Professor’s libel suit against Trinity College students is quietly withdrawn

A professor and a former student at Trinity College have withdrawn a libel suit against other students who posted handbills around the school implying the two are racists after they formed a campus club that promoted the study and discussion of western civilization.

The two-year old suit by longtime Trinity political science professor Gregory Smith and now-former student Nicholas Engstrom was recently withdrawn without public explanation after talks between the opposing parties.

Parties to the suit and their lawyers would not discuss it. A spokesman for Trinity did not return a telephone call.

The quiet withdrawal was in contrast to the campus culture clash in 2019 that led to it. Engstrom’s application to the college for recognition of what was called the Churchill Club, with Smith as faculty adviser, was opposed by students who asserted that western culture is at the root of many of modern society’s ills, racism among them.

The student newspaper reported in a satirical piece that the campus “is in turmoil debating the merits of allowing fascism on campus.” It called the Churchill Club the “Trinity College Fascist Society” whose “aim is to promote and defend fascism, which they see as under attack in the modern world.”

Recognizing the club, the piece said, would be reminiscent of Britain’s appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Students accused Smith of using  “dog whistles” and other “thinly veiled language” in his writings to assert that Western” or ‘white” culture is superior to others. One such “dog whistle” was said to be the phrase “tribal enclaves.”

It appears, however, that Smith used the terms when arguing against what he called “cultural houses” or campus housing that segregated students based on racial, ethnic or sexual identity. He used the terms in a private letter he had written years earlier to a committee of school administrators at a time when Trinity was eliminating fraternities and sororities.

“Houses that integrate students by interest and academic subject matter would be far more promising than tribal enclaves that lead to division and hostility that need not exist,” Smith wrote. “We are creating a climate of armed camps, not one of open, urbane and cosmopolitan civility. What happened to the premise in Brown v Board of Education that separate is never equal? What happened to Martin Luther King’s “dream” of getting past the surface to treating each person as an individual and an equal rather than as members of groups?”

In the piece, Smith lamented what he considered Trinity’s tendency to establish homogenized, group political and cultural thought, something he said inhibited ideas and debate. He accused the school of “a new form of racism and classism” by promoting the notion that white, suburban students are guilty of the “original sin” of historic or systematic racism.

During the protest against the Churchill Club, other students posted hundreds of flyers featuring photos of Smith and Engstrom with the phrase “the new racism is every bit as ugly as the old.”

The phrase was taken from a social media post in which Smith called for the removal of a fellow Trinity professor who posted a series of violent, profane screeds accusing “white/cisgender/heterosexuals” of creating systems, philosophies and values that “subvert, corrupt and desecrate” others.

That professor condemned “self-identified white’s daily violence direct (sic) at immigrants, Muslim, and sexual and racially oppressed people. The time is now to confront these inhuman (expletive deleted) and end this now.”

In his reply, Smith wrote: “The new racism is every bit as ugly as the old, and it is every bit as divisive. Until we get beyond this kind of hate, we have no real hope of living together as fellow citizens and friends.”

The students sued by Smith and Engstrom failed in Superior Court to win dismissal of the suit. The case then went to the state Supreme Court on the narrow issue of whether the students could immediately appeal the loss of their motion to dismiss. The appeal of the denial of the motion to dismiss was at the state appellate court when the suit was withdrawn on Nov. 9.