The following is a guest contribution and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
On Wednesday, prominent conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a college campus, silenced in the middle of a debate with a liberal influencer. The killing was a horrific spectacle, both in its sheer violence and tragic symbolism. It was first a human tragedy, but it was also a tragedy for the idea that politics can, and must, be conducted through reasoned discussion. Here at Princeton, it has reignited the debate over the state and role of free speech on our campus.
Later Wednesday evening, The Daily Princetonian published an Opinion piece by Siyeon Lee and Charlie Yale, criticizing The Princeton Tory for publishing a letter by alumni group Princetonians for Free Speech. In the letter, PFS quotes the experiences of one of our sophomore writers who penned a personal essay recounting his negative experiences as a conservative freshman. Finding the Tory “a journal that only appeals to a select few on this campus,” Lee and Yale concluded that “protecting speech that lies beyond the confines of conservatism was never in [PFS’s] interest at all.” The Tory is open to all who choose to read it. The fact that its pages are not often read by left-leaning students is indicative of an anemic campus discourse.
Though clearly written before the tragedy, it is fitting that their piece was released on the same day as Kirk’s killing. Free speech has always been a particularly important subject for campus conservatives, and not by coincidence. Whether you use faculty donations or national polls as a metric, the political story is one-sided, and it has been for some time. While many campuses, like ours, have rigorous formal protections for free expression, the problem lies in their cultures, not their codes of conduct.
“Manners maketh man,” the old saying goes. Likewise, culture createth campus. Though rights and rules are important for creating de jure support for speech, it is the responsibility of students to actually embody and protect that culture. The killing of Charlie Kirk should make us all reflect on our individual duties to love one another and speak the truth as we can best see it. In the aftermath of his death, people should find renewed zeal for the truth, not fear. It should also encourage us to be honest about the reality of political speech on our own campus.
For example, in 2023, the Princeton Federalist Society hosted an event titled “The Transgender Movement and Its Assault on Biology,” which convened a panel of different perspectives on the issue. I, of course, knew the event would be controversial, and I was looking forward to the debates it would spark. When I posted advertisements for the event, they were taken down by students as soon as I had put them up. When the Tory hosted an event with a conservative theologian the same year, one anonymous poster mocked the role of religion in modern politics, writing, “Bro did not get the enlightenment memo from 250 years ago” to the tune of 1,100 upvotes. In the spring of this year, when President Trump enacted controversial policies targeting universities, another poster wrote, “[t]he clowns over at the Princeton Tory are mad quiet right now.” Again, 1,100 upvotes.
These are, of course, just quips from anonymous students. Yet, despite their relative insignificance, they do reflect a popular small “p” progressive idea of higher education, by which I mean the view that universities have as their highest calling the duty to promote social progress. Traditions only exist to be deconstructed, and received knowledge is to be scrutinized before it is wholly discarded. Our past is merely the prologue to a more enlightened present. The worst of this ethos dispenses with arguments altogether, seeking silence for its opposition.
While the authors insist “the people on our campus currently facing the most tangible threats to free speech are not disaffected conservatives who had tough freshman years,” it is hard to argue that conservative ideas don’t suffer from suppression. Charlie Kirk’s presence on college campuses was proof enough of the void he was filling. In a world where our universities were better fulfilling their missions, we would have no need for figures like Kirk.
The greatest ideological threat to campus speech comes from those who seek to entirely write others out of discussion, and in recent years, this push has come from progressive students. In their piece, Lee and Yale link to one of these students’ articles from last year, to which I responded soon thereafter. Though a political Conservative (in a big “c” sense), the tradition of free speech I seek to conserve (in a small “c” sense) is itself broadly liberal, meaning it seeks to protect the ability for people to speak regardless of the substantive arguments they advance.
These reflections and distinctions aside, I commend Lee and Yale for doing what few on our campus are willing to do: sign their name to an argument and put it up for scrutiny. I also appreciate the free advertising they have given the Tory, and I hope more students visit our website to read what we have to offer. They have modeled the kind of spirited opposition that should characterize campus discourse and its various sides.
The same cannot be said for others on this campus, who took to Fizz to mock the death of Charlie Kirk. To treat bloodshed so flippantly reflects a deeper darkness that words can hardly confront. I would thus encourage us to recover an appreciation for Princeton’s original motto: “under God’s power she flourishes.” We should seek the image of God in every person we meet. Abstractions cannot be made to fight abstractions: though “right” and “left” are helpful terms in organizing schools of thought, we cannot reduce ourselves to them, and we cannot place them before our shared humanity. To reason, and not simply react, is to do something fundamentally human.
Charlie Kirk was a person first. He was a son, a father, and a husband. The best way to react to his death is to seek this common dignity, and the best way to seek this common dignity is to seek people. Choose the relationships that challenge the temptation to turn others into abstractions. Don’t scroll on Instagram, don’t refresh your Twitter, don’t gossip on Fizz. Go read a book, go make a friend, go listen to a song. Politics is not just the views we hold or the debates we have; it is the choices we make while living in community with one another.
As a conservative, I ask that Kirk’s death prompt reflection on our own campus culture. As a student, I hope it inspires us to seek knowledge with openness and humility. And as a person, I pray it challenges us to see each other as brothers and sisters, not simply as small examples of bigger phenomena.
Zach Gardner is a senior majoring in Politics and minoring in English and History. He is the publisher of The Princeton Tory. He can be reached at zachgardner[at]princeton.edu.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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