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    DeSantis urges Florida universities to stop hiring foreign visa workers

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    Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, is urging the state’s universities to stop hiring international employees through the H-1B visa program.DeSantis said he wants the Florida board of governors “to pull the plug” on the practice. Nearly 400 foreign nationals are currently employed at Florida’s public universities under the H-1B visa program, reported the Orlando Sentinel.“Universities across the country are importing foreign workers on H-1B visas instead of hiring Americans who are qualified and available to do the job,” said DeSantis in a statement. “We will not tolerate H-1B abuse in Florida institutions. That’s why I have directed the Florida Board of Governors to end this practice.”However, it’s unclear how such a move could be carried out. States do not have authority to revoke federal visas, and US Citizenship and Immigration Services regulations prohibit firing employees based on immigration status.Last month, Donald Trump raised the H-1B visa fee from $215 to $100,000, a decision likely to face legal challenges. He also issued a proclamation alleging “systematic abuse” of the program.The H-1B program permits employers to hire skilled foreign professionals for specialized positions that are difficult to fill with US workers. Across Florida, more than 7,200 people hold H-1B visas.The program has caused friction among Trump supporters. Some, such as Elon Musk, argue it’s essential for US innovation, while others, including DeSantis, contend it enables companies to replace Americans with lower-paid foreign labor.DeSantis cited positions filled by workers from China, Argentina and Canada, arguing these roles were taken from qualified Floridians in favor of “cheap labor”.The University of Florida is one of the state’s largest users of the H-1B program, employing more than 150 staff members under the visa, according to an Orlando Sentinel review of federal data. Other universities also rely heavily on the program, including the University of South Florida with 72 employees and Florida State University with 69, according to the Tampa Bay Times.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEducators note that most H-1B visa holders at these institutions work in departments such as computer science, engineering, physics and chemistry. About 60% of people who earned PhDs in computer science from US universities in 2023 were temporary visa holders, not citizens or permanent residents, reported the Sentinel.Donald Landry, the University of Florida’s interim president, said during the news conference that the university will embrace DeSantis’s review of H-1B visas. “Occasionally, some bright light might be good enough for the faculty, and then we will try and retain the person into whom we’ve invested so much,” Landry said, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “But that’s the exception that proves the rule.” More

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      The right wants Charlie Kirk memorials across the US – but is it just an attempt to capitalize on his killing?

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      Republicans and conservatives are campaigning to quickly build statues and other memorials across the United States for the slain rightwing activist Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination at a college event in Utah last month.Political leaders in states such as Florida, Michigan and Oklahoma have not only called for construction of memorials but in some cases also threatened to penalize colleges that refuse to publicly honor Kirk, who was killed on 10 September.The heavy-handed push to honor Kirk, who held views that many see as racist and sexist, follows Donald Trump’s moves to restore monuments of Confederate leaders that were removed in recent years, which appear to be part of a broad effort to impose rightwing views on the country.“The way in which you keep the culture war going – or the way that you win it – is to have religious icons like Charlie and use their face and their name and their likeness to further your cause,” said Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia who has studied Christian nationalism.Kirk, who co-founded the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, was killed at Utah State University during one of his signature events in which he debated students.Since then, Trump and others in his administration, such as Stephen Miller, have blamed the shooting – without producing any evidence – on a coordinated violent effort by the “radical left” and threatened to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” the left’s “terrorism and terror networks”.Kirk often criticized gay and transgender rights and made Islamophobic statements and once suggested that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “mistake”. However, at the state and local level, Republican lawmakers have described Kirk as a “modern civil rights leader” who stood for “allowing everybody to voice their opinion respectfully”.Just a week after Kirk’s murder, Ohio Republican state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto introduced legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to build a “Charlie Kirk memorial plaza” with a statue “that features the conservative leader sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk “and his wife standing and holding their children in their arms”.A few weeks later, in Florida, Kevin Steele, a state house Republican, also proposed legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to rename roads for Kirk.“The Florida State University shall redesignate Chieftain Way as Charlie James Kirk Road,” the bill states. “Pasco-Hernando State College shall redesignate Mrs Prameela Musunuru Health and Wellness Trail as Charlie James Kirk Trail.”In Florida, if the schools do not establish the memorials by stated deadline, the state would withhold funding from the institutions, and in Oklahoma, the state would fine the schools, according to the legislation.Boedy, the University of North Georgia professor, likened the lawmakers’ threats to withhold state money to Trump’s moves to cut off federal funding to universities unless they met his list of demands.“State funding for education should be based upon students’ interest in majors, in enrollment and in science, in objective criteria, and honoring a single person is not part of that,” said Boedy, who has been on Turning Point’s watchlist of “professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom”.Jett, Prieto and Steele did not respond to requests for comment.Kirk was critical of higher education and wrote a book titled The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth.“I find it really ironic that the state of Oklahoma is demanding that every public university have a Charlie Kirk memorial plaza,” said Erika Doss, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America.While the states have not approved the legislation requiring the memorials, at least one Florida county has installed a sign for a Charlie Kirk Memorial Highway, despite some public opposition.And less than a week after the murder, New College of Florida, a liberal arts university that has been the subject of a conservative takeover, also posted on X an AI-generated image of a bronze sculpture of Kirk at a table and stated that it would build the statue on campus “to defend and fight for free speech and civil discourse in American life”.That may not be easy. After events like 9/11, the Vietnam war, and the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, public monuments were often not built for years, sometimes decades.Quickly sharing a fake image of a Kirk memorial “is a lie”, Doss said. “It matters because it doesn’t tell the truth about how complicated and necessarily complicated making public art should be.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy waiting years to build a memorial, you can see how time really changes the “emotional tenor and the perspective on the event”, said Gabriel Reich, a professor of history and social studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who has studied collective memories of the US civil war and emancipation.“How people feel about [Kirk’s killing] five years from now may be different, and it may depend on what happens between now and then,” said Reich. “Does the political violence escalate and continue? Does it get tamped down?”It’s not a foregone conclusion that the schools will build the monuments.In Michigan, the Mecosta county board of commissioners wanted Ferris State University to build a statue for Kirk and offered to split the funding, but the school president declined, citing a “a longstanding practice that limits statues on campus to individuals who have made significant, direct contributions to Ferris State University itself”, according to the Detroit Free-Press.At New College, alum William Rosenberg sees the proposed statue as an attempt by the administration to distract from problems at the school, which was once a highly ranked institution considered among the most liberal in the country.“New College was a welcoming environment for people who were motivated and wanted to learn and wanted to do it on their own terms,” said Rosenberg, who graduated in 1980 with a degree in medieval studies.Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has tried in recent years to transform the school by appointing political allies such as the conservative activist Christopher Rufo to its board of trustees, firing its president and revamping its curriculum.Since then, the school has seen its national ranking and graduation and retention rates plummet, while the state now spends significantly more on each student than those at its other public universities, according to Inside Higher Ed.After posting the AI image of the statue, New College’s president, Richard Corcoran, touted the public response in a weekly email.“In the first 72 hours of the announcement, New College of Florida was mentioned nearly 3 billion times (including traditional media in the graph below, and reposts on social media),” the email stated. “Normally, New College receives about 100 million impressions a month. In 72 hours, New College received about 2 1/2 years of media coverage.”A New College spokesperson, James Miller, declined an interview request.Rosenberg, a semi-retired computer engineer, doubts the school will actually build the statue because of Corcoran’s “history of promising the world and delivering nothing”.“A lot of alumni feel it was a gross PR move to capitalize on Charlie Kirk’s murder,” Rosenberg said. “New College of Florida has now become a political pawn whose real mission is about making political headlines while the on-the-ground education has nosedived.” More

