Kirk assassination raises the political stakes for HE

The Manichaean world view displayed by US President Donald J Trump and his supporters at the memorial service of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk confirmed the worst fears of university leaders and civil libertarians: higher education, long perceived by the right wing as a bastion of liberal values, is being blamed for Kirk’s death. And it can expect to feel the heat.

Kirk, the 31-year-old-founder of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), which is credited with helping Trump win the 2024 election by mobilising the youth vote, was murdered on 10 September on the campus of Utah Valley University (Orem, Utah).

His memorial, attended by hundreds of thousands and streamed to tens of millions, was held on 21 September at the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.

Kirk’s assassination was a tragic event for a number of reasons, Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), told University World News.

“It signals a new level of violence that has resulted from a new permission structure and a climate of exercising vitriol and threats against one’s political opponents. It is a tragedy that has happened,” she noted.

But she said it is “wrong-headed to assume that this is the fault of colleges and universities or a liberal bias on college campuses. There’s no evidence to support the notion that [the assassin] was acting with a liberal political agenda”.

Disciplinary measures

She was speaking on 18 September, seven days after the alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, was captured by the FBI and local law enforcement in a remote cabin in Washington County, Utah.

A day later, on 19 September, more than 50 students, faculty or staff at more than 30 colleges had faced disciplinary measures, including termination or expulsion, most for making social media statements about Kirk’s murder that were judged to be supportive of it.

The University of Kentucky, for example, had suspended Brad VH for an X posting in which he quoted Mark Twain’s comment: “I have never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great satisfaction.”

“What we are watching is almost a pole reversal with the Republicans, who four, five, six or eight years ago would have called this ‘cancel culture’ and are now weaponising the same exact system they accused the left of using to oust faculty members for things like social media posts celebrating the fact that Charlie Kirk was murdered,” Connor Murnane, campus advocacy chief of staff for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Freedom, told University World News.

“In the case at Florida Atlantic University, a tenured professor was placed on administrative leave pending investigation just for retweeting criticism [of Kirk],” he added.

Halfway through his five-minute address to the 70,000 people in the stadium and the millions watching, Frank Turek, Kirk’s spiritual advisor, made clear that for Kirk and his followers, more than government policy was at stake by Kirk’s going on to college campuses where he famously set up tents emblazoned with the words “Prove Me Wrong” about such statements as “Big Government Sucks”.

While several speakers referred to the event as “an old-time revival meeting”, a term harkening back to the days when thousands of people gathered in fields to be “born again” listening to evangelical preachers, Turek spoke in apocalyptic terms of the “darkness on college campuses”.

He left no doubt about the theological meaning of “darkness” when, later in the sentence, he called Kirk a martyr for his evangelical Christian faith – a point made several times by every other speaker.

Tulsi Gabbard, US director of national intelligence, accused colleges and universities of turning away from training young people to think critically and to debate ideas like Kirk’s.

He claimed they did this by “saying words are violence”, ensuring “dissenting voices are hushed” and that “those who speak of God, those who speak the truth, simple objective truths, like that there are only two genders, are told in these schools, ‘You have no voice’.”

Speaker after speaker spoke of Kirk’s Christian faith, his belief in himself as a modern evangelist, and of his activities leading students to Jesus being his true calling.

“But the main thing about Charlie and his message,” right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson said, was not about policy, though he pushed conservative causes, but rather that “he was bringing the gospel to the country”.

Carlson compared Kirk to Jesus – and his killer to that moment 2,000 years ago when “some guys” were sitting in a room discussing how to stop Jesus from speaking “the truth” and one said, “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we just kill him. That’ll shut him up.”

As did others, Secretary Pete Hesgeth, who heads the newly minted Department of War (formerly Defense), said: “Charlie Kirk was a citizen who had the biblical heart of a soldier of the faith, who put on every single day the full armour of God.”

Others said he was in a fight to “save Western civilisation”, as Kirk himself said in an interview with (American) National Public Radio that aired on the day after he was assassinated.

In the middle of his remarks, Vice-President JD Vance said: “He was taken from us by those who despise the virtues that actually make our civilisation great to begin with: dialogue, truth-seeking, family and [Christian] faith”.

And at the end, he said: “My friends, for Charlie, we must remember that he is a hero of the United States of America, and he is a martyr for the Christian faith.” (That the United States is officially a secular republic was not mentioned by a single political leader.)

The political left as enemy

While both Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr, quoted from scripture, each also spoke in political terms that left no doubt as to who the enemy was.

Trump Jr slid easily from speaking of the danger that Kirk and he had faced at Michigan State University (East Lansing) during the 2016 campaign when security told them: “We can no longer guarantee your safety because left-wing activists were going crazy,” and a later threat at a rally during the 2024 campaign, to: “They took his life.”

