Texas State University fired a professor Wednesday after he was accused of inciting violence during a speech at a socialist conference, The Texas Tribune reported.
In a video posted on X, associate professor of history Thomas Alter can be seen giving a speech over Zoom to attendees of the Revolutionary Socialism Conference. “Without organization, how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-driven mad organization in the history of the world—that of the U.S. government,” he said in the clip, which was circulated online by a YouTuber who infiltrated and recorded the event.
Texas State president Kelly Damphousse said in a statement Wednesday that the university reviewed the comments, which he said “amounted to serious professional and personal misconduct.”
“As a result, I have determined that his actions are incompatible with their responsibilities as a faculty member at Texas State University,” he added. “Effective immediately, his employment with Texas State University has been terminated.”
The video clip shared on social media was spliced and cut together. In the full version of his speech, which is posted on YouTube, Alter discusses the various tactics of different socialist groups.
“Another strain of anarchism gaining ground recently is that of insurrectionary anarchism,” Alter said in his speech. “Primarily coming out of those that were involved in the Cop City protest. These groups, individuals have grown rightfully frustrated with symbolic protests that do not disrupt the normal functioning of government and business. They call for more direct action and shutting down the military-industrial complex and preventing ICE from kidnapping members of their communities. Many insurrectionary anarchists are serving jail time, lost jobs and face expulsion from school. They have truly put their bodies on the line. While their actions are laudable, it should be asked, what purpose do they serve? As anarchists, these insurrectionists explicitly reject the formation of a revolutionary party capable of leading the working class to power. Without organization, how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-driven mad organization in the history of the world—that of the U.S. government.”
Alter didn’t respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
He is the second Texas professor to be fired from their post this week. On Tuesday, Texas A&M officials fired Melissa McCoul, a senior lecturer, and removed two faculty members from their administrative roles after a student complained that the material McCoul taught in a summer course violated President Donald Trump’s executive orders.
Right-wing social media accounts have embarked on a widespread name-and-shame campaign to out any college employees who have celebrated or spoken insensitively about Kirk’s death.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | skynesher/E+/Getty Images
Two administrators are now out of a job and a graduate student lost an internship after making comments online that downplayed or celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk, the influential conservative founder of the campus-focused Turning Point USA.
In the 36 hours since Kirk was shot and killed during an event at Utah Valley University, right-wing social media accounts have screenshotted and circulated several social media posts, likes and reposts from college faculty and staff members related to Kirk’s death. In addition to the firings, the campaign to name and shame these individuals has led to death threats, Wired reported.
Late Wednesday, a student affairs administrator at Middle Tennessee State University was fired after posting “insensitive” remarks on Facebook in response to Kirk’s death. “We take great pride in the professionalism of our staff; in my long tenure with this university I’ve never before had to dismiss someone for so carelessly undermining the work and mission of this fine institution,” Middle Tennessee State president Sidney McPhee wrote in a statement Thursday. A university spokesperson confirmed the employee was Laura Sosh-Lightsy, an associate dean of student care and conduct who had worked at the university since 2005.
“Looks like ol’ Charlie spoke his fate into existence. Hate begets hate. ZERO sympathy,” Sosh-Lightsy wrote in a Facebook post that has been circulated widely by right-wing accounts on social media. A university spokesperson did not confirm whether or not that specific post led to her firing but noted that “her termination was related to her insensitive social media posts related to the horrific death of Mr. Kirk.” Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican, called for Sosh-Lightsy’s firing on X, writing that she “should be ashamed of her post.” Sosh-Lightsy did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment.
On Thursday afternoon, University of Mississippi chancellor Glenn Boyce confirmed the firing of an unnamed staff member who he said “re-shared hurtful, insensitive comments on social media regarding the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk.”
Boyce didn’t provide specifics but noted that “these comments run completely counter to our institutional values of civility, fairness and respecting the dignity of each person.”
At Baylor University, officials distanced the university from a graduate student who wrote “this made me giggle” in response to a social media post sharing the news of Kirk’s death.
“We are aware and greatly disappointed by a social media comment from a Baylor graduate student regarding the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk. To make light of the death of a fellow human being is completely inappropriate and completely counter to Baylor’s Christian mission. Baylor strives to be a community in which every individual is treated with respect—in life and in death,” a university statement said.
