Though conservative critics of higher education claim that universities indoctrinate students to adopt leftist attitudes, several presidents told me that students arrive on campus already formed. “They’re not tabula rasa,” Rich Lyons, the chancellor of U.C. Berkeley, said. Young people who have faced economic hardship, he added, tend to “bring with them hardened perspectives, and a significant degree of anger.” At Berkeley’s commencement last spring, pro-Palestine protesters disrupted the speakers—including the former chancellor Carol Christ, who said sadly from the podium, “We have lost the ability to talk with one another.” Lyons and the presidents at the Penn Club were grappling with the same question: How could they reach a wildly diverse set of students and teach them to engage with people who think differently than they do? Several of the presidents talked about initiatives they’ve rolled out to encourage civil debate. Incoming students at William and Mary go through a “Better Arguments” program, in which they are instructed, for instance, to prize maintaining relationships over winning a dispute. Arizona State University has a slew of centers designed to foster democratic habits: civic literacy, the exercise of free speech. Marlene Tromp, the president of Boise State, said that when she took her job, in 2019, the university was “facing a lot of concern surrounding this narrative that higher ed only moved in one direction—there was only one set of ideas that were available.” The school launched the Institute for Advancing American Values, which asks students and various speakers from different political backgrounds to describe the formative aspects of their lives, and their most deeply held beliefs. Amid all the enthusiastic salesmanship for viewpoint diversity and civil disagreement, it was striking that most of the presidents studiously avoided the topic of diversity on campus—not just what ideas you have in the room but also who you have in the room. Tromp said that the Harvard scholar Danielle Allen was an intellectual inspiration for Boise State’s center. Allen, who is Black, has written that colleges have gotten lost in “the swamps of particular tenets of anti-racism,” as part of their embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or D.E.I. Conservatives have painted D.E.I. as a uniform set of programs, ideas, and ideologies. In reality, the term encompasses a wide-ranging set of practices. Still, D.E.I. spaces often share certain analytic frameworks, usually centering on questions of justice: “How you make sure a specific subset of folks don’t find themselves facing obstacles and barriers on campus,” Allen said. “Often, in the D.E.I. space, what we’ve done is to say Black compares to white compares to Asian.” She added, “That, by definition, is corrosive of community.” Allen has advocated for an alternative intellectual framework that she describes as pluralism. The model aims to help students live and learn together—making everyone feel welcome, and also helping students navigate the conflicts that inevitably arise in a community where people have different world views. Pluralism demands that conservative evangelicals who don’t believe in same-sex marriage be welcomed to campus alongside gay students, and that political conservatives who oppose affirmative action have fruitful discussions with people of color. In 2018, Allen and a group of colleagues published a report suggesting that viewpoint diversity and free expression are crucial components of inclusion and belonging on university campuses. But it was a hard time to push for viewpoint diversity, with Trump in office and the nation on the cusp of a racial reckoning. Conversations about “inclusion and belonging” effectively became limited to race, gender, sexuality, and disability, Allen said. “I’ve experienced some frustration, I will admit, as I watched that paradigm narrowing in the years post-George Floyd,” she told me. “All those identities matter, but what we need to do as a pluralistic society and as pluralistic campuses is broader than that.” Recently, the mood in higher ed has shifted from introspective to panicked. In March, the Department of Education warned sixty schools that they had potentially violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by allowing “relentless antisemitic eruptions” on their campuses. The D.O.E. pulled four hundred million dollars in federal funds from Columbia University; in response, the university has reportedly pledged to overhaul its security protocols and review its Middle East-studies programs. The Trump Administration also froze a hundred and seventy-five million dollars in funding for the University of Pennsylvania, for allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports. Other universities that depend heavily on federal money for scientific research, such as Johns Hopkins, have laid off workers and closed labs following deep cuts across federal agencies—cuts that were partly premised on objections to D.E.I. All of this has prompted college presidents to take another look at the ideas that Allen and her allies have long promoted. Call it the pluralism pivot: a desire for a new paradigm that might ward off skeptical politicians and heal the bad vibes that have plagued higher ed. Though many college presidents were already trying to fix the cultural problems on their campuses, their hands may soon be forced by policymakers. Some of the universities that have most fully embraced pluralism are in politically purple or red states, such as Utah, where legislators have been moving to stamp out D.E.I. “I’m sorry—deeply, profoundly sad and sorry—that our sector had to start its reconsideration under these kinds of circumstances,” Allen told me. “That said, I’m glad to see that the pluralism concepts and frameworks are getting traction.” Race- and gender-focussed centers had opened in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, and the first administrator in charge of diversity was appointed in 1983. But the university’s D.E.I. efforts—known at the school as E.D.I., with the “equity” and “diversity” switched—accelerated in 2015. University leaders held a campus-wide dialogue on the “racial climate,” which led to extra money for ethnicity-related student groups, an effort to hire more minority faculty members, and an office “to respond to racial microaggressions.” The university created a new college, the School for Cultural & Social Transformation, nicknamed Transform. Transform was the “left humanities” college, as one professor put it, whereas another college served as the “centrist humanities” school. This effectively created a siloed ecosystem, in which the most progressive professors would teach the most progressive students, who worked with the most progressive staff members. Kathryn Bond Stockton, a professor of English and critical theory, helped to create Transform and served as the chief diversity officer for the U’s main campus. She had come to Utah in 1987 from Brown. “I just remember saying to myself, ‘I don’t think the East Coast or the West Coast needs me,’ ” she said. “It was exciting to come to a place where I knew there would be a lot of disagreement with me and with my views.” Stockton, who is gay, was an evangelical throughout her teens and twenties, and felt that she could relate to religious people, even if they might reject her sexuality. “The queerest thing about me is that I love Utah,” she said. Stockton recalled a 2023 event put on by the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative campus group. Local education activists were invited to make their case against D.E.I., “gender ideology,” and critical race theory, or C.R.T. Stockton, along with a group of other faculty and students, protested outside, in the rain, before the event. “I don’t know that anybody saw us or anybody heard us,” she said. Still, she went to the lecture, and later spoke to a group of women who had seemed excited about the talk, so that she could better understand their perspective. “I have lived my whole life in such an impossible set of circumstances—not being gendered in the way that I want, and not being able to love the people I want to love—that I feel that’s work I want to do,” she said. And yet she also emphasized that others might feel uncomfortable engaging with views they find offensive and dehumanizing. “I never recommend this as a general principle,” she said. Stockton was a both-and: willing to engage with people who didn’t agree with her world view, but also keen to protect students whom she saw as vulnerable. When Mary Ann Villarreal arrived at the U, in 2019, to serve in the newly created role of vice-president for E.D.I., she noticed that the university was most responsive to students and staff who sought out conflict. “The way that people got what they wanted was they pushed demands, and resources were allocated in that way,” she said. The school’s cultural centers were designed to offer camaraderie and support to students from similar backgrounds. But they largely weren’t set up to address the needs of rural students or Latter-day Saints—commonly known as Mormons, although the Church has discouraged that term. Some secular faculty from out of state have historically taken a defensive posture toward the Church, which is headquartered in Salt Lake City—punching up against the dominant conservative religious group, even though Latter-day Saints are a religious minority in the United States. Clark Ivory, a Church member who was previously the chair of the U’s board of trustees, has served on search committees for high-ranking academic leadership positions. He told me, “While it was never spoken, you knew that a candidate who was from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was going to have an uphill climb.” Eboo Patel, the founder and president of Interfaith America, an organization that fosters pluralism on campuses, told me that the U’s rank and file seemed enthusiastic about racial diversity, gender diversity, and cultural diversity—but not religious diversity. “That is pretty normal among lefty, student-facing staff, because religion is framed principally as being anti-L.G.B.T.,” he said. “The mid-level staff were just intransigent.” Villarreal wanted to make E.D.I. less insulated. “Their idea of diversity was ‘Can I have one of each?’ ” she said. “That was the university’s way of being.” She built relationships with leaders at the Institute, a center for L.D.S. students near campus. She proactively pushed to revamp the spaces for Black and Latino students, trying to anticipate their needs, rather than waiting for students to complain. She talked about a “culture of connection” as the North Star of E.D.I. In the fall of 2023, she got a hint that the school’s E.D.I. work might be in trouble. Nationally, protests over Israel and Gaza were roiling campuses. The discourse about D.E.I. had reached a fever pitch, with conservatives claiming that it was a vehicle for indoctrination. Versions of these battles were playing out at the U: a Latino student group, Mecha, blocked the entrance to a film screening about transgender kids who had detransitioned, hosted by the Young Americans for Freedom. Later, when the university sent a letter revoking its sponsorship of Mecha, the club’s members staged a protest at one of the school’s cultural centers, reportedly waving a Palestinian flag and refusing to leave. Villarreal learned that state legislators were working on an anti-D.E.I. bill. She put together an inventory: every dollar her office spent, every outcome achieved. It was meant to prove the worth of what the staff was doing, but Villarreal also understood that it might be a death document—a memorialization of work that was coming to an end. Utah has long been deep-red politically but moderate temperamentally; Mitt Romney, as a U.S. senator from Utah, was one of the few elected Republicans who didn’t show unwavering fealty to Trump. In late 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, a number of Utah leaders—including the incoming Republican governor, Spencer Cox—signed on to the Utah Compact on Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. The compact stated that racism is “a system of ideas, beliefs, practices, structures, and policies” which requires “bold anti-racist actions” to unravel. The signers affirmed that “our commitment will not just be a passing moment, but a legacy movement of social, racial, and economic justice.” But, by 2023, Cox signalled a change in attitude on D.E.I. He called diversity statements—essentially a pledge from job candidates to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion—“awful, bordering on evil.” Randall, the school’s president, agreed to reëvaluate its diversity practices and prohibited the use of diversity statements in hiring. It didn’t matter. In early 2024, two legislators introduced a wide-ranging bill, H.B. 261, the “Equal Opportunity Initiatives,” which would rein in D.E.I. practices across Utah. Among other things, the legislation banned diversity trainings and offices, and barred universities from promoting the idea that people are “inherently privileged, oppressed, racist, sexist, oppressive, or a victim” because of their race or gender. One of the bill’s authors, Representative Katy Hall, spoke of receiving letters from professors who described themselves as lifelong liberals. “There is a tension amongst faculty and administrators regarding the mission and role of the university,” one wrote. “There are those who perceive it to be the production of knowledge. And there are those who have shifted to seeing the role as that of social justice. The two approaches are not compatible.” Keith Grover, the bill’s Senate sponsor, said he had received complaints from three students in Utah who were turned away from tutoring services, academic advising, and a club because they were not racial minorities. Dozens of Utahans lined up to comment on the bill; supporters were just as likely to be racial minorities as they were to be white. A defector from China, for example, called D.E.I. “a dangerous weapon in the hands of biased educators.” The bill’s critics, however, questioned the legislators’ motives. One public-university educator suggested that the bill’s purpose was “to have a chilling effect on higher-education professionals, and for us to question what we are and aren’t supposed to be doing.” Virtually none of the comments were narrow assessments of particular D.E.I. programs. The people of Utah were grappling with much bigger questions: whether race and gender should define them and their friendships and communities; why some people in the country feel muzzled and excluded; whether D.E.I. is a useful way to account for America’s sins of discrimination. “When people watched the testimonies, they started to realize, ‘What in the world have we done?’ ” John Johnson, a conservative legislator, told me. I asked him why some of the signers of the Utah Compact had, just a few years later, come to support an anti-D.E.I. bill. “I firmly believe the people in Utah, our governor—they had the best of intentions. There was a real desire to improve race relations,” he said. But “people could see how far things have shifted.” H.B. 261 passed in January, 2024, and was signed into law by Governor Cox. This winter, I visited the Utah statehouse and met with Hall, the bill’s author, in her office. An American flag and an elk skull were mounted on the wall; a hat on a shelf read “MAKE THE GREAT SALT LAKE GREAT AGAIN.” Hall told me, “ ‘Diversity’ is a beautiful word. Everybody wants that. Inclusion—we want that. But we don’t want that to the point of exclusion.” On a campus, “when you have just race- or identity-based places, you become in this bubble,” she said. Ann Millner, a state senator, told me, “This feels like a pendulum that we’re swinging. We were separate but equal. And then it was open access, to everyone, and then there was this swing back to more separating. I think the pendulum is moving back a little bit.” Before she got elected to the legislature, Millner served as the president of Weber State, a university with nearly thirty thousand students in Ogden, Utah. Many of them are parents, or