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      Obama takes aim at companies cutting deals with Trump: ‘We have capacity to take a stand’

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      Barack Obama took aim at institutions and businesses who made deals or worked out settlements with the Trump administration, noting on a new podcast episode: “We all have this capacity, I think, to take a stand.”In a talk with Marc Maron on the comedian’s last edition of his long-running WTF With Marc Maron, the former US president said institutions – including law firms, universities and businesses – that have changed course during the Trump administration should have stood by their convictions.Instead of bending to the administration, Obama noted that universities should say: “This will hurt if we lose some grant money in the federal government, but that’s what endowments are for. Let’s see if we can ride this out, because what we’re not going to do is compromise our basic academic independence.”He also noted that the organizations that did concede to Trump should be able to say: “We’re not going to be bullied into saying that we can only hire people or promote people based on some criteria that’s been cooked up by Steve Miller,” in reference to the top White House aide and architect of Trump’s hardline immigration policy.Obama, whose two terms preceded the first Trump administration, also said that companies should also have stood up against administration pressure campaign to turn back from diversity hiring.“We think it’s important, because of what this country is, to hire people from different backgrounds,” Obama said.Universities, law firms and other businesses have all reached agreements with the White House, including dropping DEI targets and agreeing to rein in campus antisemitism in exchange for restoration of federal funding. A series of powerful Washington law firms have also agreed to provide free legal services to the administration, while corporations have rolled back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.Disney, a frequent target of political-ideological factions on the left and right, scrapped its internal “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” program for “Opportunity & Inclusion” to empower “all through access, opportunity, and a culture of belonging”.Elsewhere in the interview, Obama acknowledged that integrity comes at a price.“Sometimes it’s going to be uncomfortable,” he told Maron, referencing a joke that Maron made in his stand-up routine that Democrats annoyed the average American into fascism.“It cracked me up,” Obama said. “I wasn’t as funny about saying this, but four or five years ago I said: ‘Look, you can’t just be a scold all the time. You can’t constantly lecture people without acknowledging you’ve got some blind spots, too.’”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVulnerability, he said, comes in standing up for core convictions but not attempting to assert “that I am so righteous, and so pure, and so insightful, that there isn’t the possibility I’m wrong on this.“There was this weird progressive language,” he said, that implied a “holier than thou superiority that’s not different to what we used to joke about coming from the right and the moral majority … and certain fundamentalism that I think was dangerous”.Maron posted the final episode of his show on Monday after 16 years of hosting and with more than 1,600 installments that he’s broadcast from his Los Angeles garage. Obama brought the 62-year-old host, stand-up comic and actor to his Washington office for the last interview.Obama asked the initial questions. “How are you feeling about this whole thing?” he said, “transition, moving on from this thing that has been one of the defining parts of your career and your life?”“I feel OK,” Maron answered. “I feel like I’m sort of ready for the break, but there is sort of a fear there, of what do I do now? I’m busy. But, not unlike your job … I’ve got a lot of people who over the last 16 years have grown to rely on me.” More

