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Ninety one percent of undergraduate students believe that words can be violence, according to a new poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and College Pulse.
The survey’s findings are especially startling coming in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — an extreme and tragic example of the sharp difference between words and violence.
“When people start thinking that words can be violence, violence becomes an acceptable response to words,” said FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens. “Even after the murder of Charlie Kirk at a speaking event, college students think that someone’s words can be a threat. This is antithetical to a free and open society, where words are the best alternative to political violence.”
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AI arrived on campus as a crisis but has since become banal. Students can now do basically all their schoolwork automatically with AI—answering scientific problem sets, writing computer code, and drafting essays. Professors like me have no idea whether we are really teaching or just LARPing for students who are also pretending to occupy their role.
I’ve come to the conclusion that something bigger, stranger, and more damaging has been taking place for a long time. AI has combined with two other recent campus crises—the coronavirus pandemic and the research-funding cuts of the second Trump administration—to amplify a deeper truth: American college is incompatible with itself. Americans speak of “college” as if it is one coherent thing. That’s wrong.
Charlie Kirk’s family announced a wrongful death notice Wednesday, paving the way for a potential lawsuit against Utah Valley University officials, who, they allege, did not provide proper security at the outdoor event where Kirk was killed on Sept. 10, 2025, the Associated Press and other news organizations reported.
A rooftop sniper fatally shot Kirk at a university-approved event hosted by his conservative student organization, Turning Point USA. Kirk’s estate and heirs filed the notice against the university, its former president, its police department and the state of Utah, alleging that the shooting “came against a well-known backdrop of risk” and was the result of a “series of stunning failures and reckless decisions.”
There’s a common trope that liberals, especially liberal college students, often support using violence or shoutdowns to stop people they disagree with from speaking. It’s no secret that there are plenty of examples of this behavior. But are those isolated incidents, or do they reflect a broader pattern? Are liberal students more violent?
There used to be a massive gulf in support for violence between “very liberal” students (and democratic socialists, a separate ideology option in our survey) and everyone else, especially conservatives. That gap is gone, replaced by a gender gap, such that every male ideology is now more violent than its female counterpart.