As of this writing, there is no evidence of a conspiracy and nothing is known about Robinson’s political beliefs other than that he appears to have been somewhat critical of Utah’s governor, Republican Spencer Cox.

Trump called the shooter a “radicalised, cold-blooded monster”. He later related how he had warned Kirk that on campuses “the radical left would do very bad things, very dangerously”.

Warming to his theme, Trump recounted tales of fire alarms being pulled, “countless rage-filled radicals who tried to shout him down”, and how once “police had to build barricades to protect students from angry mobs of thugs”.

Lest there be any doubt who Trump had in mind when he related these incidents, he continued: “Many of these people, by the way, are paid a lot of money to do this. They’re paid agitators. Remember that when you see that they all have the same beautifully printed signs . . .. They’re paid for by very bad people. And hopefully, we’re going to be finding out through the Department of Justice who these bad people are.”

Note that on 27 August, Trump posted on Truth Social that “George Soros, and his wonderful Radical Left son, should be charged with RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corruption Organizations Act] because of their support of Violent Protests, and much more, all throughout the United States of America.

“We’re not going to allow these lunatics to rip apart America any more, never giving it so much as a chance to “BREATHE,” and be FREE. Soros, and his group of psychopaths, have caused great damage to our Country! That includes his Crazy, West Coast friends. Be careful, we’re watching you!”

The Open Society Foundations (OSF), founded by George Soros and now run by his son Alex, told the news website Axios that such accusations were “outrageous and false”, adding that the OSF does not “support or fund violent protests” and that it “stand for fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, including the rights to free speech and peaceful protests that are the hallmarks of any vibrant democracy”.

Campus ‘brainwashing’

In moving from the fact that Kirk was assassinated on a university campus and that Robinson was a college student to tarring all of American higher education, the speakers at the funeral travelled the same well-trod path that Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy a day after Robinson was arrested.

“You heard the family members say that this man became more political in recent years – what did he do in recent years? He went to college. That is where kids are getting radicalised. Not just online, our campuses are where a lot of radicalisation, hate, and intolerance starts from,” Campos-Duffy claimed.

However, Campos-Duffy’s dismissal of the impact of online culture on Robinson put her at odds with Cox, who said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that friends of Robinson had confirmed that he was active in the “deep dark internet, Reddit culture and other dark places on the internet” and that the unused shell casings had internet memes written on them”.

As Kari Lake, a strong Trump supporter and failed Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, would do three days later at a 14 September memorial event at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, when she said that Robinson had been “brainwashed” at college, Campos-Duffy ignored the fact that Robinson spent less than one semester at Utah State University (Logan) as a pre-engineering major and was about to finish a community college electrician training course.

Neither of these are the kind of programmes Republicans usually point to when discussing leftist political indoctrination, and both are in the deep-red state of Utah.

Also on 12 September, an editorial in the right-wing Washington Free Press said: “There are many guilty parties in the rise of political violence. But, to our minds, among the biggest culprits are the universities.

“In the same way that madrassas radicalise jihadis, America’s campuses are among the places in the US most hostile to disagreement and debate.

“Where they preach ‘inclusion’, they actually practice exclusion – shouting down speakers they disagree with, for instance. Where they promote ‘diversity’, they actually enforce a uniformity of thought.”

Universities are “toxic, hostile, illiberal environments” and have been for decades for conservative thinkers and speakers, the editors claimed.

Let’s call it racism

The vitriolic attacks on higher education in general have been matched by real-world consequences for UCLA’s director of race and equity, Jay Perkins, who is Black.

“You can’t force people to mourn someone who hated us – no matter how he died. It’s OKAY to be happy when someone who hated you and called for your people’s death dies – even if they are murdered,” he wrote in a post on X that had him placed on leave.

At Montana State University-Northern (Havre, Montana), Dr Samantha Balemba-Brownlee, who teaches in the Department of Criminal Justice, was suspended after posting: “He was a misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic asshole. He spread hate. He harmed society. He cut down women at every turn. No, I do not mourn the man.”

Kirk’s supporters would adamantly deny this charge, and at the funeral much was made about how much Kirk loved even his enemies. But in January 2024, he said on The Charlie Kirk Show: “If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘boy, I hope he’s qualified’,” while he considered Martin Luther King Jr “awful” and believed that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “mistake”.

Additionally, Kirk is on record as having said: “Black women like Joy Reid, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Michelle Obama … used affirmative action because they do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. So they had to steal a white person’s slot.”

In Texas, a Black student who was caught on video slapping himself several times in the neck after hearing that Kirk had been shot in the neck was expelled following this post from the state’s governor, Republican Greg Abbott: “Hey Texas State. This conduct is not accepted at our schools. Expel this student immediately. Mocking assassination must have consequences.”

According to Professor Neal H Hutchins, who teaches in the College of Education at the University of Kentucky (Lexington) and is also a lawyer, these disciplinary acts “seem to be based on displeasure with what individuals are saying.”

