Charlie Kirk University?

Why plans by LSU administrators and Gov. Jeff Landry to use the university as a vehicle to deify the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk would be a disgrace

Photo by Jessica Tan on Unsplash

I hadn’t planned to write anything this week, as I’m on vacation, but Gov. Jeff Landry’s announcement Monday that he will force the LSU Board of Supervisors to erect a statue honoring the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk left me no choice.

The Kirk Hagiography Department at LSU was already gearing up to honor the fallen conservative activist. LSU recently announced a new lecture series to “promote free speech,” named for Kirk.

Landry and LSU administrators are dead wrong to try and turn the school into Charlie Kirk University. And anyone who cares about keeping LSU out of partisan politics ought to speak out and say so—and soon.

We can—and should—mourn Kirk’s killing while defending robust expression on campus. But honoring Kirk with a statue and a free-speech lecture series is a category error so vast that it reads like parody.

It confuses the principle of free inquiry with the practice of targeting and intimidating scholars. It also tells Black students, faculty, and staff—indeed all minorities—that LSU is not for them.

Kirk’s public image wasn’t about defending open debate, but demonizing professors, policing classrooms, and attacking diversity. His organization, Turning Point USA, engaged in “watch lists” and online campaigns targeting faculty members across the country, especially those teaching or researching in fields unpopular with conservatives, such as gender studies or the history of racism.

Many of those professors faced abuse—some received death threats—after being singled out. That’s not free speech; it’s a tactic to intimidate and silence. Naming a free-speech series after an activist whose approach involved silencing faculty and attacking diversity as un-American distorts the principle of free expression.

Landry has made his position against diversity clear: He’s redirecting Louisiana’s universities away from their longtime accrediting body and toward a new, ideologically aligned interstate commission. In July, he established a Task Force on Public Higher Education Reform to “move away from DEI-driven mandates.”

In simple terms: fewer commitments to inclusion, and more signals to the base—and to prospective minority students and faculty—that “diversity” at LSU is a bad word.

By establishing the new Kirk lecture series, LSU’s leaders say they are reaffirming free speech after a tragedy. And that’s what Landry claims is his intent with the statue: “There is no better warrior for free speech than Kirk, and we must continue his legacy on every campus in America,” he said in his social media post announcing his pressure campaign for the statue.

But intent isn’t the main issue; impact is. Kirk gained an audience by depicting universities as indoctrination centers and professors as adversaries. Among other things, he said the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a mistake.

To associate his name with a free-speech program at a public university is to endorse that view and to suggest that the ideal university citizen is the activist who creates watch lists, not the scholar who teaches uncomfortable or controversial research findings or the student who advocates for justice.

It also occurs amid actions that, overall, seem like a re-whitening of LSU: the nearly all-white presidential search committee that has named an all-white, all-male list of prospective candidates; the shrinking of DEI infrastructure; and the disappearance of Black leadership from the campus.

Free speech at a public university is not a commodity to be licensed to a faction. It’s a promise: that ideas and research—especially the unpopular kind—can be expressed without fear of institutional retaliation or mob harassment.

Those of us who oppose honoring Kirk in this way aren’t trying to silence anyone or protect anybody from ideas. This is about refusing to endorse a philosophy that made scholars villains and increased threats against them. 

LSU can support free speech without honoring someone whose legacy contradicts it. If the university continues to make Kirk its guiding figure for expression, then let’s be honest: it isn’t truly promoting free speech. It’s fostering a politics of intimidation—and speeding up the death of diversity.

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Why is Landry trying to distract us?

By the way, Landry’s sudden desire to meddle more in LSU’s affairs—including getting involved in firing head football coach Brian Kelly—is probably motivated by the awful poll numbers released the other day by Baton Rouge pollster John Couvillon.

JMC Analytics and Polling surveyed 600 likely voters October 18-20. Fifty-one percent of those surveyed said they disapprove of Landry’s job performance, while only 39 percent approve. Landry’s “very favorable” rating fell from 25 percent to 19 percent since the last poll. His “very unfavorable” rating went from 31 percent to 39 percent.

Landry’s sudden desire to meddle in LSU football and other aspects of the school is classic Huey Long behavior: Distract the voters from their more serious concerns with a little football and razzle dazzle. It’s a cheap trick and may serve to help Landry for a while, but this kind of governance is unsustainable. Landry has big and growing problems with the Louisiana public.

Throwing up a statue to Charlie Kirk and firing the football coach is not the way to win back the the non-MAGA voters who supported him two years ago.