made by people in the Trinitonian, who were responding to Isaiah or responding to some of these things, there’s still this: it’s not even implicit; it’s almost explicit derision—we recognize you that you have free expression, but you’re kind of a Neanderthal,” he says. “So it just speaks to the need for these kind of voices to have an outlet to bring up issues that aren’t necessarily a given, even though most of the people at university think they are.”

Although Struby disagrees with the political message of The Tower, she does not oppose the publication itself. “I feel like everyone should have an opportunity or a platform to express their thoughts about things,” she says.

Ultimately, The Tower and other conservative voices are an addition to the political conversation at Trinity, and such a conversation is needed to alter the culture of polarization. “To change [polarization] would require people to actually assume goodwill on the part of their opponents, and be willing to listen to people make principled arguments, and articulate them, and engage them,” says Crockett. “That’s not easy for people to do.”