After Charlie Kirk, Trump should crack down on campus ‘safetyism’

An assassin who wants to silence a debate in America’s colleges can’t do it just by killing Charlie Kirk. Although Kirk was an exceptionally effective campus speaker – maybe the most effective since William F. Buckley Jr. in his heyday – he was far from alone in voicing conservative ideas in academic settings where they are generally unwelcome and at times violently opposed. There are others who will pick up Kirk’s microphone. But Kirk’s murderer has allies who can do systematically what the gunman could only do once. His allies in silencing voices like Charlie Kirk’s are university administrators who respond to violence by imposing stifling security costs on the targets of violence and intimidation.

America’s colleges and universities too often give militants a veto over campus speech. This was true long before Kirk’s murder. A few years ago students at a small Catholic college in Texas invited me to speak on their campus. I’m not exactly a well-known firebrand likely to draw an enraged mob anywhere. But this Texas Catholic college told the students they couldn’t host a conservative speaker without security insurance that they couldn’t afford. This wasn’t a response to any threat: it was a simple act of censorship by administrators too craven to ban a speaker forthrightly. They used safetyism as a convenient excuse.

My experience was not unique – colleges and universities across the country have long discouraged or completely prevented conservatives from speaking by demanding heavy security expenditures and indemnities against left-wing violence. Instead of imposing the costs of violence on those who threaten violence, institutions of higher education in our country impose those costs on those who are threatened. They impose those prohibitive costs not only on high-profile targets like Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Riley Gaines, and Andy Ngo, but also on speakers who aren’t targets at all. This is not a good-faith attempt to prevent violence; it’s a bad-faith strategy for stifling campus debate. Can you imagine a speaker invited to express views approved by a college administration being stuck with the bill for his or her security?

Most left-wing violence on campuses is far from murderous – it more often takes the form of rowdy mobs shouting down or attempting to intimidate speakers. These mobs do not exist because the violent left is unstoppably powerful on the nation’s campuses; they exist because the administrators in charge of campuses are unwilling to enforce basic rules on unruly children. The intimidation is opportunistic. Cowardice, more than adolescent extremism, is the root of the problem. If administrators really do fear that any conservative speaker will be met with rioting and violence, they have obviously already failed in their duty to maintain a safe environment for their students – they failed by allowing lunatics to amass enough power they could silence their critics without even having to riot.

Colleges and universities across the country have long discouraged or completely prevented conservatives from speaking by demanding heavy security expenditures and indemnities against left-wing violence

Some administrators are timid; more are not so much frightened of violence as frightened of having to take a side between freedom and leftism – they pride themselves on their progressive attitudes, yet they can’t admit that the price of those attitudes is deference to censorious radicals. Left-wing bullying is carried out in the name of anti-bullying; it’s cruelty masquerading as compassion. Calls to censor Charlie Kirk were typically framed as if doing so was necessary to protect transsexuals, racial minorities, and “democracy” itself. (The scare quotes are appropriate since actual democracy without free speech is well-nigh impossible.) Aggression against conservatives – who are a minority on almost all campuses – gets whitewashed as altruism. Left-liberal administrators who like to imagine themselves as broadly in favor of free speech get their principles put to the test when anyone farther to the left claims that Charlie Kirk or some other conservative is really a purveyor of “hate speech” and indeed that their speech is actually “violence.” With administrators who believe in “trigger warnings,” speech can be killed without an assassin’s having to pull the trigger.

If there is a legitimate reason to charge security or insurance fees, the university, whether it’s a state school or a private institution that receives any taxpayer dollars, must bear the cost. Colleges that are fully privately funded can do as they wish, but if an institution receives public money, it cannot allow only viewpoints that are aligned with the left to have representation. Charlie Kirk’s murder should spur the Trump administration to compel institutions of higher education to live up to their duty to the public and to their own students. And if hosting speakers whose lives may really be in danger seems costly, universities should cut the problem off at the source by making their campuses safe for civil discourse in the first place. The Trump administration has so far made Israel and anti-Semitism the focus of its attempts to change the culture of higher education, with policies that in some cases actually harm free speech. So far as any evidence suggests, Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed for talking about the Middle East. His assassination is about America’s freedom of political speech at home, in the very institutions that are meant to be most dedicated to free inquiry. Sly techniques of censorship, such as pricing conservative speech out of campus discourse, cannot be tolerated.

There’s danger enough in the risk of further self-censorship on the part of conservatives. The left – in the form of both aggressive activists and pusillanimous administrators – doesn’t need to intimidate the right with violence when it can do so effectively by simply imposing costs, from the cost of providing security for a speaker to the costs to one’s career prospects of being known as a conservative or Trump voter. Make it more expensive to be a campus conservative, at every point along the line, and there’s no need for overt censorship. The economic incentives will do the ideological commissar’s work for him. The safetyists understand this, while conservatives who sometimes have a genuine concern for their own safety increasingly internalize the left’s mentality along with its threats. The left largely exists to make everyone feel vulnerable and victimized, in need of protection not just by metal detectors but by censorship and supervision. The more the right feels besieged and beleaguered, forced to pay for its own basic freedoms, the more it will willingly surrender to the left’s fearful way of thinking and living. Charlie Kirk didn’t die for that – he died, as he lived, to defy it.