Adam Kissel: Trump’s Backdoor Into Trinity

Felix Thompson ’24

Alum Contributor

This fall, Trinity welcomed the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy Fellow Adam Kissel to the faculty. Given the current political and educational environment, the potential for loss by Trinity is such that I call on the school to re-examine their decision to invite Kissel to campus. 

A cursory look into Kissel’s online presence (his X account has been privatized in recent days) uncovers a sizable body of work dedicated to standard issue culture war frenzy. This activity is nothing more than a distraction that serves as bait for college students and a variety of ideological rivals. Kissel participates in the culture war to direct attention away from real issues such as plainly worsening inequality or the current administration’s rapid encroachment on constitutional freedoms—an administration whose first iteration Kissel worked for and whose second iteration he helped to provide with its authoritarian playbook. His politics also distract from the question of why Trinity’s formal organizations department (FOrg) decided to hire someone with minimal professorial experience and with degrees in English, American literature, and social thought to teach “Theory & Philosophy of Markets.” Kissel’s job is to twist and exaggerate perceived injustices to distract from the heinous crimes they are committing, and in this case, likely to open a backdoor into Trinity’s campus to bring a respected institution down a few notches.  

Like many culture warriors, Kissel loves pointing out universities’ supposed grave violations of constitutional law to distract us from the current administration’s most glaring violations of fundamental rights—often with universities’ help. As he points out, “Far too many American colleges and universities make violating civil rights laws part of their daily routine,” his belief being that white students are consistently discriminated against on campuses. Yet, students like Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil and thousands of others who have had their visas revoked and rights trampled—often with the help of their host institutions—seem to fly under his radar. Universities, such as Columbia, whose capitulation to the Trump administration Kissel celebrated and promoted the spread of to other campuses (potentially Trinity?), have taken the lead in silencing student dissent. We must ask if Kissel has arrived at Trinity to spread this troubling theme. 

Just this August, Kissel retweeted advocacy for deporting all Chinese students from American universities to avoid educating the youth of our adversary and supporting their genocide in Xinjiang. Anyone who has been following American foreign policy since 2023 (and the 75 years before that) recognizes the hypocrisy of this position and the questions that it raises. Who gets to decide which country’s student populations deserve deportation? Will Kissel play a role in that decision making, especially on Trinity’s campus? We know that American allies such as the United Arab Emirates and Israel that perpetrate genocide, slave labor (contributed to by our current president) and war crimes around the globe will be exempt. Kissel represents the class of people that will make decisions without respect to the due process of students in American universities and with regard only to America’s financial and political interests.  

Kissel and his allies in the Trump administration are intent on ruining the landscape of education in America. If fully realized, the education section of Project 2025 that Kissel reviewed and agreed with in his capacity with the Heritage Foundation would trample on the rights of students and independence of academic institutions. Additionally, the man who would have you believe that all schools should be run independently of the government thinks it would be ideal for the government for those same schools to have a “pro-American” outlook in their education. Trinity just made itself a prime target to become a laboratory for these policies. Still, the issue is not that someone who champions the policies of the current White House is allowed on Trinity’s campus; the issue is that his stated reason for being on campus is something he seems completely unqualified for. Trinity should be deeply concerned that he will leverage the knowledge he gains about the school to pressure Trinity’s administration to conform with the Trump administration.   

In the wake of the shocking killing of Charlie Kirk, it’s reasonable to expect that many on the right will push even harder for their voices to be heard at schools like Trinity. Certainly, there are problems inherent in trying to build a fairer world one step at a time. However, now is not the time to experiment with radical voices that wish to eliminate institutions like Trinity and deport their students arbitrarily. While Kissel may be relying on a more vocal conservative minority and alumni population to make their voices heard in his defense, right now these people belong nowhere near the independent institutions they have made it their sworn goal to destroy, especially not in capacities that belie their true intentions.