We’re now into our third week on campus. There are few things I enjoy more than teaching our first-year students (unless it’s teaching our upper college students). Gresh minds, open hearts, expectant folks, freed from the constraints of the K-12 training environment, ready to think big thoughts and ask the big questions.
Higher Education in this country has gone through major transitions – some historical (the idea that college should be at least available to most people) and some more recent (AI; the Pandemic and all its trials).
But the beating heart of “higher ed” is the same — that almost mystical quest for truth, new ideas, new balances and all the rest. Learning, challenging, pulling apart things to see how they work – or coming up with new ideas about how they could work.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk, 31 and the father of two small children, struck at the very soul of this incredibly important tradition.
The convention is a simple one, really: When thought is constrained; fenced in, forced into a template where “truth” is static, societies wither. Thought has to be constantly moving, new ideas and positions must meet consideration, all ideas have their place in the array – and the society that does this moves forward.
When we edit what students are exposed to, we dry up our most important resource – the ability to carefully consider, accept or reject, based on critical analysis. It is a feature unique to democratic societies – that all ideas get a chance to be heard, that there is and should be no canon of truth that remains unchallenged or untested.
Charlie Kirk was, in his sadly short life, a major proponent of this philosophy. And he went beyond chatting, writing, posting and podcasting about it – he took his ideas into the center of the learning process.
He took them to school.
Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, speaks during a Unite and Win rally held by Turning Point Action at the Arizona Financial Theatre on Aug. 14, 2022, in Phoenix.
When Kirk was murdered, he was peacefully sitting with a crew of college kids, arguing. Debating. Civilly. Peacefully. He did not make a habit of addressing himself to narrow people whose minds were already made up, but called together folks who opposed him, who challenged his views, and confronted them, reasoned with them, engaged them.
That was his style, yes – but it’s a style that goes back to the Agora of ancient Athens … to the Academy, from which the modern community of scholars takes its name and its traditions. Kirk was no saint – in the rough and bruising world of American politics, saints are rare. He connected with students because of his unvarnished, even raw, energy. He brought his case to the next generation. They were his element.
He was not surrounded by security or cops or bodyguards. There was no high-level scrutiny of the folks who dropped by to hear him talk. The crowd was occasionally loud – rowdy, even – but that was part of the appeal. Debate about important things should be loud; should be rowdy. His electric tagline was “prove me wrong!”
When he was murdered, it was said to be from a building at least 150 yards away.
In a few days, we’ll celebrate Constitution Day on our campus – a day when my first-year students organize and manage a festival to remind everyone of the basic freedoms assembled under that somewhat peculiar document. “Peculiar” in the Victorian sense that there is nothing else quite like anywhere.
Among the freedoms and liberties detailed in the first 10amendments is “freedom of speech,” enshrining in the founding the idea that the society that speaks freely shares new ideas, fresh energy and finds new and different paths forward. Every year, we throw a party for these ideas, and it is no coincidence that we do this on a college campus.
That Kirk was gunned down in cold blood on the sacred turf of an American University, in conversation with students who could have been my own students, strikes at the heart and vitals of what we’re about. As institutions of higher education, and as a country.
R. Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College in Lakeland. He is also a columnist for The Ledger and political consultant and on-air commentator for WLKF Radio.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Charlie Kirk’s murder was an attack on civil dialogue | Commentary