full-time workers, or the first in their family to go to college. Millner felt that student services shouldn’t just focus on race and gender; they should offer everyone the support they need to put their heads down and get a degree. She and others touted the same initial stat about H.B. 261’s success: after the bill was passed, Weber State opened the Student Success Center, which offers things like advising and workshops on personal finances, to all students. More than a thousand students visited in the fall of 2024. The previous fall, only four hundred and fifty students had shown up at seven different race-, ethnicity-, and gender-focussed cultural centers—combined. Grover, the Senate sponsor, told me that he sees Utah as a national leader on this issue. “The country has definitely moved on D.E.I.,” he said. “This is where we’re going now.” In 2022, Raj Vinnakota, a friend of Patel’s and the president of an organization called the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, started talking with college presidents about the unease they felt on their campuses. They worried that the perspectives at their schools had become too narrow, and that their students didn’t understand how to engage with opposing viewpoints. Higher education had become polarized, with a college degree serving as a reliable predictor of how someone might vote. People had come to view higher education “as a private good,” Vinnakota told me. It’s easy for politicians to vilify college when the point of it is to adopt the right ideas and get ahead rather than to become a productive member of society. “There is a public-good responsibility that is being lost, that is being devalued, that is being deprioritized,” Vinnakota said. In August, 2023, he launched a new initiative, College Presidents for Civic Preparedness. A few months later, Hamas fighters invaded Israel, initiating a war. On campuses, “the floodgates opened,” Vinnakota told me. A hundred and twenty-three presidents are now in the group, and have committed to protecting open debate and free inquiry. Roslyn Artis, the president of Benedict College, an H.B.C.U. in South Carolina, told me that the goal is to take on “the P.R. problem in education, which generally is born of this perception that we are biased, we are liberal, that we are producing little anarchists.” In 2019, Artis hosted Trump on campus. “I nearly died over it, politically and otherwise,” she said. Benedict is about eighty per cent Black, and eighty-four per cent of students come from low-income families. Artis believes that she has a responsibility to expose students to views they might not like. “I am anti-safe space,” she said. “It is our students who have to assimilate. The world does not assimilate to them.” But Lori White, the Black president of DePauw, a majority-white liberal-arts school in Indiana, who also joined the coalition, was careful to note that philosophical discussions about freedom of expression go only so far. As a student, she said, “if I’m in an argument with you, and you say something controversial that I feel like somehow compromises my humanity, it’s really hard for me to hear. I’m not yet mature enough, sometimes, to be able to accept that.” In this charged political moment, college presidents may have mixed motives for waving their hands in the air in favor of free expression. It’s not just Trump’s crackdown: legislatures around the country are considering anti-D.E.I. bills along the lines of Utah’s. Texas and Florida have already placed even stricter limits on academic content seen as biased or indoctrinating. When I asked Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, whether presidents are flocking toward pluralism because they’re afraid of being hit with a lawsuit, he laughed. “They’re entirely that,” he said. “One hundred per cent. What else would they be? People are afraid—as they should be!” Still, to see the pluralism pivot entirely as an exercise in covering your ass would miss the depth of the soul-searching that college presidents are doing. Especially after Trump’s election, presidents “feel lied to” by their diversity experts, Patel told me. For years, college administrators claimed that minority groups felt literally endangered by the ideas of Trump and his allies. And yet, to take just one example, roughly fifty per cent of Latinos under the age of forty voted for him. “It’s, like, You’re just wrong,” Patel said. “You’re like a dentist that pulled the wrong tooth.” A few months after H.B. 261 passed, Villarreal, the U’s V.P. of E.D.I., left the school for another job. “It was disappointing,” she said. “I really struggled with the question of where I had failed to cross some bridges.” She had wanted to turn diversity work at the U into something bigger than racial box-checking. “It was a failed vision on my part,” she said. Perhaps the banner under which she was working, the campus-diversity movement, no longer serves the purpose it was meant to. A movement that had always focussed on making people feel that they belong had become associated with division and exclusion. “The acronym and the word—there’s no win in it,” she said. “There’s no win in claiming D.E.I. Let’s just be clear about what we’re doing.” Several of the school’s identity-related cultural centers have also shut down. This winter, another student leader, who asked not to be named because she was worried about being targeted by