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      US universities must reject Trump’s ‘compact’. It is full of traps | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Sticks are bad, but sometimes corruption through carrots is worse. The Trump administration – after having brutally cut federal funding earlier this year – is now trying to make nine universities an offer that they seemingly cannot refuse. In exchange for preferential treatment in funding and bonuses like “invitations to White House events” – apparently the same logic as a fancy credit card that promises you backstage access at concerts – the universities are expected to sign a “compact” with the government. All nine institutions must reject this proposal: it is a thinly veiled attack on academic freedom; it is a test case for whether Trumpists can get away with demanding loyalty oaths; it exceeds the president’s powers to begin with; and it is bound to achieve the opposite of its stated goal of “academic excellence in higher education” (as opposed to what kind of excellence in education, one is tempted to ask).Some features of the compact might look reasonable at first sight. No one is against addressing ever-rising tuition fees (never mind that the Republican party at the same time is capping federal loan programs and shoveling money to high-cost private lenders). And some might welcome the Stephen Miller-lite version of xenophobia: capping the number of foreign students at 15% and forcing foreigners to take American “civics” (it is unclear who would decide the content of lessons “about how great our country is”).But the document also functions as a kind of rap sheet for institutions portrayed as single-mindedly focused on discriminating against white males. Formulations such as “signatories shall adopt policies prohibiting incitement to violence” would make one believe that, as of now, universities encourage terrorist agitators to run rampant on campus; the demand to “transform or abolish institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas” suggests that, as of now, anyone saying the wrong thing about abortion is beaten up by progressive vigilantes (never mind the question what it means to treat an idea as such “violently”).It is no small irony that one of the strategists of the assault on higher education, May Mailman, charges universities with having committed to a “culture of victimhood” in an interview with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; obviously, it is the Trumpist grievance-industrial complex which mass-produces resentment among supposed “real Americans” held down by nefarious liberal elites. For all the talk of fostering open debate, the goal appears to be the creation of safe spaces for the fragile egos of Maga students suffering from universities’ supposed culture of “negativity”.The clearest attack on academic freedom consists in the demand to ensure “a broad spectrum of viewpoints … within every field, department, school, and teaching unit”. Faculty, students “and staff at all levels” will first have to be tested for ideology; once “empirical assessments” have been completed, the diversity of viewpoints judged appropriate will have to be engineered, presumably by a bureaucracy that can also guarantee consistent viewpoints over time (for what if our new conservative colleague starts to hold different views?). In theory, the result would not just be affirmative action for the right, but forcing the economics department to employ Marxists.To be sure, some Trumpists themselves insist that the government should not be in the business of micromanaging the distribution of political attitudes. But the rejection is not a principled one centered on a proper understanding of academic freedom. It is simply the fear of setting a precedent with what they openly call “policing” and one fine day having the Democrats flood universities with leftists.As with other aspects of Donald Trump’s emerging mafia state, there is no guarantee that those bending the knee will not be bullied again. The government can always come back to universities and accuse them of having violated the agreement (still too many courses in victimhood studies; still too much “violence” – as defined by bureaucrats – vis-a-vis someone’s cherished ideas). The government will also encourage donors to claim back their cash. Since the compact’s criteria are exceedingly vague, those who take the offer will probably overdo compliance.At the risk of sounding like one of those dreadful self-styled victims: universities are fragile institutions. Many American ones are excellent precisely because people trust each other and cooperate successfully without over-regulation (some Europeans can tell you what it means to be subject to constant assessments – and how a Soviet-style bureaucracy constantly distracts from research and teaching). Of course there is always plenty of academic infighting, but what the Trumpists are doing is consciously trying to create divisions by setting potential Trump administration collaborators against those determined to resist it. As has become apparent with other autocrats’ assaults on universities, even if institutions escape (sometimes literally, as they have to relocate to other countries) the worst, much damage has been done. This is why the nine universities should not only reject the compact, but also publicly explain what is wrong with it (otherwise they will be immediately charged with wanting to protect their tuition-racket, helping foreigners and “importing radicalism” to undermine American greatness).Precisely because they have been losing court cases over free speech and visas for foreign students, Trumpists now seek to entrap universities in a deal that effectively removes the protections of federal law and gives the administration arbitrary power over them. The carrots serve to lure institutions of higher learning into a dark alley where, rather than just waiting with a big stick, the government can put a gun to their heads at any time.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More

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      Small US college towns reel amid Trump immigration crackdown: ‘They need international students’

