Charlie Kirk’s Campus Memorial

The bad news is that Charlie Kirk is dead, but the good news is that he’s now part of the curriculum. It’s been my understanding from people opposed to tearing down memorials to treasonous slavers that the most effective means of teaching people is via statuary—and my alma mater, the New College of Florida, is leading the way, with the announcement that private donors will be paying to place a statue of the late right-wing influencer on campus.

Living in Florida is like being the canary in the coal mine, if everyone’s response to the canary’s keeling over is to make fun of it until they pass out and suffocate. Republicans stole an election here in 2000, and everyone blamed us while the perpetrators got busy working out how to rig voting outcomes in their favor in the other 49 states. We passed a fair-districting amendment, and GOP lawmakers here converted the existing gerrymandered majority into a different version of itself. The same crew transformed another apparent election reform—the restoration of voting rights to felons—into both a de facto poll tax and the basis to deploy tactical voter-fraud squads to intimidate anyone who might sidestep the tax; proof of concept for Jim Crow II.

Our war on woke became everyone else’s, and the vaccine pseudoscience touted by the state’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, is the same as RFK’s. Our public education model (chartered, censored) has spread far and wide. When gullible reporters mounted Harvard President Claudine Gay’s head on the wall, the person handing it to them was Christopher Rufo, a trustee of the New College of Florida, installed during Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-woke campaign for president. Until now, one hoped we might skip the mockery interval between a bad thing happening here and it happening everywhere else, but even this innovation was left to the jackals. Tonight, Sinclair broadcasting will air a remembrance of Charlie Kirk. That’s just three days after New College announced its new statue. The rationale is the same for both: Why?—because fuck you, that’s why.

I’d been hoping to go the rest of my life without “Charlie Kirk statue” amounting to anything other than a reference to a classic of urban-legend horror, but there it was, announced on the college’s official Facebook page: an image of a bronze biped bearing almost no resemblance to Kirk. It was generated by artificial intelligence, featuring a table New College doesn’t have, in a quad it doesn’t have, bordered by buildings it doesn’t have. In a way, this is the perfect context for someone who doesn’t have anything to do with the school and neatly represents the opposite of everything its original incarnation stood for.

That’s par for the course with this evil, goateed Mirror Universe version of New College, though. The college’s mission statement has been edited to include elaborate paraphrases for the confession, “I wanted to get into St. John’s, but Hillsdale was my safety school.” It now concerns itself with “eternal verities” (an absurd enough claim to be grafted awkwardly onto a school that loved French poststructuralism so much, but one that becomes actively hilarious in view of the moral relativism besieging the GOP with Trump in charge), “moral disciplines” (where to begin?), and “the good, the true, and the beautiful” (John Keats pokes his head out of the grave and says, “I’ll take Redundancy Troika for $500, Ken”).

In practice, though, the good, the true, and beautiful have taken rather more squalid forms. DeSantis handed the New College reins to Richard Corcoran, the Florida education commissioner who walked away from wrecking Jefferson County schools with a trail of corruption allegations clattering behind him like the tin cans on newlyweds’ cars. His compensation per enrolled student is astronomical—especially given Corcoran’s relevant job experience outside of destroying education, which is none. Gender-neutral bathrooms were converted back to the old binary for no reason, and it’s a small mercy Corcoran didn’t go with a bayside campus theme of “Buoys” and “Gulls.” Student murals celebrating diversity were painted over with the same crude quest for negation that bowdlerized the Smithsonian museums and our national parks. The Gender Studies library was thrown out on the street. More than 40 percent of the school’s incumbent faculty took the hint and scrammed. Other schools that feature self-directed learning and bespoke curricula, like Hampshire, took in students who suddenly felt like refugees.

Corcoran and his lieutenants then set about demographically correcting the school, pursuing membership in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics while scouring the state’s Christian academies for enough baseball players to create the largest program in America. This sudden infusion of devout Christian beefcake acted affirmatively to masculinize a coed balance that had hovered for decades at over 60 percent female, and that to anyone’s knowledge no straight male alumnus has ever complained about. New College had the cure all along for the moral panic about the Male Loneliness Epidemic, and conservatives treated it like a measles vaccine.

