One year ago this week, on Sept.10, Charlie Kirk was killed on a college campus in the middle of a debate.
He was 31 years old.He was sitting under a tent at Utah Valley University in front of roughly 3,000 people, taking a question from a student who disagreed with him, and he was shot in the middle of his answer.I have thought about that scene for a year, and the detail that still bothers me is the tent.
Charlie had to bring his own stage, his own microphone and his own security to hold an open debate on an American campus.Every campus in this country has a hall built for that purpose.
The room was ours.So was the job.Charlie and I sat down together at Southeastern University in 2022.
No stage, no cameras, no audience.We talked about two things that turned out to be the same thing: how to fix American higher education, and where the next generation of leaders was going to come from.
He wanted to know whether institutions like mine were still forming leaders or had settled for processing students.That was always his real test of a school, and most were failing it long before a gunman showed up in Orem, Utah.ERIKA KIRK URGES CONSERVATIVE STUDENTS NOT TO BACK DOWN IN FIRST SCHOOL YEAR SINCE CHARLIE'S ASSASSINATIONThe temptation on an anniversary like this is to relitigate the killing and the ugliness that followed.
I want to resist that.The harder question belongs to those of us who run universities: why had a young man with a folding table and a microphone become the most visible defender of open debate in American higher education? He did not take that ground from us.
We vacated it.Charlie Kirk speaks at Utah Valley University on Sept.10, 2025, in Orem, Utah.
Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was speaking at his "American Comeback Tour" when he was shot in the neck and killed.(Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images)The American university was built to be a place of friction.
The premise of a liberal arts education is that truth survives contact ...