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      For a town of 20,000 residents a few miles from the Indiana state line in rural Ohio, the city of Oxford boasts an outsized number of international eateries.On High Street, the Phan Shin Chinese restaurant sits a few doors down from the Happy Kitchen, another Chinese food joint, which is next door to the Krishna Indian restaurant. There’s a French bakery and even a Uyghur restaurant selling central Asian fare.The diversity of international restaurants mirrors the student population attending Miami University, which in 2019 had a student body including more than 3,000 international students.But in recent years, the number of international students coming to study at US colleges has plummeted, a trend that could have devastating consequences for small college towns.It was the large number of Chinese students attending Miami University that prompted Fei Yang to open the MImian Chinese restaurant in Oxford, a full 60 miles from his home, in 2018.“There used to be 2,000 to 3,000 [Chinese] students but now there is like 300, 400 maybe,” says Yang. “Covid-19 stopped a lot of people coming. Before we used to make real Chinese food, now we make the American versions.”In fall 2019, Miami University admitted 2,895 international students, mainly from China, Vietnam, India, and elsewhere – last year, the number plummeted to 750. Since international students at Miami University are not receiving scholarships, they typically pay more than $65,000 in tuition, fees, housing and food, according to 2024-25 estimated cost of attendance figures, which represents a potential loss of about $140m for the university, local businesses and the thousands of workers they collectively employ.Across the US, an estimated 150,000 fewer international students are expected to study at US colleges and universities this fall compared to last year, a 40% drop.While the reasons are varied, the Trump administration’s response to protests on campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza has played a major role in fueling the falloff by driving fear of arrest and deportation into many would-be incoming international students.In June, the state department announced more severe screening and vetting processes for international students intending on studying in the US, including ordering applicants to turn their social media profiles public.Students from Turkey, Palestine, and Iran have been detained, imprisoned and deported or self-deported for expressing their first amendment rights, rights that are protected by the US constitution, regardless of whether they are citizens of the country or not. About 6,000 student visas have been revoked this year with some students seeing their visas revoked for alleged minor wrongdoings such as speeding.International student enrolment, however, has been in decline since before the current administration’s crackdown. The tariffs regime initiated on China during the first Trump administration, as well as Covid-19 pandemic travel restrictions in 2020, prompted a massive fall in students traveling to the US for higher education five years ago. In the years since, Chinese students have increasingly chosen to study in the UK and Australia in place of the US.While mid-sized and large cities and wealthy small towns such as Ithaca, New York, – home to Cornell University – can typically take the financial hit from the loss of thousands of international students due to their diversified economies, less affluent towns, whose economies have never fully recovered from the loss of students on-site during the pandemic, remain imperiled.According to the US Department of Commerce, international students are thought to have contributed around $50bn to the US economy in 2023 in tuition, rent, food, taxes and a host of other ways. In Ohio, Kentucky, and Iowa, which rank among the lowest states for GDP growth in the country, and which are Trump strongholds, their economies are set to lose as much as $200m, $45m and nearly $43m respectively. Florida’s economy could see losses reaching as much as $243m.“We tend to think that foreign students only go to big Ivy League schools in big cities. But if you look at a recent Brookings Institution report, it is clear that every school, small, medium and large, in every town or city – small, medium or large need income from international students,” says Tara Sonenshine, Edward R Murrow professor of practice in public diplomacy at Tufts University.In West Lafayette, Indiana, the 50,000 students who attend Purdue University make up the overwhelming majority of the city’s population. Almost one in four of those at Purdue in 2024 were international students, most paying full tuition and board costs. These students, many who attend to learn cutting-edge agriculture practices, help employ more than 10,000 people, making Purdue University the largest employer in the region.It’s a similar story for rural Illinois, where one-quarter of students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus are from overseas – one of the highest ratios of any private or public college in the country. There, an international student studying for a four-year undergraduate degree can net the college and offshoot businesses about $200,000 in tuition and other fees.In Oxford, Ohio, one of the biggest issues international students help local businesses with is providing custom during the six-week period from mid-December to the end of January when there are no classes at Miami University. At that time, other than permanent residents, the only people in town are international students.“Our business community is very dependent on Miami University students. Oxford’s population is about 20,000, of which 17,000 or more are Miami University students,” says Oxford city manager Doug Elliott.“We have a lot of homes that were converted into student housing. That’s typical for small college towns like us.”Elliott notes that aside from the financial benefit, international students bring energy and diversity in the form of festivals and gatherings to parts of the US that would otherwise never get to experience the wider world.“Cutting off visas for international students, combined with demographic shifts in America and the declining enrolment in college, in addition to the general disdain for immigrant populations coming here,” says Sonenshine, “would all add up to chaos and potential closures of small schools who rely on a broader pool on enrolment.” More

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      ‘Unprecedented in history’: global academic freedom group warns of dismantling in US

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      A global academic freedom group has warned that the Trump administration’s assault on universities is turning the US into a “model for how to dismantle” academic freedom.“We are witnessing an unprecedented situation – really as far as I can tell in history – where a global leader of education and research is voluntarily dismantling that which gave it an advantage,” said Robert Quinn, executive director of Scholars at Risk (SAR).In its annual Free to Think report, the Academic Freedom Monitoring Project at (SAR), an international network devoted to the promotion of academic freedom worldwide, counted some 40 attacks against academic freedom in the US in the first half of 2025, ranging from the government’s revocation of research funds to the detention and attempted deportation of foreign scholars over their political views, as well as a “torrent” of executive, legislative and other actions targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and other programs.The report noted that the data points to a continued erosion of academic freedom in the US after it counted 80 instances of pressure against universities in the prior year. While most of those came from state governments and local actors, the “nature of these attacks shifted after January 2025” to pressure from the federal government following the re-election of Donald Trump, and his administration’s efforts to control university admissions, hiring, research, teaching and disciplinary processes, the report noted.The SAR report analyzed 395 attacks on higher education leaders, faculty, staff and students in 49 countries between mid-2024 and mid-2025, including targeted killings, disappearances, arrests and prosecutions, as well as firings, travel restrictions and administrative measures. In addition to the US, the report highlights “concerning developments” in 15 other countries – including Bangladesh, where student-led anti-government protests were met with a brutal crackdown that led to the deaths of up to 1,400 people, and Serbia, where authorities threatened to defund public universities and withheld the salaries of faculty who supported a student-led movement against government corruption.Globally, the picture for academic freedom painted in the report is grim.“The space for academic freedom has shrunk at an accelerating pace over the past decade,” the report concludes. “Even in societies that have long had strong and stable democratic institutions, elected officials with autocratic impulses are using both the levers of democracy and extralegal administrative measures to undermine democratic institutions, including universities.”In the US, the war in Gaza, and widespread campus opposition to it, has offered a pretext for the targeting of universities, students and faculty whose values and views don’t align with the government’s agenda. Before 2023, SAR tallied an average of 15 to 20 attacks on academic freedom, many driven by elected officials at the state and local levels.“The pressure on the higher education space has been going on for decades,” said Quinn, noting that before the targeting of pro-Palestinian views and diversity initiatives, universities and scholars faced attacks over critical race theory and gender studies. “That being said, there’s no question that the administration is using as a bold pretext the allegations of antisemitism centered around the Palestinian issue to justify in many cases extralegal activity to crack down on the space for independent thought.”Trump’s return to power marked a “turning point”, the report notes, including more than 30 pieces of legislation related to higher education introduced during the first 75 days of his administration, executive orders eliminating diversity and gender equity programming, antisemitism investigations of more than 60 universities that flouted established processes, the freezing of billions in federal research funds and new caps on student loans and restrictions on Pell grants’ eligibility.The report also underscored the negative impact on global education of the Trump administration’s abrupt cancellation of international students’ visas and new restrictions for foreign applicants, as well as cuts at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that devastated higher education and research initiatives from Africa to Afghanistan. More

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      The students who debated with Charlie Kirk: ‘His goal was to verbally defeat us’

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      In the days after his killing, Charlie Kirk was remembered by his allies as a great debater. A quote taken from a widely shared video of Kirk discussing his life’s work – “when people stop talking, that’s when violence happens” – emblematized such eulogies.Kirk toured American college campuses with his rightwing non-profit Turning Point USA, where he would set up a tent, table and microphone, and debate with undergrads. The goal, he said, was to “save western civilization”, and remembrances after his death positioned him as a budding statesman – a conservative hero who strode across the political divide for the sake of open dialogue.Kirk applied basic rules of civility to his debate style, asking opponents their name and saying it was nice to meet them. He engaged young people in political discourse at a time when society has been split into bitterly antagonistic camps. But his critics are taking issue with any version of his legacy that does not account for the bigoted nature of his arguments. They are also closely examining his very style of deate.“I don’t think Charlie entered debates to come to a common consensus or to discover the truth,” said Mason, a 26-year-old graduate student who debated with Kirk on the YouTube show Surrounded last fall. “I think Charlie came to debates to verbally beat his opponents.”This made him a formidable combatant. “He knew the arguments for nearly every conservative principle and even theological concept, and he spent years to develop that ability, so he was very great at pivoting and changing the conversation when it was not going his way,” said Mason, who is based in Los Angeles.During one debate, Kirk insisted on the truthfulness of a racist hoax about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets. In another, he falsely called the term foetus “just a word for a human being”. He goaded college students, who eagerly stepped up to query or challenge him, with leading questions that were intended to elicit strong emotions – “what is a woman?” and “what is racism?” were two of his go-tos.“At its core, debate is supposed to be an academic exercise, with the goal being to be forthright and genuine in the information you present,” said Trent Webb, a professor of writing studies and rhetoric and director of the speech and debate team at Hofstra University. “In a good faith debate, the final goal is to reach consensus. If that doesn’t happen, then a lot of academics would consider it to be an exercise in futility.”View image in fullscreenAfter a Kirk debate, clips spun out on to social media, inviting millions into the fray. In celebration of perceived wins, Turning Point USA titled its YouTube videos things like: “Charlie Kirk ANNIHILATES Smart-Aleck Student Accusing Him of Propaganda”, “Charlie Kirk wrecks DEI talking points” and “Liberal Student Can’t Answer Charlie Kirk’s Simple Question.”Dr Charles Woods, a professor of rhetoric and composition at East Texas A&M University, and the host of The Big Rhetorical Podcast, said Kirk distilled nuanced topics into stifling, good v bad arguments.“Charlie turned myriad opportunities for meaningful dialogic transactions rooted in civility and turned them into confrontational interactions by amplifying binaries in his argumentative structure,” Woods wrote in an email. “What we know is that there is a spectrum of ideologies and worldviews, not just two: Charlie’s and whoever is on the other side of the microphone.”Hasan Piker, the popular leftist Twitch streamer who was scheduled to debate with Charlie Kirk later this month, wrote in a guest essay published in the New York Times that his would-be opponent was an “expert” at “[taking] advantage of people’s resentments and [redirecting] them toward vulnerable communities”.Still, leftists lined up to debate with him. Some, like a sociology professor who appeared genuinely curious to talk about the economic prospects of young people under Donald Trump, desired a meeting of the minds. For his part, Piker told Slate that while he is “not the biggest fan of the debate format”, he finds the forum “entertaining” and “galvanizing”.Perhaps no forum fit Kirk’s shtick better than the platform given to him by Jubilee Media, a YouTube channel that produces Surrounded, a thunderdome of debate where one person is encircled by a ring of ideological opponents who attempt to undercut his stances in lightning-fast rounds of verbal sparring, governed by literal red flags.“Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative?” asked the series’ first episode, an hour and a half of nonstop ragebait released last September. In the show, Kirk debated with his opponents such statements as: “Abortion is murder and should be illegal” (wherein Kirk said yes, he would hypothetically make his 10-year-old daughter carry a child to term if she were to get pregnant from rape); “college is a scam”; and “Kamala Harris is a DEI candidate.” (Consider these Kirk’s greatest hits; he often debated these topics on campuses.)Naima Troutt, a 22-year-old film student at the University of Southern California, said the students made $25 for their appearance on the show, which has since raked in more than 35m views on YouTube and spawned countless viral clips.A campus organizer who was involved with Black Lives Matter and Palestinian solidarity protests, Troutt did not know who Kirk was when she showed up to set that day, which helped her see him as less of a rightwing celebrity and more as a man she disagreed with.View image in fullscreenTroutt described a “camaraderie” between the students, with some of the more “chronically online” trying to explain Kirk’s significance to her before they started filming. But Kirk was not as eager to chum it up. “He was either on his phone, or outright rude. You got the sense that you were an opponent to him even when you weren’t debating.”Troutt jumped into the hot seat twice to spar with Kirk over fetal viability, Harris’s qualifications for president and affirmative action. They agreed on practically nothing, but Troutt found some merit in debating Kirk. “I think I became much better at articulating my viewpoints and defending my viewpoints, because one thing about Charlie is that as much as I disagree with – and at times hate – everything that he believed and stated in the past, the fact is he’s one of the only rightwingers who regularly puts themselves out there,” Troutt said.Troutt is not alone in this opinion. California governor Gavin Newsom, who debated with Kirk on his podcast earlier this year (and admitted his son was a fan), wrote in a statement that he “admired [Kirk’s] passion and commitment to debate”. Representatives for New College of Florida, formerly a progressive school that fell under the control of rightwing allies of Governor Ron DeSantis, announced it will commission a statue of Kirk with his table and mic on campus. The school’s social media officer told Fox News that the statue will represent “what America is all about”.Ultimately it was not rhetorical prowess but an insult that made Troutt a social media folk hero in #resistance circles: after Kirk attempted a gotcha moment by saying that “foetus” means “little human being” in Latin, Troutt called his self-satisfied smile “creepy”.