ice, took me on a tour of the student union, which is being rearranged to comply with the law. We visited what had once been the Center for Equity and Student Belonging. She led me to the back of an office, where men were assembling furniture next to a stack of moving boxes. The walls were blank; administrators had recently removed art work depicting eight female activists, including Angela Davis, the Marxist prison abolitionist, and Grace Lee Boggs, the Asian American Black Power activist. “This is where we used to always congregate,” she said. Now it’s less clear whether students are welcome—not that they’d have much of a place to sit. We walked past the old LGBT Resource Center, which had been replaced by the catchall Center for Community & Cultural Engagement. It hosted programs celebrating M.L.K. Day, and planned to hold events for Pride Week—both allowed under the new law. “It’s a little bit confusing,” she said. “The centers share awareness of the different cultures that are represented here on campus, without talking about the adversities. So it’s more performative.” When I asked whether she had gone to the events, she shrugged. “I don’t engage with them as much,” she said. Nearby was another center with an impossible-to-remember generic name, the Center for Student Access and Resources. The director, Kirstin Maanum, used to run the Women’s Resource Center. The new center’s acronym—CSAR—was pasted on an otherwise blank wall. “Students have observed that it feels like a dentist’s office,” Maanum said. Later that afternoon, I met a student named Sadie Werner. She had been the president of the Black Student Union when H.B. 261 passed, and quit out of frustration over the new rules. “I have shed way too many tears over this bill,” she said. She used to hang out at the Black Cultural Center, where students could reliably find programming, friends, and free food; now, she said, the space is locked. Werner heard that one of her scholarships—which had been administered by the center—was being eliminated, sending her into a panic about how to pay for school. It turned out that no scholarships had been eliminated, but they had been distributed among several different offices. Werner said she hadn’t heard about how to reapply. Grief over the end of the U’s cultural centers has gone far beyond students and staff. The Democratic minority leaders in the Utah House and Senate, Angela Romero and Luz Escamilla, both went to the University of Utah; they met at what was then known as the Center for Ethnic Student Affairs. “In 1997, there was hardly anyone with black hair in Utah,” Escamilla told me. The center “really helped us feel that we belonged at the University of Utah.” The fact that both she and Romero came through the same program and ended up as leaders in the legislature “speaks volumes,” she said. Romero told me, “If it wasn’t for the Center for Ethnic Student Affairs, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. I am a product of D.E.I., and I am O.K. with that.” Even a year after the passage of the law, Escamilla couldn’t understand what it was trying to achieve. “I don’t know how erasing someone’s identity is getting you closer to collaboration,” she said. “I was trying to understand, Why is this bothering you? How could this be harming you, that kids have a way of belonging?” Escamilla’s district in Salt Lake is predominantly working class and Latino. “It was so heartbreaking to me that the kids in my neighborhood, my district, the children I represent—it was us fighting for them, and no one else,” she said. When the university announced that it would be closing the Women’s Resource Center, Maanum took down the art that hung on the walls. She loaded a couple of pieces into her car and returned them to the former staff members who had donated them. She and her colleagues organized a farewell party at a brewery. They wore T-shirts with the center’s logo. They took Polaroid selfies. They wrote love letters to what their community had been. The pictures and notes sit in a small cardboard box on a shelf above Maanum’s computer. She meant to take them to the university archives, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do so. “I take them down and read them,” she told me. “Some days I cry.” Inside the box, stickers decorated with groovy flowers and “WRC” in nineteen-seventies-style font note the dates of the center’s founding and closure, like an obituary: 1971 to 2024. The philanthropic sector may or may not follow the pluralism pivot. Michael Murray, the president of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, which fund projects in higher education and religion, told me that “since October 7th things have changed quite a bit in terms of available philanthropic dollars.” High-net-worth individuals “have made it clear that they are willing to put resources on the line for institutions to do work in this space.” Jennifer Hoos Rothberg, the executive director of the Einhorn Collaborative, a nonprofit philanthropy, has put together a group of funders who she says want to take pluralism work from “nice to have, soft, squishy” to “tangible, measurable, meaningful, and sustainable.” Even traditional philanthropists in higher ed are poking around pluralism. Terri Taylor, a strategy director at the Lumina Foundation, a heavyweight funder with one and a half billion dollars in assets, told me that a group of twenty organizations