BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE

Kirk at the July 2025 Student Action Summit in Tampa. Photo by Gage Skidmore/Flickr.

It’s not surprising that Charlie Kirk’s followers would laud him as a champion of free speech even while exploiting his death to stifle the speech of others who saw him as no kind of hero. This is, after all, what partisans are apt to do. The point isn’t to defend a principle—freedom of speech for everyone, no matter the topic—but to dominate or, as Kirk’s acolytes might say, to “own the libs.”

What’s more surprising is that Kirk is being hailed in the mainstream as a model practitioner of civil discourse. For instance, Jed Atkins, dean of UNC–Chapel Hill’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, posthumously praised Kirk for having “vigorously yet respectfully stated his political views in give-and-take exchanges with all comers.” Even the supposedly liberal New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein gave Kirk credit for “practicing politics the right way” by engaging with those who disagreed with him.

Until the massive media coverage that followed Kirk’s murder, I wouldn’t have known any different. I was vaguely aware of Kirk as a proselytizer for extremist right-wing views on college campuses. But I didn’t know much about Kirk’s “debate style” or manner of interacting with students. It was the media coverage and the encomiums to Kirk’s alleged civility that piqued my curiosity. Maybe Kirk had something to teach the teachers.

It was easy to find hours of online videos showing Kirk talking to students, often in a quasi-debate format, on campuses in the United States and the United Kingdom. I came away from watching these videos—many posted by Kirk himself—wondering how anyone could characterize him as civil in a way befitting a university setting. True, he didn’t scream at his opponents, but time and again he came across as aggressive, evasive, glib, lacking humility, and more concerned with scoring points than getting at the truth. That’s not what I would call a model for college-level discourse.

With all due compassion for people who were upset by his death, I have to say that if Charlie Kirk interacted with students in a classroom the way he does in the videos I watched, he would be exposed immediately as a terrible teacher. At any college or university that cared about quality teaching and the intellectual growth of its students, Kirk—had he somehow found a job as an instructor despite his lack of academic credentials—would have been sent packing in a hurry.

The problem isn’t just that Kirk was brusque and dismissive in a way that would cast a pall over a classroom and shut students down. No matter how softly employed, Kirk’s favored discursive tactics would still cause harm, presuming the goal was to teach students how to engage with others in a serious intellectual way. To be clear, this isn’t about the conservative content of Kirk’s speech; it’s about the difference between rhetorical jousting, which is what Kirk was good at, and discussion that yields learning and mutual understanding, which is what should occur in a university.

To see this, it’s necessary to watch how Kirk conducted himself in adversarial exchanges with students. Kirk’s tactics included all the usual tricks: moving the goalposts—pivoting to a new question or topic—when an opponent refuted one of this claims; admitting no nuance and reducing issues to black-and-white terms; cherry-picking bits of evidence (though rarely citing a source that could be checked and evaluated); trying to discredit students for their youth or for identities they embraced; and confusing historical sequence with causality (B came after A, therefore A must have caused B).

Actually, these aren’t just debating tricks or clever bits of argumentative rhetoric. They are a mix of logical errors, reasoning fallacies, and sheer artifice. Which is again unsurprising if one realizes the goal is not to educate but to manipulate. Why isn’t this plain to all observers? Kirk’s fans, of course, aren’t going to call foul on their Goliath. But what about the moderates, liberal and conservative, with no taste for Kirk’s white Christian nationalism?

I suspect that Kirk, like a skilled card sharp, got away with a lot because in the churn of an exchange it could be hard to parse the action. Thank goodness, then, for all those videos. By providing stop-action, play-by-play analysis (see, for example, here and here), skilled debaters have shown exactly what Kirk was doing. This kind of exposure might not lead true believers to see Kirk differently, but it ought to give pause to anyone who values logical consistency, sound reasoning, and proper use of evidence.

Kirk’s defenders might say he wasn’t trying to be a professor, that he used hardball tactics to shake up his audiences. That’s fine. But Kirk posed as a thinker and sought to be taken seriously in university spaces. So it seems fair to hold him to higher standards than, say, a brickyard preacher whose schtick is to harangue students about their sinful ways. By these standards—the standards of intellectual discourse that professors must meet—Kirk fares badly.

So, was Kirk a model practitioner of the kind of civil discourse that ought to prevail in universities? It depends on what is meant by civil. If it means superficial politeness, the kind that comes easier the closer one is to society’s centers of power, then yes, Kirk was civil. But if it means listening actively and trying in good faith to understand other minds, then I would say no. Without this ability and a willingness to exercise it, civility is paper thin, and the kind of humane discourse upon which higher education depends is impossible. People in universities—students, professors, administrators—ought to know this, as should journalists and pundits, and apportion their praise accordingly.

Michael Schwalbe is professor emeritus of sociology at North Carolina State University.