At Amherst College, students cheered, professors argued that mourning Kirk was racist, and conservatives faced harassment.
F or many conservative students at Amherst College, Charlie Kirk‘s assassination was the most radicalizing event of our lifetimes. Not just because of the horror of the assassination itself but because we witnessed our peers celebrate his murder and discourage efforts to mourn his death, as well as professors seemingly justify his assassination.
As soon as the news broke, students began expressing their joy on the popular app Fizz, the anonymous social media app solely for students (it requires a college email to post).
Anti-Kirk posts received as many as 700 upvotes — roughly 40 percent of the student body. Since only 950 students (half the student body) likely use the app, the number of students happy with Kirk’s assassination could be much higher than what upvotes indicate.
“It was deeply alarming to see that a vast majority of my peers celebrated the assassination of a political figure who had dedicated his life to challenging people’s views through open dialogue,” Amherst College Conservatives (ACC) treasurer Marvin Oprean said. (I am the co-founder and co-president of the club.) “As an international student from Romania — a country that emerged from communism only 35 years ago — the expectation I had of American academia as a place of intellectual diversity and tolerance has been profoundly shaken.” After reading student posts from Fizz, can you blame him?
The day after Kirk’s assassination, the president of Amherst sent an email to all students, faculty, and staff, urging students to delete the Fizz app and instead engage in campus events to help strengthen our community. If anti-Kirk sentiment had stayed anonymous and digital, it would still be horrendous but might at least be quarantined away from the real world. Unfortunately, that quarantine has not held.
Grant Decker, ACC co-founder and co-president, reported that nearly every flyer advertising the ACC’s first meeting of the school year was ripped down.
During the meeting, Decker shared that many members saw students high-fiving, hugging, and joyous when the news broke. “I walked by a girl outside of class visibly excited, jumping up and down and clapping after the news broke,” club member Michael Quartermain said. “It was disgusting and disheartening to see.”
One might expect faculty, at least, to act more responsibly than students. But for many conservative students, the most concerning responses to Kirk’s murder came from faculty members. According to an account from a student who wished to remain anonymous, a professor in the Black Studies department allegedly led a class discussion on Kirk’s assassination in which students expressed that mourning Kirk’s death was inappropriate given his legacy of bigotry.
The class allegedly discussed how the attention to his death compared with other events was evidence of America’s hyper-fixation on white people and culture, and that Amherst’s response reflected double standards at predominantly white institutions. One student expressed feeling “relieved” after Kirk’s assassination. The professor allowed all comments to stand without correction and chimed in, characterizing Kirk as a deeply prejudiced individual who had it coming given the hate he spread on a mainstream level.
According to another anonymous student account, an economics professor, who describes her philosophy as shaped by “Critical Race Theory, Marxism, and Black Radical Tradition,” allegedly described Kirk as a racist, homophobic, hateful, violent, and dangerous individual during her class. She expressed that to mourn Kirk’s assassination would whitewash the violent impact he had on the country. Moreover, she voiced her personal anger with Amherst College and with Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey for complying with federal mandates to lower the flag to half-staff, and encouraged students to protest elected officials who supported lowering the flag.
An anonymous student in one of these classes told me:
I get that professors have academic freedom, but are professors allowed to hold conversations where students debate whether conservatives should be murdered for their beliefs? I already know most students here think the country would be a better place if I didn’t exist, but debates over my right to life were never something I thought I would hear in an Amherst classroom. For the first time, I felt scared for my life.
When I asked if I could quote this student on the record, the student said, “Are you joking? Professor [not given by the author] will fail me and do everything they can to ruin my life. Absolutely not.”
When I emailed both professors giving them the opportunity to confirm or clarify what took place in their classroom, both declined to comment. Furthermore, following my email to her, the economics professor scolded the unknown student who “reported” what she said beyond the classroom, and she passed out a flyer of community practices, telling students that her remarks were to remain in the classroom.
After receiving a campus-wide backlash and a death threat last semester in response to publishing an article in the Amherst College newspaper critical of DEI, I was not surprised by Amherst’s reaction. Amherst students have vocalized their violence, hate, and threats toward Republicans on campus for a long time. Kirk’s assassination was nothing but confirmation that there is a significant population at Amherst College who believe we should be killed for our politics, and would celebrate if it happened.
Reactions by professors and students at supposed elite institutions such as Amherst College have sent an obvious signal to conservative students: the belief that we should be murdered for our political beliefs is no longer fringe. When it’s considered more offensive to misgender someone than to cheer the murder of a peaceful conservative public figure, it’s clear the ideals of open debate and intellectual discourse are long gone. Many in academia have complained about the decline in our politics, which they attribute to Donald Trump. Well it’s time for them to take a long, hard look at its own role in that erosion.