Posted By Gettysburgian Staff on May 10, 2025 | 1 comment

Editor’s Note: This editorial represents the collective opinion of the Gettysburgian Editorial Board. We invite all campus community members to share their thoughts in our opinions section. Please contact editors@gettysburgian.com if you are interested in writing an opinion in The Gettysburgian. 

By the Gettysburgian Editorial Board

When students enroll at Gettysburg College, they are not expected to sit in a classroom and be told what to think by their professors and peers. Liberal arts colleges like Gettysburg exist to enable students to think critically, not to teach them what they should think. Our small class sizes exist to foster passionate debate and discussion among students and faculty alike. 

This is how learning should occur in higher education. By equipping students with the skills to engage in discussion that makes us think beyond the classroom, the College is successfully helping students develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the world around us. 

The interdisciplinary nature of the liberal arts plays into this. While we have many majors and minors that allow students to gain a deep understanding of their discipline, a Gettysburg College degree requires students to also take courses outside of their major. Students at Gettysburg are inevitably exposed to ideas and concepts outside of their chosen discipline. 

All of these factors contribute to making Gettysburg College graduates better thinkers, listeners, learners and debaters. Being exposed to perspectives you don’t hold and hearing about experiences that are different from your own makes you think. This can either broaden your perspective or strengthen your own belief, allowing you to better articulate and defend your own point of view in the future. 

Diversity in all its forms — diversity of thought, origin, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, socioeconomic class — is essential to enabling college students to expand our understanding of the world beyond our hometowns and beyond this campus. While the College remains a predominantly white institution, the student experience has benefited from becoming more diverse. 

Yet recently, academic freedom in the classroom and diversity on college campuses have been under attack. 

Across the country, international students have had their visas revoked. In some cases, they have been detained and deported simply for expressing their political opinions. Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, one of the organizers of last year’s pro-Palestine protests and encampment at the university, is one of these students. He was detained last month and flown to an ICE detention center in Louisiana.

As of mid-April, no charges have been brought against Khalil, but he remains in detention. Khalil is an Algerian citizen with a permanent green card. Due process should be afforded to all living within the U.S. — not just citizens. Instead, he is being targeted for exercising his freedoms of speech and protest. His status as a non-citizen made it all the easier for the Trump administration to target him. 

Tufts University doctoral candidate Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national studying on an F-1 visa, was surrounded and then arrested by plain-clothed ICE agents in late March. She was also flown to Louisiana, where, as of mid-April, she also remains in detention without charge. 

Khalil and Ozturk are not alone. On April 8, the New York Times reported that upwards of 300 international students have had their visas revoked by the Trump administration. Some have “self-deported” by simply leaving the country, while others have been detained without charge. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has even ordered diplomats in the State Department to scour visa applicants’ social media accounts and deny visas to those who have criticized the U.S. or Israel. According to Inside Higher Ed, at least 80 colleges and universities have reported visa revocations for their students.

Meanwhile, the Department of Education has made demands to universities around the country to change their diversity-related policies or lose federal funding, mainly research grants and student financial aid. In February, a “Dear Colleague” letter was sent to hundreds of colleges and universities, including Gettysburg College, decrying diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies while threatening to axe vital federal funding. 

Schools like Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Cornell and Harvard have been hit with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding loss. Much of this money was in the form of research grants — the very research that millions of Americans depend on. Employees at the National Institutes of Health have been warned not to fund research that includes words like “women,” “diversity,” “Covid,” and “trans.” Among the fields hurt by the funding cuts are cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes research. 

After Harvard refused to comply with a list of demands from the Trump administration, about $2 billion in federal funding was frozen. Demands made at Harvard included lessening the power of faculty in the school’s policies, changing admissions policy to prevent the recruitment of international students who are “hostile to American values” and ending all DEI-related programs, according to the letter sent by the Trump administration. 

These cuts are an unjust use of the federal government’s power. The government should not have any control over the curriculum at universities. In their attempt to reconstruct higher education to conform to their worldview, the Trump administration is also hurting part of what has made America so successful — its scientific innovation. 

Colleges and universities are where advances in science, medicine and technology are made. With funding losses seen across the country, the rest of the world is going to get ahead while American institutions fall behind. The pointless crusade against DEI-related language in federally-funded scientific research could have grave real-world implications. 

Threats are not only being made to larger, more elite universities. Here at Gettysburg, the Young America’s Foundation (YAF) filed a complaint to the Department of Education last month, alleging “ongoing civil rights violations against conservative students at Gettysburg College.” The complaint cites a number of College policies and initiatives, an academic department and identity-based student clubs and events they’ve held. 

Besides falsely claiming that some identity-based student organizations and a residential space are exclusive to students of that identity, the complaint alleges that these parts of Gettysburg College are somehow a threat to free speech. 

As Gettysburg students, we have observed the opposite — these College clubs and initiatives are what enable students to find their community, express their thoughts and organize events that make students of different backgrounds feel included. 

As of early April, the Department of Education’s Philadelphia Office of Civil Rights, the recipient of the complaint, has not opened an investigation. 

Higher education does not thrive under threat. It does not thrive under investigation from a politically-charged Department of Education searching for anything that broadly falls into “DEI.” Higher education does not advance under this intense scrutiny, and it certainly is not the environment in which students become better, more well-rounded thinkers. 

Students do thrive in a learning environment in which we are exposed to perspectives we have never considered before. We thrive through interacting with and learning about the perspectives of other students from across the country, or even across the world, who may have grown up under entirely different circumstances from our own backgrounds. 

Students are not here solely for the bachelor’s degree. We are here to learn, grow and become better people altogether. This is why diversity in all its forms, including diversity of thought, background, origin, and race, is so important to the Gettysburg College student experience. 

This article originally appeared on pages 14 and 15 of the No. 6 April 2025 edition of The Gettysburgian magazine