“Even holding aside the truly vile comments that might run afoul of First Amendment standards, it seems like there’s a lot of people being disciplined that even if I personally don’t like them or I find them in bad taste, I think there are pretty strong arguments that they are protected by the First Amendment.

“If institutions are actually going to adhere to their values and missions about free speech and expression, they shouldn’t be disciplining students,” he said in an interview with University World News.

“Are we going to just toss the First Amendment out the window and kind of leave it to universities, or at least to public colleges and universities,” he asked rhetorically before addressing the question of political pressure from elected officials.

“Is it really just whatever powerful elected officials are going to direct campuses to do? Is that going to be the new North Star that guides these issues on our campuses, at least in some states?”

Debate or combat?

As did other speakers at Kirk’s funeral, Trump lionised the man he called, “like a son to me”, for fomenting debate. “At every campus event, Charlie asked the people who disagreed with him to come forward, and instead of silencing them, he handed them a microphone and let them speak.”

But, as other news outlets have reported, Kirk did not adhere to anything like what might be thought of as the Marquis de Queensberry’s rules of debate. Rather, as a 26-year-old graduate student who debated Kirk told The Guardian: “I don’t think Charlie entered debates to come to a common consensus or to discover the truth. I think Charlie came to debates to verbally beat his opponents.

“He knew the arguments for nearly every conservative principle and even theological concept, and he spent years developing that ability, so he was very great at pivoting and changing the conversation when it was not going his way,” said the student identified only as Mason.

Dr Charles Woods, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at East Texas A&M University, who hosts The Big Rhetorical Podcast and was interviewed for the same Guardian story, said: “Charlie turned myriads of opportunities for meaningful dialogic transactions rooted in civility into confrontational interactions by amplifying binaries in his argumentative structure.”

As The Guardian article notes, TPUSA used clips of debates to celebrate Kirk’s wins, posting YouTube videos with titles like “Charlie Kirk ANNIHILATES Smart-Aleck Student Accusing Him of Propaganda” and “Liberal Student Can’t Answer Charlie Kirk’s Simple Question”.

Professor Watchlist

There is something else – something that went unmentioned at the funeral and in any of the dozens of social media posts this correspondent has viewed mourning Kirk’s passing and praising his mission – that most concerns professors: TPUSA’s “Professor Watchlist”.

Established in 2016, the mission of the Professor Watchlist, which has more than 300 names on it, “is to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” It is compiled by aggregating “published news stories detailing instances of radical behaviour among college professors” and by tips sent into TPUSA.

Matt Lamb, the original organiser of the website, told The New York Times in November 2016 that: “This site is a beautiful example of freedom of speech. Professors can say what they want, other people can report it, and we can compile reports on whatever they say.”

But professors whose names appear on the site take a very different view. Many report being doxxed and threatened. But the real aim of the watchlist is to encourage behaviour that keeps the professor off the list – in other words, to encourage either self-censorship or speaking in ways that Kirk would approve of.

“The purpose of the watchlist is to instil fear and intimidation,” said Pasquerella. “But not only among those who are listed but those who are teaching classes where they’re talking about controversial issues.”

Pasquerella said the AAC&U is aware that since Kirk’s death faculty who were on the list have had to move their classes for fear of being attacked given the “rhetoric about retaliation and making sure that liberal institutions are punished and held accountable for Mr Kirk’s death”.

Pasquerella said in the present context the Watchlist has taken on another purpose, “It’s a way to get governors like Abbott in Texas to call for the firing of faculty.

“We’ve seen this repeatedly over the last week-and-a-half since Mr Kirk’s death, where students have been expelled and faculty and staff are being fired for expressing viewpoints that are protected under the First Amendment. But that doesn’t seem to matter, including to our Attorney General Pam Bondi, who says people will be punished for speaking in certain ways.

“The Supreme Court gives that kind of political speech the highest protection, and yet there is a campaign of fear and intimidation to make sure that people don’t express dissent from the ideology being imposed upon us by the Trump administration,” said Pasquerella.

For her part, Marybeth Gasman, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair in Education and Distinguished Professor, Educational Psychology at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, New Jersey), told University World News: “The Watchlist is designed to shut people up. These are the kind of things you’re seeing with Trump right now; that someone should be fired [such as the late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel] or someone should be deported.”

The message, Gasman said, is “You fall in line or you’re going to be gone,” which includes, she said, Trump’s threat to revoke the citizenship of the actress Rosie O’Donnell, a strong critic of Trump, who is living outside the United States.

O’Donnell was born in the United States in 1962 to an American mother (her father was an immigrant from Ireland), meaning O’Donnell is an American citizen by birth, and her citizenship cannot be taken away.

