The chairman of the University of Michigan’s faculty senate blasted Charlie Kirk in a faculty-wide email on Tuesday, claiming Kirk was “no friend of academic freedom” and that his “demagoguery has endangered a great many people.”
Derek Peterson, who also serves as a professor of history and African studies, noted that 20 scholars at the university are included on Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist, which describes itself as a database of “college professors who discriminate against conservative students.”
“In life, Kirk was no friend of academic freedom,” Peterson wrote. “Twenty members of the faculty are included on his ‘Professor Watchlist,’ which targets faculty who (in his partisan definition) ‘promote anti-American values.’ His demagoguery has endangered a great many people.”
Even so, Peterson continued, “his death must cause all of us sorrow.” The email explained that “violence has no place on a university campus” because it is the “enemy of civil discourse.”
The Washington Free Beacon asked Peterson whether there was a tension between his condemnation of the murder and his insistence that Kirk had “endangered” people—an idea that could be seen as justifying violence. Peterson did not answer the question, but reiterated his criticism of the slain political activist.
“Thirty members of the Michigan faculty are on the Professor Watchlist,” he told the Free Beacon, 10 more than the number he had cited in his message to faculty. “Many of them are Black. Being included on the late Mr. Kirk’s site brought a flood of internet-born harassment, threats, and intimidation upon them. In life Charlie Kirk may well have been a friendly and congenial person. But his political strategies coarsened public discourse, encouraged name-calling, and made it possible for ill-intentioned people to find and intimidate well-meaning folks whose views diverged from their own.”
Peterson’s email comes as educators across the country have glorified Kirk’s murder and suggested it was justified, in some cases likening him to a Nazi.
“The aspiring Goebbels was interrupted by a bullet to the neck which quickly cured him of [high-velocity lead deficiency], and shortly thereafter he became a good Nazi,” Patrick Freivald, a physics and robotics teacher in New York City, posted on Facebook. “Good riddance to bad garbage.”
At East Tennessee State University, a professor allegedly wrote: “This isn’t a tragedy. It’s a victory.”
The notion that Kirk was a bigot appears to have been a key motive for his suspected assassin, Tyler Robinson, who told his roommate that he had “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred.”
“Some hate can’t be negotiated out,” Robinson wrote in a text message obtained by investigators. He was charged on Tuesday with aggravated murder, and Utah is seeking the death penalty.
For free speech advocates who have spent years combating campus censorship, Kirk’s death underscores the danger of rhetoric that conflates words with violence.
“Accept the premise that rhetoric is a physical attack and you hand extremists a moral permission slip to answer speech with force,” Greg Lukianoff, the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wrote in the Free Press. “We need to bury this trope.”
