The political powerhouse that Charlie Kirk built reached conservative college students on campuses all over the country. So when Mr. Kirk was shot and killed Wednesday at Utah Valley University, national attention turned, as it often has in tumultuous times, to the American university.
Colleges have often been the setting for America’s most divisive and memorable cultural flashpoints, over Communism and racism, the Vietnam War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Throughout, they have also been the trustees of American innovation and economic promise.
But after Mr. Kirk started Turning Point USA in 2012, at age 18, to spotlight what he saw as leftism running amok on college campuses, that began to change. Mr. Kirk’s rising influence corresponded with a sharp drop in the confidence that Americans have in their universities.
The idea that liberal ideas dominate college campuses led to the modern conservative movement, after a then-unknown William F. Buckley Jr. chronicled what he described as the anti-Christian and pro-collectivism views of the Yale faculty, in the 1951 book “God and Man at Yale.”
After Mr. Kirk founded Turning Point USA, the broader political winds began changing against colleges. The group, which hosted campus events and created a national network of young Republicans, even funding conservative student government candidates, pushed the idea that colleges were becoming too liberal. The idea would eventually gain traction beyond Republicans.
Books like “The Coddling of the American Mind,” which described Generation Z as quick to censor political opponents, and which criticized university administrators for encouraging such behavior, was published in 2018 and became a best seller. Moderate, not just conservative, professors began forming groups to denounce liberal groupthink.
After the Hamas attack on Israel inflamed campus politics in 2023, Republican lawmakers and powerful donors took a keener interest in reforming what they viewed as liberal hotbeds. Many college presidents, including those of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, were toppled after facing pressure from Republicans.
When the second Trump administration took office in January, universities no longer enjoyed the bipartisan support they had in recent history. President Trump unleashed a furious attack that included major funding threats to top schools, using the lever of research money to try to force institutions to adopt his preferred policies, including dismantling diversity programs.
“We were seeing this shift in American higher education even before this administration,” said Eddie R. Cole, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies higher education. He described Mr. Trump as “an amplifier” who has “taken the talking points that were really strong at the state level and projected them to the federal level.”
College campuses have always been a site where cultural fissures play out, and where society often hashes out those divides. In the colonial era, colleges served as centers for debate on topics like the morality of enslavement and British taxation, Dr. Cole said.
“The United States is built on ideas, and higher education is the sector of society most concerned with ideas,” Dr. Cole said. “So there’s a connection that’s older than the United States itself.”
If the conservative movement in the 1950s needed a man like Mr. Buckley, an Ivy-trained intellectual, the man for the social media era was Charlie Kirk, a college dropout and a verbal brawler.
Mr. Kirk’s critics have denounced him for seeking to bring into the mainstream racist and antisemitic ideas, including the notion of “replacement theory,” which suggests that Jews are trying to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants.
Critics also say Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist, a searchable database of professors accused of purveying “leftist propaganda,” terrified those it singled out.
“Charlie Kirk literally wrote the book titled ‘Campus Battlefield,’” said Isaac Kamola, a director at the American Association of University Professors, a faculty rights group. “He treated higher education as a war zone, with faculty and students who did not share his preferred ideology as an enemy to be defeated.”
Dr. Kamola called the watch list “the opening salvo in a broader right-wing attack on higher education.”
He also denounced Mr. Kirk’s killing as “terrifying” and said it “undermines what higher education should be about, namely the ability to teach and learn, debate and disagree, without fear of intimidation or violence.”
For his supporters, Mr. Kirk began a much-needed transformation in American higher education, making it more welcoming to people with conservative views and returning it to the values of vigorous debate universities professed to care so much about.
Emily Sturge, a recent University of Florida graduate, said attending Turning Point USA events as a student engaged her in politics and connected her with Campus Reform, the conservative news site she now works for.
“We’ve seen our campuses turn into places where many conservative students feel silenced in the classroom,” Ms. Sturge said. “That’s why Charlie Kirk was such an outlet for so many conservative students. He provided them with that space, that voice, that platform to live authentically to their values.”
When he was shot on Wednesday at Utah Valley, Mr. Kirk was doing his primary work, the work that propelled him to stardom in conservative media. He was on a tour of college campuses, debating students on a freewheeling range of questions.
The campus looks nothing like the universities that Republicans attack. Utah Valley, ensconced in a deep red state, is a regional university with open admissions and a large student body.
Even so, some Republicans highlighted that the shooting occurred at a college to urge institutions to embrace viewpoint diversity, the idea that universities should encourage a wide array of political perspectives.
“In memory of Charlie, I urge every major American university, especially the Ivy League and New England’s small liberal arts colleges, to invite conservative speakers to their campuses and to welcome them,” Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s press secretary, wrote on social media.
“Academia cannot be a no go zone for conservatives. Charlie would welcome this. It will help heal the country if the liberal left that dominates colleges actively reaches out and peacefully welcomes the right,” he added.
Many universities were already doing so even before Mr. Trump took office. Public universities in red states have set up centers devoted to conservative thought. And top schools have touted efforts to invite more viewpoints. In fact, Mr. Kirk was set to debate a left-wing online personality later this month at Dartmouth — a small liberal arts college in New England.
And while conservative speakers like Mr. Kirk have sometimes faced protests when they show up on campus, more often they come without incident, and rarely meet violence.
At Utah Valley, many students had signed a petition asking that Mr. Kirk not be allowed to speak on campus. But the university, as universities usually do, held firm and let him come, arguing that a critical part of its role in society was to be the setting for difficult debates, “where ideas — popular or controversial — can be exchanged freely, energetically, and civilly.”
Vimal Patel writes about higher education for The Times with a focus on speech and campus culture.
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