“Smiling is creepy?” Kirk clapped back, to which Troutt responded: “No, your smile specifically.” The quip landed her an Interview magazine feature branding her “the college student who owned Charlie Kirk”. (Foetus in Latin actually means “a bringing forth; producing; fertile”.)In March, Kirk asked her to come to the stage for a 10-minute debate he held at USC, where they tussled over DEI again.“I was shocked by that,” Troutt said. “I literally just roasted this man, and now he wants to debate with me again. But the second time he was a lot nicer. A lot of Trump and Kirk supporters came to watch it, and it was a more hostile environment, but he was less hostile to me.”Mason, who debated with Kirk on Surrounded, describes himself as a progressive and felt it important to showcase leftist values.View image in fullscreen“They’re so often caricatured, especially for those in echo chambers of the right,” Mason said. (He asked that his last name not be shared for privacy reasons.) “As someone who feels very confident in my beliefs and convictions and my ability to communicate, I think it’s beneficial for me to go on a platform like this.”Mason and Kirk’s topic was gender and transgender rights. Mason got Kirk to admit that he did not know the bimodal theory of gender, to which Kirk called him “condescending”; Mason apologized for his tone, but said he was “trying to match” Kirk’s energy toward other debaters. Despite the testiness, the pair had a lively debate.“Having a conversation with him was very easy to do,” Mason said. “I’ve consumed so much of his content that I knew what he was going to say. I wouldn’t say that it was easy for a lot of the other [Surrounded debaters], because he understands the sport of rhetoric and debate, and is really good at controlling the conversation. I had to put in a strong effort to assert myself.”Webb, the Hofstra professor, called the unmoderated format of Surrounded where claims are not factchecked, “unnerving”.“You can’t negate that it’s very interesting to watch,” Webb said, “but those students are not armed with proper data and evidence, and a lot of times they’re speaking to things that sometimes are blatantly untrue.”After the debate, Kirk hinted that he wanted Mason to come on his radio show. That never happened, but the two kept in touch. The second time they debated – about wealth inequality at the USC event – Kirk praised his “high IQ”. But Kirk never put the debate up online. “I like to believe that’s because the conversation didn’t go the way he planned,” Mason said, “but it could have also just been because I don’t have the same online presence as someone like Naima.”The circus around Kirk’s social media did not just advance conservative causes. His work boosted young leftists like Troutt and to a lesser extent Mason. Gaining a platform as “the girl who owned Charlie Kirk” overwhelmed Troutt at first. “It did feel like getting thrown to the wolves,” she said. But she sustained her viral moment and has over half a million followers on TikTok, where she posts about politics.This small online community of Kirk debaters consider themselves an influential voice of reason against “alt-right” internet stars like Kirk, Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens.Hungry for another go, Troutt and other Surrounded debaters were scheduled to star in a reunion episode with Kirk later this month. On the morning of the day Kirk was killed, debaters in a Surrounded group chat were theorizing what topics might come up so they could start preparing. “It was surreal that in the middle of all of that, we got a news article sent by someone, saying: ‘Oh my God, this just happened,’” Mason said.After Kirk died, a range of reactions poured out on social media, with many recalling Kirk’s incendiary takes or honoring his memory. Kirk allies advocated for firing those who they said spoke against him. Meanwhile, some of the debaters were criticized by followers for their eulogies of their former opponent and the sadness they expressed about his killing.View image in fullscreenDean Withers, who appeared on the Surrounded episode and was called “the Democrats’ Bro Whisperer” by the the New York Times, mourned Kirk’s death through tears in a TikTok video. Tilly Middlehurst, a student who Kirk asked about feminism and what defines a woman at an event for Cambridge Union Society, her university’s debate club, choked up as she said the act of political violence left her “shaken and disgusted”.Withers later said that he became emotional watching the violent video of Kirk’s shooting online, because a close friend had been in the audience of the event and because he knew Kirk personally. “My tears weren’t me telling you how you should feel, but rather you happening to see me in how I felt,” he said. Middlehurst made her social media profiles private. (Neither responded to a request for comment. A representative for Cambridge Union Society wrote in an email: “Any comments made by speakers who openly debated with Mr. Kirk during our event earlier this year are expressed in a personal capacity and do not reflect the views of the Cambridge Union.”)Troutt felt “hesitant” to speak about Kirk’s death, though people looked to her for comment. “I don’t want to say the wrong thing and hurt people and lead to more violence. But I do want to help people in this moment process what this means for our country,” she said.After speaking with the Guardian, Troutt posted her own TikTok. “All acts of gun violence are horrible and must be condemned. That is my baseline,” she said in the clip. She added: “Mind your karma, watch what you put online.”Mason believes that “two things” can be true at once: “The video [of the shooting] was incredibly grotesque, this is terrible across the board, and I do grieve for his young children, but that does not make the life or the principles that the victim stood for any more palatable.”He found it hard to square the Kirk he interacted with, if briefly – a professional, nice enough man – with the hateful views he promoted.“I think that speaks to the dissociation that politics allows, where somebody can have these abstract concepts of what a group is, or speak ill of them, but it’s much more difficult to be insulting or vitriolic toward somebody who’s right in front of you,” Mason said.In the aftermath of his death, Kirk’s legacy remains as divisive as one of his debates. But there is no denying his influence on public discourse.“When we teach argumentation and debate in our classrooms, it’s not necessarily agenda-driven,” said Webb, the rhetoric professor.“Social media has taught us to believe that all opinions said online are valid and require response, and because of that, people are nowadays easily baited into these ‘debates’.” More

