FOrging a Conservative Trinity

Alex Gervais ’28

Executive Opinion and Design Editor

For months we’ve watched as our democracy and way of life have been fundamentally under attack by the Trump administration; now that fight comes to Trinity. In June 2025, the Formal Organizations department (FOrg) hired Adam Kissel, a visiting lecturer teaching two sections of FORG-310, Theory & Philosophy of Markets. Kissel’s class is built off the ideas of economist Adam Smith, examining the formal organizations that underpin domestic and international markets.  

Kissel has an underwhelming amount of experience for a visiting lecturer. His last in-classroom role in higher education was a one-year stint as an adjunct instructor at Liberty University from 2021-22, teaching a course on graduate grant writing—not markets—at the primarily online university. Kissel now serves as an unconfirmed appointee on the trustee board of the University of Western Florida. He was reappointed to the post after his first appointment by Governor Ron Desantis was rejected by the Republican majority Florida Senate Ethics and Elections Committee. Over his career, he has also worked for a number of conservative think tanks including the Koch Foundation, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the West Virginia Professional Charter School Board and, currently, the Heritage Foundation. Additionally, he worked for the Department of Education during the first Trump administration, overseeing a portfolio of higher education grant spending. He has never publicly held a role as a visiting lecturer or equivalent at any university at or near the academic standard of Trinity College. 

During his time at the Heritage Foundation, Kissel helped “shape higher education reforms that [were] part of Heritage’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project.” These “reforms” became policy in Project 2025, the fascist mandate for leadership written by Trump’s inner circle being implemented across our federal government. He’s also publicly posted his beliefs that trans people don’t exist, public universities should be privatized and pro-Palestinian protestors should be arrested and deported. 

While I vehemently oppose Kissel’s hire, it is not the man himself who primarily concerns me, but instead the creeping conservatism in academia that he represents. The legal showdowns between heavy hitting Ivy League schools like Columbia and Harvard against the Trump administration have been featured broadly in national media and are a fundamental attack on Trinity’s diverse, inclusive, and tolerant ethos. However, there’s a deeper strategy at hand, one that conservative think tanks and thought leaders have perpetrated for decades. As explored in “Free Speech and Koch Money,” coauthored by Trinity Professor Isaac Kamola, the Koch brothers (Kissel’s employer of five years) and their ultraconservative donor network have long laid the foundations of a conservative takeover of higher education. Their feigned outrage at alleged free speech violations and the seemingly never-ending string of conservative speakers and debaters on college campuses are a part of the Koch playbook. They make inroads at prestigious universities like Trinity, twisting our curricula and student body one visiting lecturer at a time, sowing the spoiled seeds of modern conservatism until they take root and fundamentally change the nature of our college. 

Conservative thought has a place on Trinity’s campus. Diverse viewpoints are a good thing: a range of opinions benefits all of our students and breaks us out of our algorithm driven online echo chambers. I fully accept and encourage the inclusion of conservative voices on our campus; I may vehemently disagree with almost everything they have to say, but I still revere their right to say it. However, actively compensating a man who contributed to the writing of Project 2025 and worked for the Trump Administration is a bridge too far. If FOrg wanted to hire a conservative visiting lecturer, then there are plenty of conservative free speech thought leaders out there; there are former McCain and Romney and Ryan and Gingrich staffers who hold those values but also recognize the rising tide of fascism in our nation (and have applicable experience in higher education).

In April 2025, Trinity’s outgoing President Joanne Berger-Sweeney joined 180 other university presidents and signed onto a letter condemning the Trump administration’s dangerous overreach into higher education. In June, the college turned around and hired a former Trump Department of Education assistant undersecretary and current fellow at the Heritage Foundation. While FOrg has an independent endowment (an entirely abnormal setup for a department at Trinity), administration still had to approve Kissel’s hiring. There still must be a recourse for this hypocrisy. Trinity cannot publicly pledge to protect higher education as we employ one of the architects plotting its downfall. This simply isn’t a reality that Trinity’s liberal students, donors or staff should lay down and accept. Money at Trinity must not ever be committed to inviting the alt-right conservative movement onto our campus. 

For the rest of his career, Kissel now gets to say that he worked at Trinity College. Our institution of higher learning will forever be marked with an irredeemable splotch of academic red ink. His hire taints every diploma that is handed to a Trinity graduate, it makes the lemonade just a bit more sour at each convocation. The history books will remember our actions in this moment, they’ll decry the time we spent sitting idly by and refusing to fight to protect our campus and our democracy. I call on the Lugo administration and Edward Stringer, coordinator of FOrg, to not be complicit; they must execute a complete and thorough review of Kissel and his hiring. It’s time for Trinity not to just declare its values, but to uphold them.