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.

Students Discuss Living with Conservatism at Trinity

By Jacob Rossitter

Dean of Students David Tuttle hosted a conversation with students yesterday​, discussing what it means to be a conservative student on Trinity campus.

Among the 16 students who participated the discussion titled “Being Right: Living – and Living with – the Conservative Viewpoint on the Trinity Campus,” only two identified themselves as being conservative. The majority of the participants identified themselves as liberals.

One student told the room that he came to the discussion because he was “tired of his echo chamber.” Another student said that although she had a “very strong opinions about things,” she still wanted to “hear what the other side had to say.”