Astrid Tuminez was on her way to Rome, the trip a kind of pilgrimage after months of grief. Her husband, Jeffrey Tolk, had died suddenly earlier in the year, and the loss had left her carrying a weight she couldn’t set down. “I felt darkness and a rage I’d never known before. It was like a tectonic shift in my reality,” she said.
Tuminez imagined quiet days walking through old churches, sitting in dim chapels in Rome. As part of her spiritual healing, she hoped her schedule held a meeting with Pope Leo. But as her flight landed in Atlanta for a short connection, her phone lit up. One sentence, again and again: “Charlie has been shot.”
Tuminez remembers the moment less as a thought than something her body absorbed all at once. “Our bodies feel these things. Just utter shock, like my whole body was on fire,” she said in her office at Utah Valley University (UVU) in November. “And then I had to find my inner quiet, because when something like that happens as a leader, you realize it has real consequences.”
She booked the next flight back to Utah and walked toward the new gate, unable to name the ache rising in her chest. Someone had been shot on livestream. Students, faculty, staff and community members – the whole world – had witnessed it. “The shock and trauma for everybody else is very real,” Tuminez said. “There was a wounding that happened to all of us.”
In the terminal, airport screens looped the same images: flashing lights, federal officers, students trampling one another in panic. People around her stared at their phones, some gasping, some whispering. But nothing cut through her like seeing her own campus – the institution she had led since 2018 as its first female president – from thousands of miles away, in utter panic. “It wasn’t about me anymore,” she said. “I had to ask what people needed in that moment, not what I wanted,” she said, her voice trembling.
At the center of the footage was Kirk himself – 31, born into a wealthy family in a suburb of Chicago – whose entire public persona and fanbase, in many ways, stood in direct opposition to everything Tuminez’s life had proved possible: higher education as a ladder out of poverty, immigration as an open door, the idea that a girl from a poor family in the Philippines could one day lead a university in one of the US’s most conservative counties.
But her thoughts were elsewhere. “I thought of her,” Tuminez said softly, referring to Kirk’s 37-year-old wife. “Erika. What she must be going through.” After a long pause, she added: “My heart breaks for Erika, for their young daughters, for his family.”
She returned to a campus charged with national politics, at a moment when the second Trump administration was already cracking down on higher education: silencing protest, cutting research funding and dismantling diversity programs across the country.
“There was a big loss, a big grief, a big feeling of insecurity for me personally,” said Tuminez, known to be calm, sharp and experienced. “Everything you thought was normal is suddenly not.”
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Tuminez has spent her life navigating upheaval – typhoons that tore the roof off her childhood home, martial law in the Philippines.
Before she led a university, before the scholarship and the PhD and the years living abroad, she was a girl in a hut on stilts above the water in the Philippines. Her family had moved from a rice-farming village to the city of Iloilo. “I never felt safe,” she said. “Ever.”
When she was five, Catholic nuns offered her and her siblings free schooling at the convent school. Lunch money, however, was not included. “During recess, because I didn’t have money for food, I’d hide in the library and read everything,” she remembered. “I discovered language: Dr Seuss, Nancy Drew, girls who were fearless and clever.
“Education to me as a child was a superpower. Once my brain was liberated from ignorance, once I could read and realize there was science, poetry, novels … it opened the world. It gave me self-esteem.”
She won a scholarship to the University of the Philippines, then acceptance to Brigham Young University (BYU) – only to be denied a US visa three times.
“The interviewer asks you: ‘Do you own land? Do you have a bank account? Do you have a car?’” she said. “And of course, all the answers were no. I had no net worth whatsoever.” She fasted for good luck before the third attempt. Still, the answer was no. On the fourth try, two older American couples from her church marched into the embassy and vouched for her.
“They said she’ll obey all the laws. And that was what helped me get the visa,” Tuminez said.
In 1982, she arrived in Sacramento, California, wearing clothes donated by church friends, overwhelmed by the American tall buildings, the ease of life and the sheer sense of possibility. In 1983, she moved to Utah for school. Staying with her sister near BYU, she felt instantly wealthy. Running water, electricity, a strip of carpet – “I thought my sister was a millionaire,” she said, laughing. “Life felt so easy. I thought you should get straight A’s in America because life is so easy.”
But what surprised her most of all was American elections.“I grew up under martial law in the Philippines,” she said. “Elections were really violent. So when I saw people lose an election here and just accept it, I couldn’t believe it.”
At BYU, she fell in love with Russian language and literature, and went on to earn a master’s degree in Soviet studies at Harvard and a PhD in political science at MIT. She studied nationalism and identity, and came to believe that American belonging is shaped not by ethnicity but by civic ideals.
While at Cambridge, she met her future husband, Tolk, whom she later described as her fiercest source of strength. They married in 1988 in Salt Lake City.
Her career after graduate school spanned multiple sectors and continents, including multilateral institutions, philanthropy and the private sector, like Microsoft, before she returned to Utah in 2018 as the university’s seventh president.
