Amid grief over Kirk's assassination, some liberal academics are irked over martyrdom

TOI correspondent from Washington: For the right, he was a doughty culture warrior who walked into the lion’s den to take on “woke” liberals. To the Left, he was a dangerous provocateur who put their lives at risk before he was himself assassinated during a campus event.

Charlie Kirk’s murder is being broadly condemned and mourned across the political spectrum, but liberal academics who were in his "digital crosshairs” for years are cautioning against bestowing martyrdom on him even as MAGA conservatives are elevating him to sainthood.

Also read: Messages, casings & rifle - How Tyler Robinson was caught

Kirk created a website called Professors Watchlist , a database of hundreds of academics who he believed advanced a leftist agenda, promoted anti-American values, and discriminated against conservative students in universities across the country. The listed included more than a dozen academics of Indian-origin, and even South Asia scholars like Georgetown University’s Christine Fair, all deemed liberal and woke.

Many of them are speaking out even as President Trump on Friday vowed to punish those he said contributed to an environment of “radical left political violence.”

“The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy,” Trump said Friday morning on Fox News even as his supporters spoke of zeroing on teachers and academics who are criticizing Kirk after his death, including warnings of deporting non-citizens.

But liberal academics say it was Kirk who created and normalized a culture of violence with his “digital hitlist.”

"We cannot allow this tragic assassination to whitewash Kirk’s legacy,” Stacey Patton, a college professor and former reporter with the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote in a social media post, recounting how she came on Kirk’s “hitlist” in 2024 after writing commentary that she said inflamed the MAGA faithful.

"And once my name went up, the harassment machine roared to life. For weeks my inbox and voicemail were deluged. Mostly white men spat venom through the phone: ‘bitch,’ ‘c*nt,’ ‘n****r.’ They threatened all manner of violence,” she said.

Patton said the haters overwhelmed the university’s PR lines and the president’s office with calls demanding that she be fired. The flood was so relentless that the head of campus security reached out to offer her an escort, because they feared one of these keyboard soldiers might step out of his basement and come do her harm.

Several academics backed Patton, who is black. "Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA put me on their “professor watch list, designed to harass and intimidate academics. He was no free speech warrior, he was a free speech hypocrite,” wrote Jody Armour, a law professor at University of Southern California and author of Negrophobia & Reasonable Racism: The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America.

Some academics of Indian origin were put on the list for merely demonstrating their scholarship in their area of speciality, with the website cherry-picking quotes that triggered MAGA faithful.

Ashwini Tambe a Professor of History at George Washington University and Editorial Director of Feminist Studies, the oldest journal of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship in the United States, was cited for her work on transnational sexual maturity laws which did not sit well with the conservative values Kirk, a college dropout, espoused.

Kalindi Vora, a Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies as well as Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University, was accused of “Marxist Thought” for her class that examines "critical engagements between scholarship from postcolonial, feminist and other radical Marxist traditions.”

“Kirk’s Watchlist has terrorized legions of professors across this country. Women, Black faculty, queer scholars, basically anyone who challenged white supremacy, gun culture, or Christian nationalism suddenly found themselves targets of coordinated abuse,” Patton wrote.