Charlie Kirk’s New Book, a Broadside Against Higher Ed, Is Heavy on the Anecdotes

On Page 1 of Charlie Kirk’s new book, Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can Win the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters, it becomes clear that the lingo of language isn’t the 24-year-old’s strong suit.

He’s about to take the stage at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when a few protesters begin to chant: “Charlie Kirk is a jerk! Charlie Kirk is a jerk!”

Recalling the chant, he quips: “Nice alliteration, that, but I have been called worse.”

I am on the first page of Charlie Kirk’s new book and already I’m shaking my damn head pic.twitter.com/j775Znz9Gp

— Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) October 9, 2018

It’s tempting to dunk on Kirk’s gaffe — the chant was rhyming anapestic dimeter, not alliteration — and call it a day. People on social media have been doing it for some time. But Kirk’s name is known to thousands for his anti-higher-ed broadsides. He has an audience of 763,000 on Twitter, and he makes regular television appearances.

He also has ties to the highest levels of the federal government. The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. wrote the foreword to this book. And Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, spoke at a summit directed at high schoolers and hosted by his organization, Turning Point USA. That’s the same group that The Chronicle found to be influencing student-government elections through donations.

So what does he have to say in his second book?

To anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the right’s criticisms of the academy, this brief 160-page refrain will sound familiar.

Kirk invokes safe spaces, political correctness, and liberal indoctrination as the symptoms of higher ed’s sickness. He excoriates the University of California at Berkeley, where protesters last year effectively shut down a planned speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, and lavishes praise on the University of Chicago’s free-speech policies. He complains about the injustice of students who were punished for handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution. (The Justice Department has done the same.)

The Spin

Much of what Kirk writes in the early chapters of the book, which was published by Post Hill Press, will be familiar to close readers of The Chronicle. But in a few cases, he spins the narrative to more easily demonstrate what he calls the bias of leftist professors.

Back at the University of Illinois, Kirk mentions the controversy surrounding its former mascot, Chief Illiniwek, and a professor who criticized it, Jay Rosenstein. The scholar made headlines after he was accused of filming someone he suspected of changing into an Illiniwek costume in a bathroom. He has told The Chronicle he never filmed anyone in a state of undress in the bathroom, and criminal charges against him were dropped.

“He tracked the offender whom he thought might be a school employee to the washroom to, as he put it, catch the chief putting on his costume to ‘document all of the ways the university employees might be involved in helping,’” Kirk writes. “Except that taking pictures of someone in a bathroom is illegal and a felony.”

And he mentions the controversy that surrounded Kaitlyn Mullen, a student at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and Turning Point USA member, which both The Chronicle and This American Life covered extensively.

Kirk paints a version of the incident in which Mullen was berated by a group of faculty members, although several witnesses interviewed by The Chronicle mentioned that only one graduate student had acted aggressively toward Mullen. (Another university employee had threatened to call the police if Mullen didn’t move her Turning Point table to a nearby “free-speech zone,” but no action was taken.) Several other faculty members protested at her table, but none was judged by the university to have acted inappropriately.

In another chapter, Kirk highlights portions of the website Turning Point USA started, the Professor Watchlist, a sort of rogues’ gallery of academics who “discriminate against conservative students.”

The Fill

At times, Kirk departs from his focus on higher education to address tangential topics. He spends a chapter on Candace Owens, Turning Point’s communications director, who recently spoke at Dillard University, and her idea that “the only thing that’s holding blacks back is an obsession with the past.” In another, he rails against socialism, Vietnam draft dodgers, and George Soros’s donations to universities and colleges.

He also fills much of the book with out-of-context tweets from his personal account. (To the delight of some online, one tweet gives himself credit for quoting George Orwell.)

He mentions a largely discredited study on the willingness of college students to use violence to shut down controversial speakers. Kirk acknowledges problems with the study, but seems to feel confident that it demonstrates his point regardless.

“Despite some flaws in the methodology (e.g., the respondents were not a random sample),” he writes, “the anecdotal evidence cannot be ignored.”

The book concludes with Kirk’s call to action. He touts his credentials, which include multiple meetings with President Trump and the title of the “second most powerful tweeter in conservative politics, according to an independently ranked list.” (Kirk didn’t name the list, but this one, from The Western Journal, puts Kirk second in a list of 14 conservative tweeters to follow in 2018.)

He encourages readers to join the movement while plugging Turning Point’s website, the Professor Watchlist, and even “posters to hang in your dorm room.” It’s all said with an aim for expansion.

“Our website provides a host of weapons for engaging the left,” he writes. “You can learn how to start a chapter on your campus. You can connect with chapters on other campuses.”

Chris Quintana is a staff reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.