The graduate student—whose online username includes “coach”—is not a member of the faculty nor a part of the athletics program, the statement clarified. Midway Middle School, where the graduate student was student teaching, also removed him from teaching there, KWTX reported.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is monitoring which universities are censoring employee speech, said Lindsie Rank, director of campus rights advocacy at FIRE. “It may not be moral to speak ill of the dead, but it is protected by the First Amendment so we’re going to be keeping our eyes open for those situations,” she said.
The Florida Board of Governors unanimously approved Donald Landry on Thursday as interim president of the University of Florida, three months after it rejected Santa Ono for the job in a split vote.
Landry, who has a lengthy academic résumé but has never been a college president, will now be among the top-paid campus leaders in the country, with a base salary of $2 million and the potential to earn an additional $500,000 in bonuses. But the one-year contract also includes an unusual caveat: Landry will earn $2 million in severance pay if he is not selected for the permanent job.
Such a guarantee is an anomaly for an interim president, one expert said.
The Interview
Landry’s interview with the Board of Governors Thursday was much less contentious than Ono’s.
The board grilled Ono, who resigned as president of the University of Michigan to pursue the top job at UF, for almost three hours, mostly over his past support of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which he sought to distance himself from ahead of the interview.
But on Thursday, it was clear from the outset that board members liked what they saw in Landry.
Prior to the vote, University of Florida Board of Trustees chair Mori Hosseini ticked off Landry’s accomplishments, noting he is a celebrated physician and academic. Hosseini also highlighted his various roles, such as chair emeritus of the Department of Medicine at Columbia University and president of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, as well as his prior experience on the President’s Council on Bioethics during the George W. Bush administration, among other achievements.
“We are excited to see what UF can accomplish under his leadership,” Hosseini told the board.
The statewide Board of Governors also seemed excited about the candidate, approving his hire after an interview of around 30 minutes, which included more complimentary remarks from members praising Landry for his leadership in the health field and for filing an amicus brief supporting Florida and Texas officials in a Supreme Court case last year. In that brief, Landry argued against content moderation efforts on social media platforms, which he cast as censoring alternative perspectives and “suppressing dissent on a host of scientific questions.”
Paul Renner, a former Republican lawmaker and current gubernatorial candidate, told Landry, “In addition to your remarkable academic record, it strikes me as unique that I don’t know anyone else in academia that’s filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in defense of free speech.”
Renner also asked how Landry would defend free speech at UF.
Landry answered that beyond academic freedom and free speech, there “is a right to teach and a right to learn.” He said he would prevent disruptions to “the teaching functions of the university” by emphasizing time, place and manner restrictions “as significant as necessary but as small as possible” to balance free speech with UF’s mission. Landry also emphasized the importance of inculcating a culture of civility and the need for UF students and faculty to buy in.
At another point in the interview, Landry expressed concerns about “ideological pressure” to “not speak to certain topics,” specifically referring to climate change. He argued that climate activism has suppressed the free discussion of science, which Landry said “is not settled in that area.”
The Contract
One expert noted that several parts of Landry’s contract stand out as unusual—starting with severance pay if he’s denied the permanent job in a year.
“I’ve never seen a guarantee of any type given to an interim,” said Judith Wilde, a research professor at George Mason University who studies presidential searches and contracts.
The salary itself is also quite substantial, especially for an interim president, she said. Ono was set to make around $3 million a year, which Wilde suspects the next permanent president will also get.
“Given the way that Santo Ono was treated in Florida, they may have been fearful that it would be difficult to get anybody to come. So they’ve advertised, in a sense, that they are still willing to give a big salary,” Wilde said. “Whoever steps into that job will probably get at least $3 million.”
Wilde also said that the key duties and responsibilities listed in Landry’s contract are highly prescriptive compared to other contracts, which don’t spell out specifics to the same level of detail. Among other duties, Landry is directed to appoint a permanent provost, fill interim dean positions and other vacant leadership roles, and “accelerate efforts” to encourage “Jewish students who feel threatened or harassed at other institutions to apply for admission.”
He is also instructed to “work with Florida and Federal [Department of Government Efficiency] to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse”—a provision that has appeared in other presidential contracts. (While Ono’s contract also included that provision, it was less prescriptive over all.)
Several of the key duties and responsibilities, including certain hiring decisions, require the approval of UF’s board chair, which Wilde said would grant significant power to Hosseini.
“In essence, it makes him a co-president,” Wilde said.
