Dear Editor,

When I was a freshman in high school, my English teacher pulled me aside before we began our Shakespeare unit and told me, “We won’t be talking about it in class, but I thought you would want to know that many scholars believe Shakespeare was a bisexual or gay man.”
She was right of course, that I would want to know — she knew I and another student had started the Gender and Sexuality Alliance that year. In our club meetings, I led presentations on inclusive sexual education from resources gathered on Planned Parenthood’s website, at 15 filling the gap left by the abstinence-based and queer-exclusionary educational policy of the Pennsylvania government.
After college, I taught Shakespeare to my own students, English language learners at a public high school in Spain. I began by setting the context of the collected sonnets. More than 150 poems, 126 on his love for a young blond haired man, as well as 26 on his conflicted desire for his “dark lady.” In the news, I read about the rollback of LGBTQ+ rights in my home country, with conservative politicians and groups across the country targeting primarily trans children and drag artists. I watched as Florida expanded their “Don’t Say Gay” laws to the entirety of K-12 education, barring educators from any instruction related to gender identity or sexuality. At the time of writing this, the conservative controlled Supreme Court is considering Mahmoud v. Taylor, which could expand censorship of LGBTQ+ existence in K-12 education.
Censorship of work centering trans and queer people has a long history. On May 6 1933, three months after Adolf Hitler was made chancellor of Germany, Nazis burned the library at the Institute of Sexology. Two years later, the party arrested 50,000 people accused of male homosexual contact, sending between 10,000 and 15,000 to concentration camps where they were specifically marked with pink triangles. Throughout the mid-20th century, public servants in the United States were expelled from their jobs for engaging in homosexual behavior as part of the lavender scare, a Cold War moral panic about LGBTQ+ people that grew out of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s red scare. In Florida, LGBTQ+ teachers and students were harassed and investigated by the Johns Committee as part of this moral panic.
In the U.S., targeted censorship and persecution of this extent by the government has never occurred against conservative or right wing ideology. Within this country, it has never occurred against white cisgender heterosexual Christian men on the basis of their identity as such. Yet, throughout the last decade, a false victim complex has been spread by right-wing commentators. If you ask Olivia Krolczyk, a recent speaker allowed on campus by President Ron Cole, ’87, her bad grade for using unscientific language in a biology course constitutes the sort of censorship the targets of her hate speech have actually faced. If we do not provide resources, funded by the donations Allegheny College would desperately like from myself and other alumni, for her to spread her vitriol towards trans women, we are suppressing conservative voices.
As a student at Allegheny College, I frequently read from conservative commentators, many of whom I did not agree with. I went to talks by speakers I disagreed with, hosted by the college. Frequently, I listened to my conservative classmates state their opinions in class, for which I am sure they received their participation grades as earned. At times, these opinions constituted agreement with our assigned reading of Garret Hardin, a conservative thinker, who in his work on the tragedy of the commons argued in favor of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Other times, I heard my classmates argue in favor of policies akin to Jim Crow laws, such as the implementation of IQ testing as a prerequisite to suffrage.
Perhaps there were other students, who due to social pressure did not voice their conservative opinions, or who were afraid of a student smarter than them slicing through their inept argument. To be clear, fear that another person will call you hateful or an idiot does not constitute a genuine infringement on one’s right to free speech. I too have been fearful throughout my life of backlash against my more controversial opinions, yet I still make a choice to proclaim them because I have something called a backbone.
I, like most other politically left members of the Allegheny community, do not object that I have been forced to engage with conservative ideas. I share the values around freedom of inquiry that Cole espoused to alumni in an April 9 statement; however as I also shared in an email response to the president, the recent events on campus do not constitute a free speech debate, but one of academic integrity.
As many of you know, the Allegheny chapter of Turning Point USA, a club whose charter was rejected by Allegheny Student Government, hosted an event for Krolczyk, an ambassador for the Riley Gaines Center, which advocates against the participation of trans women in women’s sports. Despite massive opposition from both current students and alumni, Cole declined to cancel the event, instead dedicating the college’s resources to platforming her anti-intellectual hate speech. In the same April 9 statement, Cole stated: “We should expect that other speakers will bring controversial ideas to our campus – some with which we will agree, and others with which we will passionately disagree. To preserve our commitment to freedom of inquiry, we must be a place where students learn to engage with controversial ideas and develop the skills to lead change.”
