Letter to the Editor: Understanding the Stakes – In Response to “Reactionary Politics”

Dear Editor,

American colleges once prided themselves on protecting dissent and debate. At Trinity, that tradition now faces a test. Will we defend it, or discard it over one controversial hire? In an age of mounting political violence, the choice has never mattered more.

That choice was on full display in the Sept. 23 edition of the Tripod, where Amber Gray ’26 responded to my earlier letter on the hiring of Professor Adam Kissel. While I am encouraged that she shares my “general perspective on free speech,” I believe the arguments she advances reveal how fragile our commitment to that principle has become.

She writes that the hiring of a professor with “just a [m]aster’s degree” is “embarrassing,” and that Professor Kissel is “undereducated” and “not a qualified academic.” Of course, Kissel is far from the only Trinity professor lacking a terminal degree. The school employs several faculty with only bachelor’s degrees, including an English professor who holds a prestigious named chair. Gray is welcome to contest that Kissel’s time as a senior official at the Department of Education doesn’t meet Trinity’s “high standard” for professors, but his hiring is hardly irregular.

I chose not to highlight the formal organizations program’s strange position on campus as a non-degree granting entity with its own endowment, not out of an “appall[ing] lack of research,” but because it wasn’t relevant to the argument either Alex Gervais ‘28 or I was making. All Trinity professors, regardless of department, retain the same right to “search for truth…without fear of reprisal.” 

Gray accuses me of hypocrisy for being insufficiently attentive to the attacks on left-wing free speech at Trinity, but even a cursory glance at my last letter should have disabused her of that notion. I explicitly defended Johnny Williams, Trinity’s most embattled leftist professor, against attempts to curb his freedom of speech. That’s why I wrote Kissel’s “beliefs don’t matter.” Regardless of how you feel about either professor, restricting unpleasant or unpopular speech limits all speech.

She writes that, “Gervais did not call for the removal of Mr. Kissel on purely ideological grounds,” but this is not the case. In his original piece, Gervais writes that Trinity employing someone who worked in the first Trump administration is a “bridge too far,” and that President Lugo must “execute a complete and thorough review of Kissel and his hiring” to “protect higher education.” 

Gervais is not alone; calls to fire Kissel are growing. Felix Thompson ‘24 wrote in last week’s Tripod that the school should “re-examine their decision to invite Kissel to campus,” for fear that hiring a new conservative professor would turn Trinity into a “laboratory” for the Trump administration’s sinister experiments. Perhaps last week’s rapture predictions have left me sour, but it seems unlikely that adding one more to the single digit number of conservatives on the faculty will turn Trinity into Liberty, let alone “destroy” our institution.

Gray writes that I’m “preaching this centrist value of ‘hearing both sides.’” Despite the quotation marks in her letter, those are not my words, and not my beliefs. Students are free to avoid any professor, and Kissel’s right to speak does not impose a duty on any of us to listen. My view is simply that Trinity students should not be deprived of the opportunity to learn from Professor Kissel just because some in the community object to his hiring. 

You don’t have to care for Kissel’s beliefs to care what happens to him. If he is punished for his speech, no professor will be above suspicion, and no norm sacrosanct. Online mobs and angry donors eagerly await the day when a few strongly worded emails are all it takes to remove a professor.

For all our sakes, I hope President Lugo stays above the fray and allows Trinity’s legacy of academic freedom to emerge from this saga unblemished.

– Elliot Louis ‘27