Harvard is one of nine universities the Trump administration has targeted with federal funding freezes. In April, the government froze $2.2 billion in federal grants after the university rejected its demands to overhaul its policies on admissions, governance, hiring and more. In July, Harvard, which also sued the Trump administration over the freeze, was reported as open to paying as much as $500 million to settle with the Trump administration, though leaders said they would be reluctant to pay the government directly.
While no deal with Harvard has materialized yet, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC on Thursday that if one does, the $500 million could go toward vocational education.
“If Harvard settles with Donald Trump, you know what he’s going to do with the $500 million?” Lutnick said. “He’s going to have Harvard build vocational schools. The Harvard vocational school, because that’s what America needs.”
But deal or no deal, the frozen funds may start flowing back to Harvard soon.
Last week, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration illegally froze Harvard’s federal money, but the government plans to appeal. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that Harvard researchers were told some grants were being restored, though it’s not clear how widespread those restorations were.
The horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University is an unspeakable crime. But we must speak about its causes and how we can seek to reduce violence of this kind—and also how we must not seek to silence free speech in response.
Obviously, murder is an evil act in itself. But a political assassination of this kind is many magnitudes worse than the all-too-common murders we encounter every day in America.
Political violence undermines the sense of safety that’s essential to free and open debate. If controversial views inspire murder, then most of us will be reluctant to speak out honestly. Political violence and threats can be a powerful source of self-censorship. We need to end support for political violence of every kind on every side, from this terrible murder to the threats of violence against professors from all sides who express controversial views.
Political violence also breeds administrative censorship. Many of the campus bans on protests and suspensions and banishments of those accused of misconduct are done using the excuse of fear of violence. Safety becomes a simple defense for every act of repression, and Kirk’s murder may be used by campus officials to ban controversial speakers from all sides and to prohibit the kind of public discussion that Kirk was admirably engaged in when he was killed.
And political violence inspires political censorship, particularly when elected officials are looking for any excuse to suppress their ideological opponents. Donald Trump announced a campaign of retribution against leftists who harshly criticized Kirk: “For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it …”
It’s appalling that Trump would call for unconstitutional repression of this kind to “find” and “stop” any leftist who ever used mean rhetoric—and the organizations that fund or support them. Even if you believe (as I do) that prominent political leaders such as Trump—one of the worst offenders at nasty political rhetoric—should tone down their hatred, that doesn’t mean that everyone should restrain their rhetoric, and it certainly does not allow the government to punish those who choose to say harsh words.
Since we do not yet know who murdered Kirk or what the motives were, it’s bizarre to assign ideological blame for this violence. But even if the murderer turns out to be a leftist inspired by hateful essays about Kirk, we must not punish (or even condemn) people who denounced Kirk.
We need to condemn horrible violence of this kind from any source, but we cannot blame those who engage in political critique for the crimes of lunatics. Words do not cause violence, and censorship does not stop it. It’s bizarre that the party of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is now suggesting that mean tweets kill people.
Other Republican politicians urged repression as the response. Rep. Clay Higgins (a Louisiana Republican) called for massive censorship of anyone who “belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” calling for them to be “banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER,” to have their business licenses and permits and driver’s licenses revoked, and be “kicked from every school.”
By far the most disturbing finding in the latest free speech survey of college students released this week by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression was that the proportion of students willing to support physical violence to stop an offensive speaker on campus grew from 20 percent in 2022 to 34 percent in 2025. FIRE chief research adviser Sean Stevens noted, “This finding cuts across partisan lines. It is not a liberal or conservative problem—it’s an American problem.”
In FIRE’s survey, the growth in willingness to use violence to stop an offensive speaker over the past few years tracks directly with the growth in willingness to shout down speakers (from 62 percent to 71 percent) and to physically block students from attending a speech (from 37 percent to 54 percent).
The willingness of people to silence speech is connected to their willingness to support violence as just one further step to achieve that repression. Stopping political violence can’t be seen in isolation from stopping political censorship of all kinds. We need to view a commitment to free speech as an essential tool to help reduce political violence.
Censorship can become the training wheels for political violence. Once you are willing to dehumanize someone by stripping away their rights and silencing their speech, the kind of dehumanization necessary to violently attack them becomes easier to imagine. And once you’re willing to use political violence, the reality will always become more likely.
Alice Dreger at Heterodox Academy noted that after the problems we’ve seen with the heckler’s veto, “The shooter’s veto is a whole new level of terrorism endangering political speech in America.” But what if the shooter’s veto is just the logical extension of the heckler’s veto?
