On the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, one of the most horrific tragedies in our nation’s history, evil showed its ugly face yet again. An assassin’s bullet needlessly took the life of husband, father, and political activist Charlie Kirk. His supposed offense? Debating. This senseless act of murder was committed on the grounds of an institution that should be a beacon of free thought and expression: a college campus.
I want to say this is unexpected or that political violence on campus is unlikely, but I’ve been defending the rights of students and faculty at public universities for too long to say that this is a total surprise. As director of Alliance Defending Freedom’s Center for Academic Freedom, I’ve seen everything from mobs on campuses blocking and verbally abusing a pro-life speaker to our own CEO being shouted out of a bipartisan presentation at Yale Law School. The unspeakable horror we witnessed on Sept. 10 was a predictable destination of the trajectory of escalating violence on our college campuses.
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When I watched everything unfold, one specific instance came to my mind. In 2020, students at the State University of New York at Binghamton invited renowned economist and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Arthur Laffer to speak on campus. Co-hosted by Young America’s Foundation and the College Republicans club, Laffer was set to present an extracurricular discussion titled “Trump, Tariffs, and Trade Wars.”
An economist speaking about tariffs and trade wars is about as innocuously wonky as it gets. But four days before the event was set to take place, College Republicans hosted a table where they handed out hot chocolate and flyers promoting the event. Members of the campus College Progressive group incited about 200 students to “disrupt this disgusting space.” When they arrived, they confiscated and destroyed flyers, broke down the table, hurled obscenity-laced insults, and physically assaulted one College Republicans member.
On the day of the event, protesters shouted down Laffer on a megaphone for nearly two minutes before he was escorted off campus. He didn’t even have a chance to speak.
The kicker is that school administrators and police knew about the threat and did virtually nothing about it. The College Progressives and a local antifa group advertised that they were going to disrupt the event, yet university police allowed masked protesters to flood the venue and do what they said they would do. Rather than try to stop the disruption and allow the event to continue, university officials escorted Laffer from the venue. To add insult to injury, campus police blamed the conservative student group for hosting the event, as if college campuses are supposed to be no-speech zones.
The increased violence in response to free speech on college campuses shows us the threefold problem infecting schools across the nation.
First, there is an alarming lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty and administration in higher education. In one study, the liberal-to-conservative ratio of faculty in American universities increased from 2:1 in 1989 to 5:1 in 2017. A 2022 report from the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement confirmed similar results, with 65.5% of professors estimated as “solidly liberal” and only 13.2% “conservative.” In 2023, a Harvard study showed that its faculty displayed a 26:1 ratio. Uniformity of thought breeds intolerance of disagreement. Counterfeit unanimity feeds the delusion that only evil people could disagree with a certain viewpoint.
Second, there is a widespread belief throughout higher education that certain speech is equivalent to violence. According to this ideology (springing from critical theory), if speech you disagree with is comparable to violence, then it is acceptable to use violence to oppose such speech.
Finally, university officials routinely allow progressive students and faculty to violently disrupt conservative speakers and events. This refusal to fairly enforce the laws further encourages and emboldens future violence against such speakers.
The solutions are straightforward. Hiring a diverse faculty would show students that noble people can be found throughout the political spectrum in good faith. Hosting debates on important topics of the day makes clear that speech is not equivalent to violence. And, importantly, enforcing the university’s laws and policies uniformly and fairly, regardless of the person’s political or ideological views, sends the message that students and faculty who shout down or violently interrupt speakers and speaking events will not be tolerated. If universities adopt these policies of greater diversity and accountability, they will again become a marketplace of ideas, rather than an assembly line for one type of thought.
We can only hope that Charlie Kirk’s needless murder will be the beginning of the end of violent speech suppression on campus.
Tyson Langhofer is senior counsel and director of the Center for Academic Freedom with Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal).