[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

A day before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the 2026 Free Speech Rankings, a FIRE survey of 68,000 college students at 257 universities, was released and it revealed that 1 in 3 students believed that using violence to stop a speaker they agreed with on campus was acceptable.

2% or 1,360 students believed that violence to stop speech they opposed was “always acceptable”. 13% found it “sometimes acceptable” so that over 10,000 students find violence against campus speakers acceptable some of the time. When combined with the 19% who say violence is rarely, but sometimes, acceptable, that’s over 23,000 college students who were willing to answer that using violence against speakers they disliked was a valid option.

Projecting and generalizing this large sample size to the much larger number of 18 million of college students across the country would translate into support for violently shutting down campus speakers by between 2.7 million and 6.1 million college students.

Another 54% or more than half, support blocking students from attending campus speeches they oppose, and 71% back shouting down speakers.

A majority of college students not only oppose free speech, but support intervening to stop it.

What kind of views do they support shutting down by any means necessary? 74% believe speakers who view transgenderism as a mental illness should 60% believe in blocking abortion opponents. 76% believe in banning anyone who says BLM is a hate group.

Charlie Kirk believed all of these things and was willing to come to campus and say it, challenging students to come and debate him, until the debate was ended finally and fatally.

He’s dead because 1 in 3 students support using violence to silence opposing speakers.

His killing though was not some aberration. It was not, no matter how much the media will try to portray it, the equivalent of John Hinckley shooting Reagan. One killing anywhere can be an aberration but generations of violence incubated by professors and deans on campus, some of whom openly admire terrorists and urge students to imitate them, is not random chance.

It’s a culture of terrorism that is now approaching its murderous apex.

A generation before Kirk’s murder, conservative speakers were already learning to avoid campuses. When David Horowitz toured college campuses, he faced harassment, threats, and attacks, forcing him to invest in expensive security. By the time a new generation of speakers like Ben Shapiro were coming to campuses, security expenses had skyrocketed and colleges routinely used the threat of violence by their own students to shut down conservative events.

The media attacked Horowitz, Kirk and other campus speakers as ‘provocateurs’ as if they were the ones bringing the violence to campus, rather than exposing the readiness of all too many college students to turn to violence in order to stop them from being heard by other students.

Ignoring this state of affairs led to a wave of assaults against faculty, not only conservatives, but liberals who dissented in some way from political dogma. And deans stood by and said nothing as college campuses became not only a political monoculture, but a radicalized one where professors were prevented from teaching their classes if they were targeted by leftists.

The next stage of campus radicalization were the Hamas encampments after Oct 7.

Now the assassination of Charlie Kirk is the next stage as campuses have grimly followed the course that they began during the counterculture movement a few generations ago as organizing centers, staging grounds and finally front lines in the leftist war on America.

Some have said that President Trump has been too hard on campuses like Harvard, Columbia and UCLA after the Hamas encampments. The sad truth is that he hasn’t been hard enough.

College campuses have become terrorist training camps and should be treated like them.

During the Civil Rights movement, certain parts of the country were treated as dangerous hateful places whose authorities were suspect and which required extensive monitoring. Unfortunately the parts of the country, college campuses, that needed that treatment, didn’t get it, resulting in a wave of violence, extremism and domestic terrorism that has become a multigenerational legacy as that generation of radicals has taught generations more.

After Charlie Kirk’s murder, it must end.

Colleges must be ‘deradicalized’ the way that Germany was ‘denazified’. There can be no more room for faculty or students who preach violence. And the militant defenses of even foreign nationals who rallied for Islamic terrorists on college campuses by universities, by the media and by top Democrats show how terrorism goes from the top down through the movement.

American taxpayers remain the primary funders of the college system. Mostly involuntarily. They’re funding a system that has failed, by every objective metric, at its stated goal of education, but succeeded brilliantly at its actual goal of radicalization and indoctrination.

The radicals who poisoned every soft science moved on to fatally taint any cultural field and have lately been rampaging through the sciences. The assaults on conservative speakers, beginning with David Horowitz, and climaxing in Charlie Kirk’s murder, show that this is not just politics, it’s terrorism and unless we deal with the campus, we will be dealing with a civil war.

The 2026 Free Speech Rankings show that it may already be too late for American academia.

But these may be the final years in which something may be salvaged from the cultural wreck before we really have to start treating Ivy League campuses like Jihadi camps in Afghanistan.

The radicals in control of college campuses have escalated from targeted harassment to terrorist encampments to murder. And worst of all, the majority of college students have been indoctrinated into supporting these crimes. If that is what the multi-trillion dollar edifice of higher education gets us, then as a country we may be better off without it.

In 1910, there were only 332,000 college students in the whole country. By 1931 there were a million, by the 1950s there were 2.5 million, by 1970 there were 8.5 million, by 1984 there were 12.5 million and we now approach 20 million. The question is are we better off for it?

The college boom was driven by the conviction that the bright shiny future required a top-ranked class of experts who could figure out everything for us. But instead college has become an elite overproduction factory churning out mediocre paper fillers even as the science and tech talent is increasingly coming from Asia.

Higher education is bad enough as a great ripoff that has saddled a generation of parents and children with endless debt, but worst of all, it’s become a training ground for tomorrow’s terrorists. Instead of treating colleges as the bright promise of tomorrow, treat them like the terrorist training camps they’ve become. End the violence and hold them accountable.