Last spring, as the Trump administration was freezing billions in federal research funding for universities and threatening the visas of thousands of international students, Emily Hettinger, a senior at Yale, joined a campus protest in defense of higher education.
It was a strange place to be for Hettinger, who had been growing disillusioned with Yale over what she saw as its elitism and disinterest in the disadvantaged community surrounding its Connecticut campus. “I remember feeling this sort of dissonance,” Hettinger said. “I wanted to defend higher education, but I didn’t want to defend it in its current form.”
