Fork in the quad
Celebrations of Charlie Kirk's assassination, and the purges they have incited, mean The Academy must reform itself before it is too late
Do you have a right to be offensive? Provocative? Radical? That’s the question we are now debating in America in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and our answer might decide whether we stay together or break apart.
The murder of Kirk – for whom radical provocation was tactically essential - may be a watershed moment, for what it provoked in the rest of us, visible to all of us.
Higher education and entertainment are the industries catching the first aftershocks of the assassination’s earthquake, as those who took to their keyboards to celebrate Kirk’s death or stomp on his casket with vitriol find themselves facing the posse. A dozen or so professors or administrators at universities at schools as prominent as Clemson and Ole Miss and as obscure as Austin Peay are losing their jobs for social media posts they probably did not contemplate for long.
One of America’s most famous comics, Jimmy Kimmel, briefly lost his show after a callous quip, though his was likely drafted with the advice of lawyers aiming to avoid such a fate. Faltering economics for his show may have been a bigger factor, but Kimmel will always blame the joke.
Almost every paycheck I have ever earned was for what I call First Amendment Activity. I’m a political ad-maker who started out in journalism. I am a speaker at corporate board meetings and I pontificate for CNN. I would even categorize my youthful work as an umpire and referee as First Amendment Activity – and if you do not believe officiating girls’ basketball is controversial and dangerous, I dare you to go back in the mountains at Wartburg, Tennessee and try it.
As a speech absolutist, I do not seek speech-based punishments for anyone, regardless of whether I disagree with the content, or even if I find it despicable. But can we all agree that if any meaningful number of people relish an assassination we have major problems as a nation? Is it not proof Hollywood and academia have a monopoly mentality that must be busted?
If you work in a place – be it the ABC network or the Ole Miss faculty – where you are comfortable knowing your co-workers will smash the like button when you mock the death of a conservative leader, then you, ABC and Ole Miss all have a problem.
Colleges, like newspapers, TV networks, movie studios, publishing houses, and religious denominational headquarters, have become petri dishes for one, and only one, strain of American thought and in that homogenous environment, tolerance for the most radioactive quackery of that ideology becomes normalized.
We act surprised we have professors who think political assassination is a societal good. We should be surprised taxpayers tolerated the lack of ideological diversity on public university faculties that nurtured the rot.
Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans on college faculties by a ratio of 8.5:1 according to a 2020 survey. When college professors make political donations, the cash flows to Democrats more than Republicans by a 95:1 ratio. There are entire academic departments at many major universities without a single registered Republican professor. At elite universities, the disparities are worse. The Buckley Institute’s Report on Faculty Political Diversity At Yale found Democrat professors there outnumbered Republican educators by a ratio of 28 to 1.
In the recent election, a survey by Inside Higher Ed found faculty picked Kamala Harris over Trump 78% to 8%. The young Americans who have been in their lecture halls lately skew a lot less leftward. The most dynamic sector of the electorate between 2020 and 2024 was younger voters, with young men swinging from Joe Biden in 2020 to Donald Trump in 2024 by 16 points and younger women moving that way by 5 points.
Ideological indoctrination by professors and administrators is not my worry; if they are trying - and I think few are, they are failing. But the intolerance that their groupthink fuels threatens our civil society.
Polling data about elections should get less attention these days than surveys about our national conscience. YouGov’s first poll after the Kirk assassination shows 24% of respondents who call themselves “very liberal” and 10% of those who call themselves “somewhat liberal” say it is acceptable to be happy about the death of a political opponent. Too much.
A good example of this sentiment came from the now-suspended law professor at Southern University, who posted: “I will 1000% wish death on people like him. He is the epitome of evil, and I have no compassion, not even a minute ounce of it for people like him who go around spewing hate the way he does.”
Larger shares of liberals in the YouGov poll say political violence is sometimes justified. There are nuts on all sides, but the current hot corner of this problem is on the left, and it descends from what campus culture has become.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found one-third of college students believe some level of violence is acceptable to shut down a campus speech and a majority believed it could be acceptable to block other students from attending a campus speech. That data is a massive survey of 68,000 collegians. It tells us not just about the kids, but about the adults curating their collegiate climate.
The faculty lounge now faces a fork in the quad.
One path is the sword. Forever, hundreds of universities in red states have been ignored by the conservative policymakers who fund them. Those days are over. The purges of the assassin’s cheerleaders are just the beginning. The raids will be rabid and ragged.
The other path to avoid this bad solution to a real problem is the lamp. Professors who love learning more than left-wing illiberalism must stand up to their colleagues who do not. The inventors of diversity dicta need to come up with a new one, cull their own ranks, and intentionally incentivize and elevate a half generation of conservative professors and scholars who will balance out the academy and make free-wheeling, mutually-respectful and tolerant debate the brand of higher education again.
In Case You Missed It: Last week I got riled up about the derision of “thoughts and prayers.” You might enjoy SENDING PRAYERS AND CASSEROLES if you missed it. There was only one column last week - first time that’s happened.
Bring That Junk Back: A promoted social media video by Cracker Barrel last week let us know the company is not just reinstating its logo, it’s undoing the upscale remodel it had previously unveiled. In UNDOING AUTHENTICITY a few weeks ago I warned about the danger of replacing the customer’s nostalgia with her aspiration. Seems to have been prescient.
The Archive: All the columns are here at The What For website. Check it out and see if your favorites are everyone else’s.
Editor’s Note: This piece was amended to note Jimmy Kimmel only briefly lost his show, once he was reinstated.
I think your take on the academy is spot on, but your piece seems to suggest this is a one-sided problem. Given the celebrations and jokes when Paul Pelosi was attacked (as just one example), that's disingenuous at best. The larger problem is that both sides have dehumanized people who aren't like them. The academy does it, the left does it, the christian nationalists do it, evangelicals do it. And, of course, the algorithms feeding us our "news" willfully exacerbates that dehumanization (helped by a couple of foreign intelligence agencies who want nothing more than for us to hate each other). I've got real problems with what has happened to academe, but it's a symptom of a much larger problem.