Don Moynihan, a tenured public policy professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who wrote a Substack article about this conservative phenomenon, told Inside Higher Ed that “using higher education as a scapegoat for Kirk’s tragic assassination doesn’t fit the facts of the situation.” He noted Kirk had been allowed on campuses.
“Kirk built his career and his political movement on campus,” Moynihan said. “He died talking to thousands of students at a campus-organized event. While he might have been critical of many members of campus, he was still able to find a space at universities to make that criticism. So for me this discredits the notion that somehow universities are culpable in his murder.”
“I do worry that his assassination will be used to justify the pre-existing culture war upon higher education at both the state government level and at the national level through the federal government,” he added.
“It seems like universities are being pressured to target faculty for those comments [about Kirk], to punish them,” he said. “Staff are also being caught up in this wave of cancellations. And it does feel like an important time for universities to stand up for values of free expression and to illustrate the same tolerance that they did when they invited dissenting voices onto campus.”