joined a call in December, after Trump’s reëlection, to trade notes on efforts to foster dialogue on campuses. Still, the foundation, which has historically focussed on equity, is leery of abandoning its emphasis on racial justice. “Race is, in many ways, a superseding factor,” Jamie Merisotis, Lumina’s C.E.O., told me. “Being a person of color, being Black, or being someone who comes from an underrepresented ethnic group like Latinos leads to poorer outcomes.” He sees the turn away from D.E.I. as a response to its politicization. “To walk away from the construct of race or ethnicity,” he said, “means our collective talent as a nation will suffer.” The most stalwart D.E.I. advocates see the criticisms of current D.E.I. practices as cover for racism. Paulette Granberry Russell, the president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, said, of legislators who oppose D.E.I., “The real interest is in obliterating efforts that provide support for particular communities. It’s been two years of trying to get a message across that this work is not divisive, it’s not discrimination, it’s not exclusion or indoctrination.” She added, “Don’t let them get away with saying it’s divisive.” At a place like the University of Utah, these debates are largely theoretical. H.B. 261 is the law, and the school must move forward. I met with Taylor Randall, the president, in his office. He has been working with Patel, the Interfaith America president, along with others to develop a pluralistic vision for the U—not a repackaged form of D.E.I. but a new vision, based on coöperation across difference. Randall has a scholarly background in accounting, and his attraction to pluralism is fittingly pragmatic. “A market economy functions on relationships and transactions, which naturally require compromise and coalition-building,” he said. Helping students find common ground is “the most practical skill I can teach.” Students need to learn how to state and debate their views, he added: “It’s one of the critical skills we’ve got to have as citizens.” The U is starting to roll out new initiatives. In addition to Patel, the school has brought in Arthur Brooks, a Harvard professor and a self-styled happiness guru, and Timothy Shriver, the chairman of the Special Olympics, as “impact scholars” who regularly visit the campus. There are scholarships for students who do service projects with one another. Faculty and students who pitch ideas for collaborating across lines of difference will be eligible for grants. “We’re in the early stages to see whether this framework is going to work or not,” Randall said. One of the U’s efforts is centered on religious inclusion. Interfaith America has conducted “bridge builder” trainings in which students learn techniques for careful listening and facilitating difficult conversations. The U’s leaders are also focussed on trying to change the school’s reputation for being unfriendly toward L.D.S. students. To boost enrollment, the school is recruiting from the fastest-growing counties in the state, including the heavily L.D.S. area around Provo, where Brigham Young University is situated. Over the past couple of years, Clark Ivory, the former board chair, has led a project to open “standards housing” for students who agree not to drink or do drugs, or host overnight guests. It’s not explicitly marketed as L.D.S. housing, but, he told me, it will provide those students with “a place where they can come and be very safe.” It was a surprising echo of a D.E.I. idea: that students should feel “safe” in their identities, and that their safety comes from being surrounded by others who share the same values. Randall’s pluralism initiatives look different in the context of the U’s recruitment efforts: they could be read as a bid to make the university seem more palatable to the conservative audience it is intentionally courting. Still, there’s significant suspicion on the right about pluralism—that it’s just a new word for the expectation that conservatives will compromise on their convictions in public spaces. On a recent evening, a few hundred students gathered at the Institute, the Church’s center beside the U’s campus. The building is huge, with multiple social halls and two basketball courts. There was an elaborate dodgeball tournament happening; many students had arrived earlier for a panel with InterVarsity, an evangelical group, and classes about L.D.S. theology. Troy Virgin, the Institute’s director, told me that three thousand students are enrolled in classes there, a number that’s been rising steadily. I met with a few students in one of the classrooms. Gideon Kiphibane, a sophomore at the U, told me that most of his friends had gone to Brigham Young, but that attending the U had helped him take ownership of his faith. “When you’re surrounded by your own people, you go with the flow,” he said. “For me, I have to make that choice to come to the Institute or go to church.” The students were only dimly aware of H.B. 261. Kiphibane, who is Laotian, was the sole nonwhite student in the room; he was also the only person who had visited one of the cultural centers. The other students didn’t need to. At the Institute, they had found a home for people like them. A junior named Eliza Stewart remembered, “as a freshman, coming and feeling very intimidated and overwhelmed by college and being an adult.” This, she told me, “was a safe place.” ♦