It’s worth noting that in another of the rare cases of violence against a campus speaker—at Middlebury College in 2017, when Charles Murray was attacked and Professor Allison Stanger was injured—the violence followed in the wake of the students shouting down Murray. Censorship and violence are often linked together, and both are common weapons of totalitarian regimes.
That’s why we must reject political violence in all its forms and begin with the steps of censorship that often lead to it. That’s also why we must reject censorship as an answer to political violence. Because censorship is the foundation of political violence, we cannot cure it with more censorship.
I disagreed with many of Kirk’s political views, but I liked some of his methods—organizing students and publicly engaging in debates on campus with critics (as he was doing when he was murdered).
As I noted back in 2017 for why colleges must recognize TPUSA chapters, “Although Professor Watchlist is morally wrong and a threat to academic freedom, that is not a good reason for a university to de-recognize a student group associated with it. Free speech applies even to those who oppose free speech. And the right of students to form organizations is an essential part of student liberty, even if that means criticizing faculty.” I wrote about those leftists who supported repression, “If you think only your political enemies will be subject to censorship by administrators, I think you are very mistaken.”
We need colleges to be safe spaces in the sense of physical safety from political violence and physical threats. We also need safety from professional retaliation, to ensure that people are not fired or silenced or punished for their beliefs. We must reject the use of repression to protect people from hearing offensive ideas, whichever side is being censored. By rejecting censorship, and making the open exchange of ideas an essential part of campus life that no violent act can take away, we can reduce the culture of political violence that endangers all of our voices.
The best tribute to Kirk would be for colleges and politicians and advocates on all sides to imitate the best of what he did—to create and approve student organizations that express controversial views and debate those who disagree, asking them to “prove me wrong.”
At least seven historically Black colleges and universities across the country went into lockdown on Thursday after institutions received threats, which they did not elaborate on.
Southern University and A&M College in Louisiana asked those on campus to shelter in place in response to a “potential threat to campus safety.”
The lockdown applied to the “entire Baton Rouge landmass,” including the Southern University Law Center, the Agricultural Research and Extension Center, and the university’s Laboratory School, according to a statement from the institution.
The lockdown lifted in the afternoon, but all classes and campus activities were canceled through the weekend.
Alabama State University also received a “terroristic threat,” university officials told local media outlets, and shut down campus as law enforcement officials checked buildings. The university sent an all-clear notice later in the day, noting that “the immediate threat has been resolved,” but told students to continue to shelter in place.
Two HBCUs in Virginia were also targeted.
Virginia State University went into lockdown while local, state and federal law enforcement agencies investigated the credibility of a threat received earlier that day, according to a message from the Virginia State University Office of Communications and University Relations. University officials assured students, “No injuries or incidents have been reported in connection with the threat” and said they would be provided with meals in university housing during the lockdown.
Hampton University canceled all activities and classes for both Thursday and Friday in response to a potential threat. Students were discouraged from moving across campus unless absolutely necessary, and all nonessential employees were told to “evacuate immediately” in a notice on the university’s website.
A threat at Bethune-Cookman University in Florida also forced the university to cancel classes and go into lockdown. A notice from the university told students to go to their dorms and faculty and staff members to leave campus.
Spelman College in Atlanta didn’t receive a threat but issued a shelter-in-place order because of its proximity to Clark-Atlanta University, which did. The order was lifted around 2 p.m.
Howard University, in Washington, D.C., assured students the institution hadn’t received any threats but would maintain “heightened security.”
“At Howard, we denounce all acts of hate designed to foster fear in our communities,” an update from the university read. “Howard stands in solidarity with our fellow HBCUs.”
A predominantly white institution, the University of Central Florida, also reported receiving a threat Thursday. The Orlando Sentinel, which obtained a copy via an anonymous tipster, reported that the expletive-laden message threatened Black students and referenced the killing of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed on a train in North Carolina.
A message from the UCF Police Department Thursday afternoon said, “Similar messages have been reported at other universities around the country.” The police department added it was working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assess the threat but does not consider it “to be credible.”
In what appears to be an unrelated incident, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., went on lockdown Thursday evening after suspicious activity was reported on campus, The Baltimore Banner reported. One person was injured as Naval Security Forces cleared a building.
Florida A&M University, an HBCU, did not receive any threats but put out a statement of solidarity with institutions on lockdown.
Rep. Troy A. Carter, a Democrat from Louisiana, posted on X that he was “outraged and deeply disturbed” by the threats to HBCUs.