Isaac Kamola, who teaches political science at Trinity College in Hartford and directs the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, anatomised the effect of the “language of retaliation”.

“There are two paths going forward. There’s one path in which the administration and governors and right-wing politicians and right-wing media outlets demand, demand, demand for people to be fired [over comments about Kirk’s murder], and institutions keep firing them and capitulate, capitulate, capitulate.

“And then you’ve set a clear precedent that any faculty member is a target for whatever arbitrary reason those in power think they should be fired.

“The other option is that university leadership refuses and stands up against these bullying tactics, and the broader public says, ‘Enough is enough’,” said Kamola.

A collective attack

All of the academics and defenders of civil liberties interviewed for this article referenced the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy period in the US in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Ellen W Schrecker, professor emerita of American history at Yeshiva University (New York) and one of America’s foremost historians of the McCarthy period, thinks that America’s colleges and universities face a more perilous situation today.

According to Schrecker: “McCarthyism only targeted individuals because of their (usually) past political activities. Most of the people targeted, both academics and others, were people who at one point in the 1930s and 1940s had been in or near the Communist Party. Most of them were no longer involved. They were never asked about their teaching and research.

“Today, the attack is on the university, on the academic community; not just individuals, but on the higher education community as a whole.”

In the wake of Kirk’s assassination by what it called – without any evidence – “a left-wing maniac”, the right-wing publication The Federalist published a proposal to remake American higher education (giving credence to Kamola’s claim that “We’re facing an effort to fundamentally remake the university itself”).

As did Trump, the ]editors at The Federalist called for an investigation into the “well-known . . . network of organisations that attempt to subvert American society”, starting with Soros’s Open Society University Network. These groups “need to be uncovered and eradicated, root and branch,” and be “treated as terrorist organisations”.

To undo the power of the left, which “pump out radicals who hate our country”, the Federalist calls for universities to be forced to commit a high percentage of their “endowments to hosting, protecting, and advancing conservative speakers and causes”; a proposal that suggests that the editors do not understand that the vast majority of money in university endowments is dedicated to specific types of projects, such as scholarships for medical school.

Universities and colleges “should be required to host conservative speakers extremely frequently – maybe at least weekly” and should pay the cost of security for them – a cost that mounts into the millions given that in 2017, security for right-wing firebrand Ben Shapiro’s speech on Berkeley University’s campus cost US$600,000 (or US$793,000 today).

After mooting the idea of a “National Charlie Kirk Speech and Debate Series”, The Federalist editors averred that more exposure therapy is needed and called for “All schools that receive federal funding [to be] required to have a minimum of 50 per cent conservative faculty, or lose federal funding”.

Schrecker found these ideas both risible and a clear violation of academic freedom. Of this call for 50% of professors to be conservative, she wondered how that could even be policed.

“In any event,” she said, “what’s always amused me is the assertion that there are these brilliant conservatives who are supposedly clamouring to get university jobs. If they really believed in conservative principles, they’d go into hedge funds. That is a good conservative thing to be doing, not getting a not-very-well-paid position when they could be out there making millions of dollars.

“It’s loony to think that thousands or tens of thousands of conservatives are being excluded from universities when universities are bending over backwards looking for them. There is no problem of viewpoint discrimination against conservatives.

“There’s a question of self-selection here, which nobody wants to talk very much about. Neil Gross has been studying this for years, and he always finds that just as some people are drawn to being a chef because they like to work with food, people who want to work with ideas tend to be on the left.”

Gross is the Charles A Dana Professor of Sociology and chair of the Department of Sociology at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and the author of, among other books, Why Professors are Liberal and Why Conservatives Care (Harvard UP, 2013).

It’s time to use your voice

At the end of our discussion, I asked Pasquerella to turn and speak to people outside the United States about this moment in America.

“We’re a country in crisis. Our forefathers adhered to certain moral principles as essential to the preservation of democracy. And those are unravelling at this moment.

“I was on a webinar this morning for the Financial Times, and one of the questions was, ‘Would you have international students come study in the United States?’”

“No. Absolutely not,” Pasquerella recalled the first person to respond saying: “I would advise them never to go to the United States.”

Pasquerella then said: “I, of course, believe that American higher education is valuable in part because of its focus on liberal education, the democratic purposes of higher education. But I admitted that as a parent, I would be concerned about sending my child to a country that has pretty close to unfettered access to guns and assault rifles.”

Gasman’s response to the same request was a prose version of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous anti-Nazi poem, “First They Came”, which begins with “First they came for the socialists” and ends with “Then they came for me/And there was no one left/To speak for me.”

She noted: “If you have ever been the kind of person who said, ‘If I were alive during slavery, if I were alive during the Holocaust … if you are the kind of person who said that you would have done something, you wouldn’t have been quiet’, you have to use your voice now.

“People like Trump … benefit when people are silent, when people are quiet.”