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      Texas A&M University president resigns after ‘gender ideology’ controversy

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      The president of Texas A&M University’s main campus is stepping down less than two weeks after a student’s viral complaint about “gender ideology” in the classroom set off a chain of repercussions, including the firing of the teacher as well as the dismissal of a dean and department chair.Mark A Welsh III, a retired air force four-star general, has been leading the university since 2022. His career before higher education included time as a fighter pilot, service on the joint chiefs of staff, work as the CIA’s associate director for military affairs, a term as commandant of cadets at the Air Force Academy, and a stint as dean of the Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M.“President Welsh is a man of honor who has led Texas A&M with selfless dedication,” the university’s chancellor, Glenn Hegar, said in a statement. “We are grateful for his service and contributions. At the same time, we agree that now is the right moment to make a change and to position Texas A&M for continued excellence in the years ahead.”Welsh has not offered a specific reason for why he is leaving his position or clarified whether it is a result of the viral incident, instead simply saying: “Over the past few days, it’s become clear that now is that time” to step down, in a Friday statement.Welsh became president following the 2023 departure of Margaret Katherine Banks, who left amid uproar over the mishandled hiring of a journalism professor, Kathleen McElroy. That controversy drew fire from Texas Republicans because of McElroy’s ties to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which are now prohibited in the state.According to the Thursday evening announcement, Welsh’s resignation will take effect on Friday.“Today, President Welsh has submitted his resignation, and both the Board of Regents and I agree that this is the right moment for change,” Hegar said in a post on X.Brian Harrison, a Republican state representative who circulated the viral footage and pressed for Welsh’s removal, applauded the outcome.“As the first elected official to call for him to be fired, this news is welcome, although overdue,” Harrison wrote on X. “Now… END ALL DEI AND LGBTQ INDOCTRINATION IN TEXAS!!”The video clip at the center of the controversy, which Harrison shared on 8 September, was originally filmed in July during a children’s literature course. The student who spoke out, whose identity Harrison withheld at their request, and the instructor, Melissa McCoul, are not visible in the footage.In another recording Harrison shared on social media, the same student can be heard speaking with Welsh. She asks Welsh if he approves of LGBTQ+ content being taught at Texas A&M, to which Welsh replies that the courses are typically for students entering fields such as psychiatry, counseling, education and non-profit work.“Those people don’t get to pick who their clients are, what citizens they serve, and they want to understand the issues affecting the people they’re going to treat,” Welsh tells the student. “So there is a professional reason to teach some of these courses.”The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, had threatened to fire Welsh in January after the university’s business school invited advanced PhD students and faculty to a conference designed to recruit Black, Hispanic and Indigenous graduate students.Though Abbott cannot fire university presidents, he appoints the members of the Texas A&M University System board of regents, who do have that authority. Following the threat, Welsh said Texas A&M would pull out of the conference completely. More

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      How Charlie Kirk turned campuses into cultural battlefields – and ushered in Trump’s assault on universities

