On Tuesday, April 29, President Steven Tepper appeared at a community gathering outside Sadove Student Center to affirm the college’s support of all students amidst attacks on transgender, international and undocumented people alongside sanctions on academic grants and funding. This speech was made as part of a greater Crossroads event, which included a variety of food trucks and music along Martin’s Way outside of Sadove.
The event kicked off at 11 a.m. with students and faculty talking amongst themselves and eating food from the myriad of food trucks present. At 12 p.m., Tepper took the stage to address the crowd.
Tepper began, sharing with the crowd, “This is really a chance for us to gather, to affirm who we are, to celebrate our value in the world…I feel so privileged and honored to be part of this community.”
Recent executive orders and executive initiatives have specifically targeted transgender people and immigrants within the U.S. These orders have removed federal Title IX protections for transgender people, banned transgender athletes from women’s sports, revoked colleges’ and universities’ classification as a “sensitive location” and sent ICE agents to arrest college students at Tufts and Columbia.
Addressing these issues, Tepper said, “There are members of our community that in the current environment have been particularly under attack, and I just want to personally say and affirm my support for our trans community, for our students who come from abroad or international students and all of us who have friends or family members that may be undocumented. All of you bring extraordinary gifts to this community. We are better off because of you.”
“We are a diverse community. We are a complicated community. More than 60 countries represented, every imaginable human being is on this campus, from every socioeconomic background, every religious perspective, every race, every ethnicity, every gender, every sexuality. It takes a lot to figure out how to curate that community so that we trust each other…We cannot allow others to dictate how we build that community, as long as we do it lawfully, as long as we don’t discriminate. We know best.”
Issues of academic freedom were also addressed during Tepper’s speech. Faculty and students at Hamilton have already been affected by recent cuts to federal funding, leading to a loss of grants and academic opportunities, as previously covered by The Spectator. Recently, $2.2 billion was withheld from Harvard for not complying with federal demands to restructure leadership, change admission policy and audit views of diversity on campus, according to the Associated Press.
“Our faculty have to be free to teach what they want to teach and how they want to teach it without any interference from our political officials. That’s what makes us great: freedom of expression. We have got to be free to speak to the moments, to the moments today, whatever we think is necessary, without fear of persecution, without fear of sanction. We can do that on this campus,” Tepper said.
Speaking of the sanctions on universities and colleges, Tepper said, “Now it seems like today [that] we’re in a climate where some people have forgotten that lesson about how powerful these institutions are for securing our democracy. Or maybe they haven’t forgotten. Maybe they are intentionally remembering the power of higher education to preserve democracy because they have other intentions around preventing liberty or about securing power.”
He continued, “We are also joining with other colleges and universities to defend these core principles. We signed an amicus brief to defend the rights of our international students to express themselves freely. We were one of the first to sign the letter that came out from AAC&U [Association of American Colleges and Universities] and the American Academy. Now, more than 500 colleges have signed that we stand together. So we will not bend as a community…We will stand together. We will celebrate what we do. We will advance, always advance, together.”