In response, many students and alumni have accurately pointed out the numerous ways in which TPUSA and Krolcyzk violated our statement of community, which states: “Allegheny students and employees are committed to creating an inclusive, respectful, and safe residential learning community that will actively confront and challenge racism, sexism, heterosexism, religious bigotry, and other forms of harassment and discrimination. We encourage individual growth by promoting a free exchange of ideas in a setting that values diversity, trust, and equality. So that the right of all to participate in a shared learning experience is upheld, Allegheny affirms its commitment to the principles of freedom of speech and inquiry, while at the same time fostering responsibility and accountability in the exercise of these freedoms.”
Some of these critiques from students and alumni focused on the proposed content of Ms. Krolcyzk’s talk, which seemed to advocate for the elimination of specifically trans women from public life and the denial of trans people’s ontological existence. Others critiques focused on Krolczyk’s surfacing a video of an incident that occurred nearly three years ago in what could be seen as an attempt to dox a current student who appears in the video. I agree wholeheartedly that her speech should have been canceled over these concerns; however, I think there is an additional argument to be made for why her speech should have been canceled.
At Allegheny, I majored in philosophy, where I learned that my claims needed to be rooted in something deeper than a simple moral appeal. I can tell you until I’m blue in the face that Krolcyzk is a hateful bigot, but that doesn’t actually make an argument about the epistemic validity of her claims, something she is also lacking. The issue with Krolcyzk’s talk, with people like her, with the whole affair of TPUSA, is that these people are fundamentally wrong and intellectually unserious. If we want to maintain Allegheny as an intellectually rigorous institution, somewhere becoming of the brilliant faculty as well as the smart and curious students it has long attracted, we must reject the infiltration of anti-intellectuals in concerted astroturfing campaigns.
In social media posts by TPUSA, Krolcyzk’s talk was advertised as centering on “Defending Free Speech and Women’s Sports.” While I feel I have adequately enumerated the flaws in the free speech argument already, I want to take a moment to address the claims regarding women’s sports. On her social media, Krolcyzk advocates for trans women to be banned from participating in women’s sports. Conservatives used to claim that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” so what are the facts regarding trans women and women’s sports?
Well, according to a scientific review of a decade of research on trans women’s participation in sports conducted by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sports, the available evidence suggested that trans women who had undergone testosterone suppression had no clear biological advantage over cis women. They also found that most attempts at exclusion of trans women mirror the historical exclusion of cis women from sports, and are not based on evidence. The first study on transgender athletes sponsored by the International Olympic Committee found that trans athletes, including trans women, were at a physical disadvantage compared to their cis counterparts. Additionally, it is clear that increased policing of who is included in the ontological category of woman not only does harm to trans women, but also to cis women who are perceived to be more masculine, as evidenced by the racist and misogynistic vitriol that the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif faced at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Empirically, Krolcyzk and those who hold her views are factually wrong. Yes, I reject her appearance on campus on moral grounds – because I love and care about the trans community of Allegheny, and I am hurt to see my alma mater abandon us. I am disturbed and disgusted to see the lack of spine by the administration to not even say the word trans in the statement released to current students when Cole rejected appeals for the event to be canceled. I also reject the degradation of the academic integrity of the institution that was my foundation as an intellectual. In the same way I would reject a speaker who claims the Earth is flat being brought to campus or one who pushes vaccine skepticism, I reject anti-intellectuals like Krolcyzk being brought to campus under the false guise of freedom of inquiry. Why would we waste resources on a failed scientist?
Allegheny’s administration must do more not only to protect the vibrant trans community on campus, but ensure the intellectual vitality of our entire community. If we want to speak about our values of “academic inquiry” and counters to suppression of controversial speech, perhaps we should bring attention to the ways trans people have had their speech suppressed by the Trump administration, including attempts to bar any recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts from promoting “gender ideology.” Why does the administration not seek to bring these intellectuals and artists with controversial ideas to our campus? In the face of genuine persecution and censorship, I would like to see Allegheny put its money where its mouth is and platform transgender intellectuals who are under attack by authoritarians, if we truly do value “academic inquiry” as Cole claims.
Until there is substantial action by the administration to rectify the disregard for our trans community and the cheapening of the academic integrity of the institution, I will not be promoting Allegheny or financially supporting the institution. I know I am not alone in this sentiment, and I encourage other students and alumni to make it clear to Cole that the cheap attempts to placate us will not suffice. I demand better of Allegheny than appeasement because I have seen it be better. I will not hold my discontent quietly as another president demeans our institution with their weak will. I suggest those who feel the same use their own freedom of speech to make it clear that we stand with the trans community at Allegheny and unintellectual fascists have no place on our beloved campus.

Sincerely,
Quinn Broussard

April 28, 2025: This story has been updated to correct grammatical errors.