Trinity College

Trinity College is a private liberal-arts college in Hartford, Connecticut — and the school where two undergraduates rooming together built one of the most consequential institutions in conservative media (ESPN). Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel were roommates as undergraduates at Trinity; two decades later they co-founded The Daily Caller, the political news site Carlson ran as editor-in-chief (The Trinity Tripod; Columbia Journalism Review). College directories will give you the enrollment numbers; what they don’t capture is that lineage — or the squash dynasty that gave this small college the longest winning streak in collegiate sports history (ESPN).

The roommates who built a media company

Trinity’s own student newspaper states it plainly: “Neil Patel, the publisher and co-founder of ‘The Daily Caller,’ is a Trinity alumnus who was Carlson’s roommate while they were undergraduates” (The Trinity Tripod). Carlson graduated in the class of 1991, taking five years to earn a B.A. in History, and founded the Caller with Patel (The Trinity Tripod). The Columbia Journalism Review tells how the site came to be: just before the 2008 election, Carlson — then recently “canned” by MSNBC — had dinner at the Palm in Washington with his old friend Patel, who was then Vice President Cheney’s primary adviser on domestic and economic policy; at dinner, Patel told Carlson he had been thinking about starting a website (Columbia Journalism Review). They drew up a business plan, secured a $3 million investment from Wyoming GOP donor Foster Friess, leased offices near Dupont Circle, and launched The Daily Caller on January 11, 2010 (Columbia Journalism Review). By June it had thirty-two editorial staffers, and since March 2010 the site has held a rotating spot in the White House press pool (Columbia Journalism Review). Early traffic figures showed momentum: 550,000 unique visitors in its first month, more than 2 million by the following March, and page views growing from 3.2 million to 11.1 million — enough to make it, per Quantcast, the 780th most-visited website in the US, ahead of Vanity Fair and National Review (Columbia Journalism Review). Carlson kept hiring — Mickey Kaus, Matt Lewis, and conservative activist Ginni Thomas all joined — while his stated hope for the site was that “every story on his site will someday be adjective-free” (Columbia Journalism Review).

The Tripod traces Carlson’s path from campus to cable: after earning his degree he started as an editor of Policy Review, the Heritage Foundation journal, then reported for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and The Weekly Standard before television — CNN’s The Spin Room (where he was the network’s youngest anchor), Crossfire, MSNBC’s Tucker, and, from May 2009, Fox News, where he co-hosted Fox & Friends Weekend from April 2013 and took over the primetime “Tucker Carlson Tonight” slot on November 14, 2016 (The Trinity Tripod). Throughout, he was also the Caller — “Besides founding and running ‘The Daily Caller’ with Neil,” the paper notes of his juggling act, he was in New York every weekend for his Fox appearances (The Trinity Tripod).

The college

Trinity was chartered on May 16, 1823 as Washington College — the second college in Connecticut, after Yale, and the 61st in the nation — and renamed Trinity College in 1845 (Trinity College Bulletin). The college’s own history notes a close but informal relationship with the Episcopal Church, while stressing that “from the beginning it did not use religious background as a factor in admissions” (Trinity College Bulletin). The late 19th and early 20th centuries were formative: as the modern university model evolved, Trinity reaffirmed its commitment to remain a liberal-arts college (Trinity College Bulletin).

The modern college took shape in two moves. In 1968 Trinity aimed to admit a substantially larger number of underrepresented minority students, and less than a year later the trustees voted to admit women as undergraduates for the first time; over the next twenty years enrollment expanded to 1,800 and the faculty to more than 200 (Trinity College Bulletin). Then, in 1995, the college turned its attention to its surroundings: working to ease the social and economic problems common to American cities, it built the Learning Corridor, an education complex that opened in 1997 adjacent to campus, including a public Montessori-style elementary school, the first Boys & Girls Club in the country located at a college, and the Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy (Trinity College Bulletin).

The Bantams

Trinity’s athletic identity is the Bantam, and its signature program is men’s squash. ESPN reported in 2007 that the team had not lost a match since February 1998 — a 165-match winning streak and nine consecutive College Squash Association team titles that was, at the time, “the longest in collegiate sports history,” ahead of UCLA basketball’s 88-game run and North Carolina women’s soccer’s 92 (ESPN). The dynasty was built by coach Paul Assaiante, hired in 1994 by former Trinity president Evan Dobelle, who solved the talent problem by recruiting internationally — the 2006–07 roster drew players from nine countries, including Pakistan, India, Brazil and Zimbabwe — and won the program’s first CSA championship in 1996 (ESPN). The Kellner Squash Center was built with $1.2 million in private donations, and the team’s success was such that March 23 was declared Trinity College Squash Day in Connecticut and the Bantams visited the governor’s mansion eight times under two administrations (ESPN).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state current enrollment, acceptance rates, tuition, or rankings, which appeared only in directories and were not verified from a full-read source. It does not give Neil Patel’s class year, which no full-read source supplied. It does not claim other famous alumni or the current college president, and it does not repeat the “Little Ivies” label, which came only from tertiary sources.