“These reprehensible acts are not only an attack on institutions of higher learning—they are an attack on our history, our culture, and the promise of opportunity that HBCUs represent for generations of students,” Carter wrote. In a statement, he called on the federal government “to utilize every available resource to identify, apprehend, and prosecute those responsible.”
The Congressional Black Caucus also put out a statement calling for action from the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI. Caucus members described the threats as a “chilling reminder of the relentless racism and extremism that continues to target and terrorize Black communities in this country.”
The rash of violent threats is reminiscent of a wave of bomb threats that targeted HBCUs in 2022 and prompted the FBI to get involved. The HBCU campus lockdowns also come on the heels of a series of false calls to colleges and universities about active shooters last month; an online extremist group claimed responsibility for the hoaxes.
Wednesday saw a moment without precedent in recent history: A college speaker shot to death on a campus during an event. That fact alone would’ve escalated growing concerns about the future of free speech and civil discourse at colleges and universities.
But this speaker was Charlie Kirk, a prominent ally of a U.S. president who was already crusading against higher ed. Kirk, a national political figure in his own right, was one of the foremost conservative critics of intolerance for right-wing views in higher ed and the founder and leader of Turning Point USA, a nationwide organization of conservative campus groups that aided the president’s re-election. Kirk even spoke at Trump’s January inauguration.
He was known for goading students on campuses to “prove me wrong,” posting the resulting clips online, appearing in conservative media to denounce higher ed, spreading his views further on his own podcast and using his organization’s online presence and on-the-ground staff to target left-leaning faculty.
“College is a scam,” Kirk, who dropped out of Harper College in Illinois, wrote in a 2022 Fox News op-ed, in which he urged most students not to go.
“Universities are indoctrination zones where free speech is crushed,” he wrote. “Radical students and faculty coerce and persecute their nonconforming peers through ‘cancel culture’ and threats … I firmly believe that most—if not all—the destructive ideas that are now eating away at the foundation of American society originated on college campuses.”
His death at Utah Valley University could put more pressure on higher ed at a time when colleges and universities have already been excoriated and targeted by the right. Faculty and those who criticize higher ed as being insufficiently open to civil debate between different viewpoints are worried that free expression will further erode.
“This is an epic moment for the future of higher ed,” said John Tomasi, president of Heterodox Academy. “For the issue of free speech, there’s been nothing quite like this ever before.”
Tomasi, whose organization promotes “viewpoint diversity” and “constructive disagreement” on campuses, noted both Kirk’s national stature and his association with campus free expression. He was the kind of person that conservatives had long argued wasn’t welcome on campuses.
“This is an attack on a magnitude that we have not previously seen,” he said. He said national attention on campus cultures intensified when Congress in late 2023 started calling university presidents into televised hearings regarding alleged campus antisemitism. Now, that “white-hot spotlight” is even hotter.
“This is a killing of a person who exemplifies the struggles of viewpoint diversity on college campuses … in the act of speaking on a college campus,” Tomasi said.
Multiple college presidents have issued statements condemning the shooting. Michael Roth of Wesleyan University, a vocal critic of Trump’s targeting of higher ed, wrote that “those who choose violence destroy the possibility of learning and meaning. Mr. Kirk’s murder on a college campus is an assault on all of us in education.” University of California system president James B. Milliken wrote, “This wasn’t just an attack on an individual; it was an attack on the very freedoms we as a nation hold dear.”
Some universities have also acted swiftly to punish employees who appeared to celebrate or make light of Kirk’s death in online comments.
I think it marks a breakdown of the culture of free speech.”
—Lindsie Rank, director of campus rights advocacy at FIRE
The killer has yet to be apprehended, their motive is unknown and the FBI is offering up to $100,000 for information. But in a video from the Oval Office Wednesday evening, President Trump called Kirk’s killing a “heinous assassination” of a “martyr for truth and freedom” and a “dark moment for America.” He said, “There’s never been anyone who was so respected by youth,” whom Kirk brought into the political process “better than anybody ever.”
“Charlie was a patriot, who devoted his life to the cause of open debate and the country that he loved so much,” Trump said, adding that Kirk “traveled the nation, joyfully engaging with everyone interested in good-faith debate.”
Kirk in the Oval Office
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
But the president—who has demanded an undefined viewpoint diversity from universities while threatening them with sweeping federal funding cuts—didn’t go on to defend all free speech, which includes even hate speech. He denounced the “radical left,” saying that “violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year.”
“Those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.” (His speech didn’t mention the 2022 attack on former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, or the killings earlier this year of Democratic former Minnesota House speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark.)
