Less than 24 hours after an assassin extinguished one of the brightest young lights in American conservative thought, a Utah Valley University faculty member sent a supportive email message to students urging them to rise above the violence.
The message, addressed “To my Students and friends,” summed up the cold-blooded murder of Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk at UVU on Sept. 10, 2025 as a “life-altering tragedy for those close to him, obviously.” A profound loss to Kirk’s followers, too, the unidentified professor added.
And then in flowery prose fitting a liberal arts college professor, the faculty member mused that any violent death is “a loss to humanity and a disruption of human and divine harmonies.” That’s especially true on a university campus because “universities are by their very nature to be the safe place for diversity and listening and developing each person’s uniqueness through a peaceful, compassionate, and passionate exchange of viewpoints.”
“UVU, in particular, stands as a university where we foster individual development and uniqueness,” states the email, a copy of which was apparently sent to then-UVU President Astrid Tuminez.
The message was warmly embraced by the university recipient, who hailed it as “such a clear, compassionate, and healing message.”
Delusional perhaps, but kind to be sure.
An email sent 11 days later from another faculty member wasn’t so compassionate and healing, but it did better reflect how the left-wing collegiate mind views Charlie Kirk and the powerful grassroots conservative movement he created. It reeks of the faculty lounge arrogance and viewpoint intolerance of the leftists who dominate higher education. As Kirk’s murder painfully displayed, these groupthink indoctrination factories are pumping out more “progressive” extremists more willing to tolerate violence to stop their political foes.
Judicial Watch obtained the emails — among 133 pages of internal UVU records — through an open records request. Tom Fitton, president of the conservative government watchdog organization, said the unity university administrators attempted to project was tested by members of UVU faculty who, according to one email, couldn’t “understand how people could support or mourn someone” like Charlie Kirk.
‘To Shape Minds’
“I am writing out of deep respect for your leadership and concern for the integrity of our university community,” an email written by a faculty member begins. The email — the subject line is “On Preserving UVU’s Values and Commitment to Students” — is addressed to Tuminez, although most of the personally identifiable information in the tranche of records is redacted, including the instructor’s name.
The pompous author asserts Kirk “appealed to the worst of us.”
“He spoke his prejudices openly, not to test free speech, but to shape minds,” the UVU employee insists. Audaciously, the author claims that the 31-year-old conservative leader and Christian evangelist “targeted impressionable youth, feeding on their fears and anxieties.” Sounds more like a day in the life in the radical workshops of today’s college campuses.
At UVU, the bloviating instructor prattles on, the mission is to “educate and support young people who will grow into leaders for a more just society.” The higher ed snob turns some atrocious metaphors about dark skies and rain tied to the “values we must elevate.” The idea is that conservative Kirk and his ideas challenging leftist orthodoxy, not his assassination — dying in a pool of his own blood in front of his wife, young children, and the world — is the dark cloud hovering over the institution.
“The hidden message in his rants was clear: hate is natural, and to resist it is to deny who you are. Hate masquerading as justice is nothing of the sort. True justice seeks fairness, accountability, and protection for all, while hate targets, divides, and destroys,” the instructor writes, never mentioning the hateful leftist accused of pulling the trigger of the rifle that took Kirk’s life.
The author implores Tuminez and UVU in general to “resist any effort to memorialize him or turn him into an icon.”
Of course, Kirk was and is an icon to millions of conservatives. But the blowhard instructor preaching the dogma of “equity” and “diversity” demands UVU murder Kirk’s memory. The author reserves compassion for the “few who attended the ceremony and witnessed something terrible.” Something? Sounds like Rep. Omar Ilhan, the Islamist Democrat from Minnesota, when she said “some people did something on 9/11.”
Source: Email from UVU instructor (obtained by Judicial Watch)
The leftist instructor can’t spare too much “compassion,” however, because UVU’s “community is far larger and more diverse.”
“Honoring this individual would go against the values of the broader student body and the university as a whole, and it would deeply offend many of the students we are trying to educate and guide to be leaders for a more just and compassionate society,” the employee pontificates.
‘Chilling Effect’
Turns out there are a lot of students in UVU’s student body that don’t share the liberal pinhead’s “values.” What offends them is not feeling as safe on campus as their left-leaning classmates.
A survey conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and College Pulse in the aftermath of the campus assassination understandably found a “notable portion” of college students nationally reported being less comfortable expressing their political views at college.
“This chilling effect is especially pronounced among conservative students, who consistently report higher levels of unease than their moderate and liberal peers,” the survey report, which oversampled UVU students, states.
Maybe that’s because a growing percentage of individuals identifying as left-leaning believe killing their political enemies is okay.
Kirk’s assassination, the report’s authors suspect, may have caused conservative students to “grow more wary” of aggressive or violent protests to shut down speakers, “perhaps reflecting increased concern about the real-world consequences of political violence.”
“Liberal students, in contrast, showed no similar pullback, indicating that the event did not shift their views in the same way,” the report states.
As The Federalist reported last week, a Liberal Currents poll conducted in partnership with the Center for Strategic Politics finds about one out of every three Democrats responding would like to see Trump assassinated while speaking at a rally. More than half of the TDS set would welcome — at least at some level — the president dying in his sleep while in office, according to the poll, conducted on Sept. 3 and Sept. 8-10.
So much for “fairness, accountability, and protection for all.”
‘Toxic Brew’
U.S. higher education is growing liberal extremists, college graduates who believe the political ends sometimes justify the violent means.
“That radical worldview is the product of the U.S. higher education system, where a toxic brew of Marxist philosophy and identity politics has become ever-more extreme,” Jonathan Small, president of the Oklahoma Council on Public Affairs, wrote in a piece — “Higher Education Has An Extremist Problem” — published not long after Kirk’s assassination.
The cognitive dissonance among the “social justice” tribe is breathtaking. In a Nov. 2025 email, a self-described UVU faculty member “had a hard time dealing with the aftermath of the shooting.” Why? Because a beloved husband and father was fatally shot in the neck while again showing the world why free speech on college campuses is critical to the health of a constitutional republic? No, because said faculty member couldn’t “understand how people could support or mourn someone who was so divisive and spewed such vituperation in his ‘debates.’”
“I regret that he was invited to UVU at all, and wish you had rethought the decision to allow him a forum on our campus,” the university teacher complained.
Source: Email from UVU faculty member (obtained by Judicial Watch)
Faculty and staff at several universities rejoiced or mocked Kirk’s murder, some insisting Kirk got what he deserved for saying “offensive” things like, men are not women and women are not men, and that DEI is a destructive scam. Some who jumped online to post callous remarks lost their plum university positions. Many were reinstated and paid handsome settlements in lawsuits over their due process and speech rights.
Charlie Kirk was silenced. He has no right of appeal. His family, preparing to sue the university for failing to protect the slain conservative leader, don’t see any justice — “social” or otherwise — in that life sentence.
“Charlie Kirk was assassinated while exercising his right to speak on a college campus,” Judicial Watch’s Fitton said in a statement. “These records reveal that, even as Utah Valley University publicly called for free expression and civil discourse, some faculty members were making hateful and vicious comments about him, objecting to his invitation to campus, and threatening to leave if his memory were honored.”
