The Campus After Charlie Kirk

By Tal Fortgang ‘17

The assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University was first and foremost a human tragedy. It was tragic for Kirk’s family, his friends, and his many fans and students. Kirk was a man, not a symbol or an idea, and every reflection on his murder must begin with reaffirming that. 

Because the horror unfolded on a college campus, during a supposed debating session, it also forces Americans to confront the possibility that what happens on campus really matters. Universities do not just send graduates into the world; they are the centers of an ongoing hot war, which is not pretend or low-stakes but moves people on occasion to violence. A young man who detested Kirk’s views on transgenderism – an idea developed in the academy, and which continues to derive its power from ivory-tower analysis -- executed a conservative speaker whose crime was unapologetically expressing views that millions of Americans share. 

Many subsequent discussions of this tragedy have attempted to trace a chain of responsibility. That is understandable and not entirely mistaken. It is at least partly true to say that the assassin was shaped not just by those who provided him with his substantive views, but by a culture that has taught young people that certain ideas are dangerous, that certain speakers are evil, and that certain speech is literally harmful to the point of warranting violence in response. In practice, universities have reinforced these views with years of equivocation in the face of left-wing threats of violence, speech codes that treat right-of-center views as forms of harassment, and general moral cowardice in the face of mob pressure. 

Yet the search for root causes is, in this case as in many, a dead end. No administrator or professor is responsible for this bloodshed. People, especially those who do evil, act in idiosyncratic ways. The best we can do to turn this trend around is to think about what good university governance looks like, how schools can instruct and model behaviors that encourage de-escalation, and gradually return to becoming places where learning is robust and violence is unthinkable. 

Here are six things universities should do after this grotesque wake-up call:

First, universities must answer a question they have long evaded: What is higher education actually for? Put another way, why does it enjoy a privileged place in American culture, such that it receives massive public support and Americans continue to push more of their high school graduates to campus. 

Higher education exists to prepare young Americans to be thoughtful, informed stewards of the civilization that makes mass learning possible in the first place. This means transmitting not just skills but the habits of mind necessary for self-governance: the ability to reason, to weigh evidence, to engage opposing arguments charitably, to distinguish the true from the false and the important from the trivial. It means instilling an appreciation for the institutions, traditions, and hard-won liberties that separate our society from the despotisms and failures that have characterized most of human history. Robust debate is essential to this mission, but debate aimed at understanding and truth, not political revolution or ideological orthodoxy. A university that fails to grasp this distinction has become a madrassa, churning out zealots incapable of the reflection and restraint that democratic citizenship requires. Expression geared towards this counterproductive end may be constitutionally protected, fun, and have the patina of engagement with the world. But it is not education, at least not in a way that deserves to be treated the same as education as we knew it. 

On to practical matters. Second, universities must ensure campus security without using safety as a pretext for censorship. The Kirk assassination demonstrates that political violence is not hypothetical. Universities have a duty to protect speakers and audiences who come to exchange views. But for years, administrators have invented, exaggerated, or relied upon actual “security concerns” by submitting to the heckler’s veto, claiming that conservative speakers provoke disruption and therefore cannot appear. This is extortion, and it must stop. If a speaker requires security, provide it. If protesters threaten violence, warn them that the speakers will be protected. If there are credible threats of violence, call the police. If there are disruptions, arrest the perpetrators and press charges. The cost of protecting free speech is not an argument against free speech; it is the price of civilization. Universities spend millions on diversity bureaucrats and palatial student centers. They can afford security details. What they cannot afford—morally or institutionally—is to send the message that the heckler’s veto works, that violence is an effective tool for silencing disagreement. Every time a university cancels a speaker because of threatened disruption, it teaches would-be assassins that force is the currency of campus discourse.

Third, take concrete steps towards advancing genuine intellectual pluralism. The ideological monoculture of contemporary academia is a choice—the result of hiring practices, tenure decisions, peer-review criteria, and departmental cultures that have systematically excluded heterodox voices for decades. In most humanities and social science departments, the ratio of left to right is not two-to-one or even five-to-one, but approaches infinity-to-one in many cases. Claimed commitments to diversity ring hollow in light of such lopsidedness. Students indoctrinated in this environment graduate believing that conservatism is not a legitimate intellectual tradition but a psychological disorder requiring therapy or, apparently, more extreme remedies. Genuine reform requires active recruitment of faculty across the political spectrum, protection for dissenting voices in hiring and promotion, and a recognition that a campus without robust conservative representation cannot claim to be an institution of higher learning. It may even require teaching current faculty about ideological traditions other than their own. The goal is not affirmative action for Republicans but an environment where students encounter the full range of serious thought about the human condition.

Fourth, universities must teach civic virtues without fear of moralizing or that dreaded phrase, “telling people what to do.” Students are young and frequently do need to be told what to do. That much is obvious when it comes to a range of behaviors, like plagiarism or drug use. It should also be true of the democratic practice of disagreement. This goes to the heart of the academic mission, which is to form citizens capable of living in a diverse republic where deep disagreements are permanent features of political life. Students must learn that their political opponents are not enemies to be destroyed but fellow citizens to be persuaded. They must understand that democracy requires a certain suspension of ultimate judgments — a recognition that our opponents today may be our coalition partners tomorrow, and that the price of self-government is tolerating the electoral success of those whose views we find wrongheaded or even abhorrent. None of this is intuitive. It must be taught, modeled, and reinforced. 

Fifth, university leaders must model institutional courage. For decades, administrators have been profiled in cowardice, surrendering to every demand from activist groups while treating the concerns of conservative students, parents, and donors with contempt. Every capitulation has purchased not peace but further demands. The result is an administrative class paralyzed by fear, unable to defend the university’s core mission because they no longer believe in it—or never did. Reform requires presidents and provosts willing to say no, to explain that universities serve purposes larger than the grievances of the moment, and to accept that principled leadership will sometimes make them unpopular with vocal factions of their community. This means defending faculty whose research offends progressive – or conservative -- sensibilities. It means refusing to turn university statements into litmus tests of political loyalty. 

Sixth, universities must confront student groups that have crossed the line from advocacy to intimidation, from protest to complicity with violence. Too many campuses host organizations that openly celebrate terrorists, justify violence against civilians, and employ tactics designed not to persuade but to coerce. These are not exercises of free speech our law or the academic mission do or ought to tolerate. This is the uncomfortable stuff of line-drawing, unfortunately, because radical views must be tolerated until they must not. It is a “view” that certain political or national origin groups should be made to feel unwelcome. But fostering a culture that acts on that view is also expression, yet one that the university cannot tolerate. It certainly cannot tolerate students who barricade buildings, threaten faculty, or create environments where disfavored groups reasonably fear for their physical safety. Discipline students who vandalize, who physically block access, who threaten violence. Make clear that the tolerance essential to university life has limits, and that those limits are violated when protest becomes coercion.

When campuses have been in the spotlight in years past – for disruptions, corruption, and other failings – leaders have resorted to platitudes, which no longer suffice. There has to be a mission-driven effort to get higher education out of its current tailspin. Therapeutic language about “healing” and “coming together” falls flat. Tighter speech codes, with more granular language policing, may be tempting, but it is a dead end. There is a better model: a mission-driven program of education geared towards building good citizens, well-rounded and virtuous, free to raise all manner of arguments for the sake of heaven, but fully capable of understanding just what a betrayal campus violence represents. 

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.