Trump isn’t the only person calling it an assassination. Free speech advocates have called past shoutdowns of campus speakers the “heckler’s veto.” Lindsie Rank, director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, called this an “assassin’s veto.”
“Regardless of how one feels about Charlie Kirk’s viewpoints, his tactics, his background, assassination cannot be a response to disagreement in a civilized society,” Rank said. “That’s the whole purpose of free speech: that we have a better way to engage in discourse across differences to settle disagreements.”
“I think there’s a lot of faculty thinking, ‘Is it going to be me, and maybe instead of a video, it’s a rifle?’”
—Isaac Kamola, director of the AAUP Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom
Rank said free speech allows people “to exchange words instead of bullets.” She said what happens on campus is never isolated to campus and raised concern about a feedback loop.
“Our society has started to accept violence as an appropriate response to viewpoints that folks disagree with,” Rank said. “I think it marks a breakdown of the culture of free speech.”
Isaac Kamola, director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and an associate political science professor at Trinity College in Connecticut, is among the fierce critics of Kirk’s tactics. While Trump called the “radical left’s” rhetoric dangerous, Kamola said Kirk’s was.
“He literally wrote the book titled Campus Battlefield,” Kamola noted. “He built a career out of treating higher education as a war zone … and treating professors and students that he disagreed with as enemies that posed an existential threat to America … That being said, when actual violence—physical violence and murder—come to college campuses, that ratchets things up to an even more dangerous degree.”
Kamola added that, “without knowing who the gunman is,” Trump is already saying “he’s going to use this as an opportunity to punish the left, and I think that’s really scary.” (Kirk’s final post on X to his over 5.4 million followers said it was “100% necessary to politicize the senseless murder” of a Ukrainian woman in Charlotte, N.C., last month.)
Kamola pointed to Turning Point USA’s own Professor Watchlist and Texas A&M University’s firing of a professor earlier this week after a student filmed herself challenging the legality of teaching about gender identity in a children’s literature class. He said the killing could now leave faculty to think, “Is there going to be retaliation for this assassination?”
“I think there’s a lot of faculty thinking, ‘Is it going to be me, and maybe instead of a video, it’s a rifle?’” he said.
Another Turning Point
Trump redefined conservatism, attracting new adherents. Kirk appeared to do the same for conservative students across the nation, adding them to the MAGA movement.
Amy Binder, SNF Agora Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, said she’s studied conservative campus activism for decades. She said Kirk “kind of burst on the scene right around the time” Trump won his first term in office.
Vigils to remember Kirk have popped up at college campuses and at the Turning Point USA headquarters in Arizona.
Rebecca Noble/Getty Images
Binder, co-author of Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives and The Channels of Student Activism, said Kirk’s Turning Point group attracted students who initially weren’t sure they were Republicans and weren’t attracted to the College Republicans chapters that traditionally mobilized students.
“Their complaint about College Republicans was that it was too establishment, it was kind of fusty, stale, too focused on getting people elected,” Binder said of these students. She said Turning Point told them that “you are part of a liberal, left campus and you are mistreated here and you need to come out of the closet and declare that you’re conservative in a big, broad way—and we’ll help you do that with really splashy events and really splashy speakers.”
“All of the incentive structure there was to go big, go confrontational,” she said. Kirk exemplified that in his sparring matches with left-leaning students on campuses.
Binder said, “Kirk was really excellent at cross-branding,” frequently appearing on Fox News, recording videos for the conservative education video website PragerU and more.
“Over time, Kirk was really involved with the Trump family, and with MAGA under Trump,” Binder said. “And he really became an ambassador for that—not only to young people, but to others as well … He was really crossing over into other age brackets and he just kind of became a face—or the face—of energized, youthful conservatism.”
Turning Point sought to elect conservatives to student governments by providing funding. It broadcast online the names of faculty it considered too left-leaning or intolerant of conservative views and marshaled voters for Trump during his re-election campaigns.
“He became the face of young Republicans and probably helped Trump win Arizona, maybe Wisconsin, maybe Michigan, with his get-out-the-vote” in 2024, Binder said. She said he “might have been predicted to have a political career in the future. He’s charismatic, he’s good-looking, he has a perfect family, he’s obviously had success.”
Charlie Kirk was speaking at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10 to kick off his American Comeback Tour when he was shot and killed.
Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images
But now, Kirk is dead. While Binder said there will continue to be a “very robust right ecosystem of organizations that seek mobilized students on campus,” it’s unclear what Turning Point’s future will be.
“Is there a power vacuum, is there a succession plan, what does that look like? I certainly don’t know,” she said. Turning Point didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for an interview Thursday.
As for how his death could impact campus free expression, Binder said, “It’s really, really horrible on just all of the fronts, and in the wrong hands, something like this could shut down speech.”
Rank, from FIRE, said that while the shooter’s motive is unknown, the effect that violence can have on free expression isn’t. She said it can not only create a chilling effect within people, but it also can cause higher ed institutions to clamp down on speech to prevent violence.
“If an administration comes in and prevents controversial speaking engagements, then you’re creating a situation where the violence wins and that just causes free speech to deteriorate even further,” Rank said. She said that would not only be wrong, but “it would be a strange way to honor his legacy.”
At least a quarter of students across a broad range of graduate and professional programs could need private loans, which tend to come with higher interest rates, in order to pay for their education once new caps on federal loans take effect next summer, multiple studies show. For some, the loans could become so costly as to make earning a master’s or doctoral degree unattainable.
Currently, this group can borrow federal loans up to the total cost of attendance thanks to a program known as Grad PLUS. But starting July 1, students will max out at either $20,500 or $50,000 per year depending on whether they enroll in a graduate or professional program, respectively. And those in graduate programs will only be able to take out $100,000 over all, while students in professional programs will be limited to $200,000. Congress made the changes as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed earlier this summer.
The caps mean that the median borrower in four of the nine largest professional programs likely will need to find other financing to pay tuition bills, according to a recent analysis from the Postsecondary Education and Economics Research Center at American University. Borrowers in the 75th percentile exceed the cap in six of the nine fields.
And it’s not just the most costly doctoral programs such as medicine and dentistry in which students will face such a challenge, PEER notes. Out of the 30 master’s degree programs with the highest loan volume, 50 percent of students exceed the cap in nearly half of them.
Many of these students could struggle to find a private lender to make up the difference, potentially forcing them to drop out or not enroll in the first place, policy experts at PEER and other research groups say. And even if a student finds a lender, taking out a private loan could lead to steep, sometimes predatory, interest rates that take decades to pay off. (Research shows that low-income individuals particularly struggle to secure private financing because of a range of factors such as low credit scores, a lack of assets or an inconsistent flow of income.)
Before this new law, “students could have just filled out their FAFSA, applied for loans through the Department of Education and been able to borrow up to the full cost of attendance of their program,” said Jordan Matsudaira, director of the PEER Center and a former deputy under secretary at the Department of Education.
But now, for upward of a quarter of graduate students, it likely won’t be that simple.
“I think that will come as a surprise to a lot of people,” he said.
Can Private Lenders Fill the Gap?
Other researchers at Urban Institute and Jobs for the Future have also crunched the numbers on the loan caps and reached similar findings.
Jobs for the Future estimated in a report released last month that if this loan cap had been in place for the 2019–20 graduating class, roughly 38 percent of graduate borrowers would have needed to take out more loans beyond the cap. And thanks to the limit, the federal government would have issued $9.7 billion less in loans—a decrease of about 28 percent, according to the report.
Urban also used data from 2019–20 but broke it down by program, finding that dentistry would have the largest share of students exceeding the cap. About 56 percent would have exceeded the annual limit, and 58 percent blew through the aggregate cap. Other programs with a high share of students that could be pushed into the private market include medicine, at 41 percent, a master’s in public health, at 29 percent, and a master’s in fine arts, at 26 percent.
Policy experts on both sides of the political aisle tend to agree that the student debt crisis needs to be addressed. But unlike conservative lawmakers and analysts who believe these caps are necessary in order to lessen student debt and encourage colleges to lower costs, some researchers worry the limits are too aggressive and don’t account for nuances like a program’s return on investment.
“The kind of pain involved here is a little bit bigger than it needed to be to rein in the most egregious abuses in the system,” Matsudaira said. “The better approach over all would have been to adopt an approach where different fields of study had different limits that were scaled with borrowers’ ability to repay.”
Some questions about how the loan limits will work and which programs they’ll apply to will be answered later this month when the Education Department starts to work through the rule-making process to carry out the law’s provisions. Representatives from nursing, aviation and social work have already started to speak out about why their programs should be considered professional degrees and therefore be eligible for the higher cap.
