I’m a university president. Our profession should finish what Charlie Kirk started
One year ago this week, on Sept. 10, Charlie Kirk was killed on a college campus in the middle of a debate. He was 31 years old. He was sitting under a tent at Utah Valley University in front of roughly 3,000 people, taking a question from a student who disagreed with him, and he was shot in the middle of his answer.
I have thought about that scene for a year, and the detail that still bothers me is the tent. Charlie had to bring his own stage, his own microphone and his own security to hold an open debate on an American campus. Every campus in this country has a hall built for that purpose. The room was ours. So was the job.
Charlie and I sat down together at Southeastern University in 2022. No stage, no cameras, no audience. We talked about two things that turned out to be the same thing: how to fix American higher education, and where the next generation of leaders was going to come from. He wanted to know whether institutions like mine were still forming leaders or had settled for processing students. That was always his real test of a school, and most were failing it long before a gunman showed up in Orem, Utah.
The temptation on an anniversary like this is to relitigate the killing and the ugliness that followed. I want to resist that. The harder question belongs to those of us who run universities: why had a young man with a folding table and a microphone become the most visible defender of open debate in American higher education? He did not take that ground from us. We vacated it.
The American university was built to be a place of friction. The premise of a liberal arts education is that truth survives contact with its critics, and that a student learns to think only by defending what he believes in front of someone who does not share it.
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Over the last two decades, we traded that premise for a different one. We built speech codes, bias reporting systems and whole departments designed to keep students from encountering ideas that unsettle them. We taught a generation that disagreement is a form of injury, then acted surprised when they began treating a speaker as a threat. Employers have been telling us the result for years: graduates who are credentialed, capable and unable to withstand being told they are wrong.
Consider what students themselves say. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression surveyed 68,510 students at 257 colleges in the first half of 2025. Thirty-six percent said shouting down a campus speaker is sometimes or always acceptable. Fifteen percent said the same about using violence to stop a speech. That survey closed three months before Charlie was killed. I am not going to claim a poll explains a murder. But it does describe a climate and the people who built that climate work in buildings like mine.
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At Southeastern University, we are unapologetically Christian, and our convictions are not subtle. That is precisely why we are not afraid of the room. In the last year alone, we have hosted Karoline Leavitt, the former White House press secretary, and Pastor Lucas Miles, senior director of TPUSA Faith, the ministry arm of the organization Charlie built. Our students did not need to be shielded from any of them. They showed up, they asked hard questions and they left sharper than they arrived.
That is the aim here, and I will say it plainly. We are not trying to graduate students who admire Charlie Kirk. We are trying to raise up a generation of them, young leaders who can walk into a hostile room, make the case on the merits and change somebody's mind. A university that has settled its first principles can afford that argument. The reflex to cancel a speaker is almost never really about the speaker. It is a confession that the institution is no longer sure what it believes.
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University presidents who want to honor Charlie Kirk this week have a more demanding option than a statement. Adopt a real free expression policy, then defend it the first time it costs you a donor. Stop disinviting speakers the moment a petition circulates. Require students to argue positions they reject, and grade them on how well they do it.
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Charlie Kirk did not die in a war zone. He died on a college campus, in the middle of the day, holding a microphone and taking a question. That is supposed to be the safest thing that happens in American life. Making it that way again is our job.
He should not have needed the tent. The room was ours. It is time we started using it for what it was built for.