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      Charlie Kirk, the far-right activist killed this week while speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University, never graduated from the community college he briefly attended. But his lack of a degree didn’t stop him from assuming a defining role in the ongoing transformation of US higher education.Kirk pioneered a style of ideological warfare against what he viewed as bastions of leftism, helping turn campuses into cultural battlefields and paving the way for Donald Trump’s unprecedented campaign to weaken American universities and subject them to his movement’s ideological agenda.“Charlie Kirk will be remembered as one of the foremost architects of the political strategy of treating faculty and students with whom he disagrees as enemies to be defeated,” said Isaac Kamola, a political science professor at Trinity College whose research focuses on conservative efforts to undermine higher education.Kirk’s murder at the age of 31 followed more than a decade of on-campus activism, which was characterized by his staunch bigotry and Christian nationalism; hundreds of often incendiary “debates” – his favored medium; and the 2012 establishment of Turning Point USA, a conservative powerhouse that calls itself, with more than 900 chapters, the nation’s largest youth movement. Starting from his parents’ garage in suburban Chicago, Kirk often boasted, the movement grew one viral attack line at a time, supercharged by social media’s conflict-rewarding algorithms.View image in fullscreenKirk wore his lack of a degree as a point of “pride”, he told California governor Gavin Newsom in a podcast interview earlier this year, and as ammunition for his characterizations of American campuses as elitist and out of touch.“I didn’t even graduate community college,” Kirk said. “I represent most of the country. Actually, still, the majority of the country does not have a college degree and if I may, you know, bluntly critique the Democratic party, you guys have become so college-credentialed and educated that you guys snobbishly look on the muscular class of this country.”While Kirk had in recent years moved from campus activist to the upper echelons of Republican politics and Trump’s inner circle, on university campuses he will mostly be remembered for his role galvanizing the so-called “culture wars” with his regular diatribes against diversity initiatives, immigration and minority groups. Kirk emboldened conservative students to turn on faculty and classmates, established a “professor watchlist” for faculty it accused of spreading “leftist propaganda”, and embarked on an anti-woke crusade that has since become official government policy.View image in fullscreen“Turning Point was not the first group to target professors, and of course attacking higher education is not new,” said Matthew Boedy, a professor of English at the University of North Georgia who has been studying the group and its founder after being targeted on its watchlist. “What Turning Point did was take the traditional, old ways of conservatives fighting the culture war and translated it into millennial speak.”Katie Gaddini, a history professor at Stanford University who studies US conservatism, recalled seeing Kirk speak at an event years ago, where he boasted that if given 15 minutes with any college student, he could “de-program years’ worth of indoctrination”.“His whole mission, and Turning Point’s original mission, was what he called de-programming the woke indoctrination that he thought was taking place on college campuses,” she said. “And of course, we’re seeing the contestation over what can be taught in college campuses playing out on a macro, policy-level scale right now.”Beyond the campus warsIf Kirk’s aggressive, often rude style and frequent forays into explicit racism and sexism ruffled feathers with more traditional conservative groups on campus, he quickly surpassed them in relevance. Boedy recalled attending an event with Kirk and Black conservative activist Candace Owens, a TPUSA veteran who resigned from the organization in 2019 after making comments in which she appeared to defend Adolf Hitler. When a group of Black students raised their fists and walked out of the event in protest, Kirk and Owens mocked them and stirred the crowd to cheer them off. “It was emblematic,” said Boedy. “They’re in it for the culture war and that does mean warring against other people.”Hasan Piker, a leftwing political commentator who rose to prominence about the same time as Kirk and had been scheduled to debate him in two weeks at Dartmouth College, said that while Kirk wasn’t the first to debate speakers on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, “he was able to serialize this format better than other people, especially because he had a lot of institutional backing”.“He was a true operative,” Piker added, noting that his relationship with Kirk had been “cordial” even as their worldview was “diametrically opposite”. Still, he cautioned against interpreting Kirk’s predilection for debates as a sincere effort to engage in an argument.View image in fullscreen“It’s being presented right now with this notion that everyone was doing these debates because they wanted to arrive at the truth,” said Hasan. “The ultimate purpose of these sorts of debate culture, focused video sequences, is not to actually arrive at some kind of hidden truth through discourse or the Socratic method, but more so to just ritualistically humiliate your interlocutors.”Kirk’s influence soon expanded well beyond campuses, said Boedy, whose forthcoming book examines Kirk’s mobilization efforts in churches, media and beyond. “Turning Point expanded beyond merely college campus wars. Kirk used the college campus wars as a springboard to talk about the larger national culture war,” Boedy added, noting that TPUSA now has more high school chapters than it has college ones, and that the group is also involved in canvassing for conservative candidates.TPUSA “incubated” more than 350 rightwing influencers over the years, the group said last year, and more recently Kirk had also taken his activism abroad, promoting Turning Point chapters in the UK and Australia. In May, Kirk debated the Oxford Union’s president-elect, and earlier this month he traveled to Japan and South Korea to spread his message before new audiences.Kirk successfully tapped into conservative students’ feelings that they had been persecuted on campus by intolerant liberals. Now, his killing risks turbocharging those grievances. “There is now proof in the minds of a lot of young conservatives that they are persecuted for their views on college campuses,” Gaddini said.As some brace for retribution from the president, others warn that the chilling effect of the violence will be devastating for universities already battered by months of conflict and division.“This is a terrible day,” said Kamola, the Trinity professor. “Even if we disagree, the project of teaching and learning, and pursuing knowledge, is fundamentally threatened by violence.” More