“In today’s economy, the majority of graduate education is practical and workforce-aligned, preparing students for jobs in health care, education, counseling, technology and much more,” Stephanie Giesecke, a representative of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said at a public hearing in August. “The definition that is too narrow risks excluding programs that are vitally important to communities and employers nationwide.”
Like Matsudaira, Ethan Pollack, a senior director of policy at JFF, said that while he sympathizes with the Republican diagnosis that debt is too high, he probably would have gone about addressing it a different way. But rather than suggesting changes to the cap itself, JFF’s report looked at the financial impact on borrowers and suggested ways that institutions, the government and private lenders can adjust in response.
One key recommendation was the use of outcomes-based financing for private loans, which would base payments in part on borrowers’ earnings after graduating. Pollack said that this approach could help students who lack strong credit histories or cosigners still pursue well-paying degrees like a juris doctorate.
But current regulations, like requiring a bank to disclose a flat annual percentage rate, or APR, when offering a loan, make it difficult for some private vendors to explore new models like outcomes-based financing, he explained. If the government were to build on the recent legislation by amending current regulations and introducing new guardrails for private lenders, Pollack added, the OBF model could make nonfederal loans more affordable for borrowers of all backgrounds.
“The federal government, in some sense, is stepping on the gas and the brake at the same time,” he said. “They’re saying that they want the private market to be stepping up, but at the same time, the federal government is one of the obstacles to the private market being able to step up in the way that we would all like them to, which is to be offering financing with much more student-friendly terms.”
Matsudaira, on the other hand, was more skeptical.
“The big question is whether the private sector is really going to be able to come in and fill a hole that big,” he said. “And even if they do, how long does it take for them to spin up to be able to do those kinds of things?”
A university group warned that the proposal would stifle the U.S. innovation pipeline and hurt the American public.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Axios he wants the federal government to get half the dollars generated from patents that universities and their researchers develop with federal funding, the outlet reported Wednesday.
“The scientists get the patents, the universities get the patents and the funder of $50 billion, the U.S. government, you know what we get? Zero,” Lutnick says in an interview clip from the forthcoming first episode of The Axios Show.
“I think if we fund it and they invent a patent, the United States of America taxpayer should get half the benefit,” Lutnick says, adding, “if we are paying for the research, if we’re paying for the lab, if it’s our money, the American taxpayer’s money.”
“How do we not get our money back?” he says. “That’s insane.”
As Axios noted in its article about the interview, the Bayh-Dole Act generally gives universities the right to own patents developed with federal funding. The Commerce Department didn’t return requests for comment Wednesday about how the Trump administration could legally get around that law.
Kate Hudson, the Association of American Universities’ deputy vice president and counsel for government relations and public policy, said in an email that Lutnick’s idea “would completely gut universities’ ability to partner with the private sector to turn research discoveries into real-world technologies, cures, and solutions that serve the American people.”
“The proposal would obliterate the progress that university tech transfer has enjoyed in the 45 years since the passage of the seminal Bayh-Dole Act, which facilitated new university-industry partnerships and led to an explosion of technological progress and substantial economic gains,” Hudson said. “If enacted, the proposal would stifle the U.S. innovation pipeline, with the American people, not universities, being the ultimate losers.”
A new report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement found that even though parenting students are especially dedicated to their studies, they face significant obstacles in college.
The report, based on a 2024 survey of students from 164 community colleges, found that parenting students were more engaged than nonparenting students across multiple benchmarks, including coming to class prepared and never skipping classes, despite their additional responsibilities. These students were also more likely than nonparents to have earned an associate degree or certificate or to mention changing careers as a goal.
But even with such strong drive, 71 percent of student parents reported caring for dependents could cause them to withdraw from college; 73 percent said financial circumstances might make them stop out. Student parents were also more likely than nonparents to face food and housing insecurity, but only small fractions of students reported receiving food or housing support from their college in the last month. In a similar vein, a third of students with children say that their colleges don’t adequately support them as parents. Meanwhile, these students say underutilized supports that could help them, including campus childcare services, financial advising and career counseling, the report found.
The report also offers examples of higher ed institutions that have put in place effective supports for student parents. For example, Lee College in Texas offers weekly financial assistance for childcare and family-friendly study areas. Monroe Community College in New York created a designated student success coach role to serve single mothers.
“Parenting students are among the most engaged learners on our campuses, but they face barriers that too often derail their progress,” Linda García, CCCSE’s executive director, said in a news release. “But when colleges take intentional steps to support them, the impact is not only on students, but on their children and communities.”