“I was actually in shock,” she said. “I didn’t think I was moving to Provo. I thought they’d made a mistake.” She laughed at the memory, saying: “I’m an accidental university president. I never planned for this. It wasn’t even on the list.”
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Long before Charlie Kirk arrived on his American Comeback tour, Tuminez had engineered a campus that could host its sharpest critics without breaking. Tolerance, for her, was a form of infrastructure. Under her leadership, UVU became a venue where scholars, political figures and nonpartisan groups could bring competing ideas into the same room without the institution being overwhelmed by them. In the years since she took office, UVU has emerged as one of the state’s central engines of civic education and engagement, a role Utah lawmakers now rely on.
I asked where she drew the line: “Inciting violence against persons or groups,” she answered. But she admits it’s not easy even for her to hear people whom she often disagrees with, those who often come across as divisive: “Even after decades in public life, it’s still hard for me. Sometimes my throat literally tightens, and I want to walk away. I have to stop, breathe and tell myself: pause. Listen better.”
But Tuminez is experienced in restraint. Much of her career has unfolded in rooms not always welcoming of people like her: male, white and quietly hostile to women of color with accents. “When I first arrived,” she told the Deseret News, “people shook my hand with sad eyes and said they felt sorry for me because I had ‘big shoes to fill’. I was amused, but it was also a microaggression.”
Now, Tuminez has led one of Utah’s largest and most diverse public universities for seven years, a role she has undertaken in one of the state’s most conservative counties. By her own accounting, she has worked two or three times harder than others simply to be seen as an equal. Being the first woman – and the first woman of color – to hold the role still matters to her every day.
When she speaks to young women, especially women of color, she turns to Toni Morrison for clarity. “They tell you you have no language, so you spend years proving you have language … but all of that is a distraction from your own greatness,” she said. “The point is simple: don’t let other people’s doubts reroute your purpose.”
In the end, it was poverty and inequality – the forces she once escaped through education – that brought her back to Utah. “That is what fires me up in an institution like this,” she said. “This is a facilitator of the American dream.”
Yet she no longer believes the dream is equally on offer. Asked whether the America she found in 1982 still exists for newcomers, she answered without hesitation: “It’s definitely harder now – for immigrants and for people born here.” A pause. “It is actually depressing.”
Higher education, she says, has grown punishingly expensive and too often delivers a poor return. What once liberated her now feels, to many of her students, like another locked gate. A fundamental shift, she insists, is overdue. That is why she has turned UVU into a living bet on the American experiment: low tuition, doors wide open, a place where conflicting ideas are expected to collide, and students leaving with jobs and a shot at the life she once seized.
When asked how she makes sense of a government that punishes universities for refusing to silence dissent, her face tightened. “Freedom of expression only matters if we are willing to defend speech we find contemptuous,” she said.
She refused to call the current political atmosphere in the US normal.
“People are traumatized – immigrants, professors, students,” she said. Without ever naming names, she turned to those in power: “Unless we lead from brokenness, we can’t lead at all. The greatest accomplishments come from human connection, not ego. The ego only poses and pretends to be magnificent. Really, it’s just insecurity.”
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When Kirk was shot in September, Tuminez returned to the question that once guided her through life in poverty: when you have nothing, how do you solve anything?
Two weeks after Kirk’s death, she introduced Better Selves for a Better America, a new effort focused on dialogue and mediation. It includes certificate programs, public peace conferences, and partnerships with nonpartisan groups such as Braver Angels, which works to bridge political divides, and the Utah governor Spencer Cox’s Disagree Better initiative.
Vigils were held around the world. Congress passed bipartisan resolutions honoring the life of a man who never experienced the destitution of poverty, and who built his career by questioning civil rights, terrorizing professors who disagreed with him by putting them on watchlists, and stoking fears about immigrants and the changing face of America.
His eulogies came from every corner – from hardliners and Fox News personalities to liberal commentators like Ezra Klein. Yet the people who challenged his record, often Black and brown people, women and other minorities, were the ones who lost jobs or faced punishment. When JD Vance flew to Orem to escort Kirk’s body home, the national spotlight fixed itself on the story of a fallen political figure.
In a quiet corner of campus, Tuminez sat in silence, praying, crying, talking with her therapist. She kept returning to something the nuns told her when she was 10: see God in every person. See the inherent value in a human being.
When I asked her what she hoped her legacy at UVU would be – especially as some pushed to memorialize Kirk – she didn’t hesitate. “My legacy is not Charlie Kirk,” she said softly. “My legacy is the culture we build in the wake of it.”
She added: “I hope they remember me as someone who was in the hallways … someone who sat in their classes … went to their dances, their arts and athletic events.”
She had survived poverty, dictatorship and loss. She had studied nationalism up close and watched democratic systems crack – in the Philippines, in Russia and, now, in ways she recognized here. She knew how fragile belonging was, how quickly fear could harden into ideology.
And she believed a university, even in a country that felt like it was splintering, could still be one of the last places where people could learn how to hold one another’s humanity without letting go.