New student athletes were astonished to arrive at orientation and discover the academic rigor of the place where they’d ended up, while glumly noting that the school lacked anything like the sort of athletic infrastructure they’d been led to expect. The school lacked playing fields (most), practice fields (all), and indoor sports facilities (above small gym”), but athletes didn’t lack for housing; nearly half of all New College students had been exiled from existing dorms, and took up residence instead at makeshift accommodations—in some cases, the nearby Howard Johnson’s. Corcoran then paid to carve up the campus to hook up a series of “Banyan Box” portable housing units typically reserved for remote mining camps to the water and power lines—only to pay again to demolish them in the wake of rude reminders from Hurricanes Helene and Milton that Florida never does makeshift for very long.

If the point was to create an athletic program of distinction, Corcoran and DeSantis’s trustees have missed it. If they were looking to improve academic performance, they flubbed that as well—despite occasional PR releases touting whatever selectively reported criterion looked best at the moment. (There’s nothing like an incoming-student average GPA that doesn’t have to count the sorts of transfer students your aggressive sports recruitment brings in.) The whole boondoggle definitely wasn’t saving money. Even though New College’s GOP critics spent decades bewailing its per-student costs, they were willing to spend a king’s ransom to tear something down and replace it with filler. An extra $50 million garnish on the regular budget wasn’t enough even before Corcoran launched his great Port-a-Dormy offensive and DeSantis floated the idea of adding an art museum and historic estate.

But that wasn’t the point—any more than debate was the point of Charlie Kirk’s “debate me” schtick or any more than crafting a piece of contemporary history is the point of Sinclair’s memorial broadcast. The point was to make an example of a college that punched academically way above its weight class and basically minted larval PhDs. The point was to level the existing New College and replace it with its opposite—in everything from politics to excellence—just because you could. The even more particular point was to take the college where every kid who grew up queer or weird in Florida or just smart enough to seem like an alien would feel at home as an adult, autonomous person and pave it over with the same place they were running from. It was the social-academic version of saying, “You have nowhere left to hide.”

So now, instead of serving as a place of refuge and free inquiry, New College exists to generate agitprop: recreating the sensation of being confronted by “Debate Me, Bro” and “someone on the Internet sending you a picture of your house,” but with something like accreditation. It is now an obliging platform for any militantly ass-ignorant white jerkoff to claim authority over any field of study because he’s got the First Amendment right to be heard. He also has expert knowledge of how all of the same enumerated rights apply to you, which is shut up.

Maybe most important of all, New College’s ideological retread is a way of shaming the shamers, because if there is anything that Charlie Kirk, Ron DeSantis, and their many flunkies believe, it is that wokeness and shame are synonymous. What animates much of their efforts is indeed an allergy to shame—and the corresponding dogmatic belief that anyone who might make them feel bad must have been groomed by unspeakably dark and evil forces.

They’re half right. New College was a great place to feel shame. An education there was as full of critical theory and revisionism as its enemies imagine. It’s the first place I learned about Thomas Jefferson putting Americans in camps, and it’s the first time I saw someone put Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman on the cross for their revisionist econometric study of American slavery, Time on the Cross. It was the first place I spent any extended amount of time around a transgender woman, who was one of my girlfriend ’s roommates. Not unrelatedly, it was also the first place I really remember feeling my face burning for missing adult social cues and for unthinkingly using retrograde language and letting harmful assumptions go not only unquestioned but unacknowledged. I remember once seething at the shame I felt on the wrong end of a telling-off featuring a good deal of a particular academic’s work, and I remember clinging to the last sliver of a reasonable argument and refusing to budge an inch—then quietly, over the next year or so, reading their work and letting people mistake that for my curiosity or wisdom instead of a homework assignment I was given as a person. Just being there started me on the path of being at least somewhat less bad at my humanity homework each year. Like all growing, sometimes it was painful, but the embarrassment didn’t turn me fascist, because I’m not a child. Besides, the school was rather better at running that process in reverse.

In this sense, the message of New College and the Charlie Kirk statue planned for it are the same: that shamelessness wins, and that the shamers will be brought low; that their world can be inverted, and on this new grid, the shameless can build any false or cruel thing they want. Both this publication and I have explained how this logic has produced the hagiography of Kirk. Dropping a statue of him on New College grounds is like spiking a football—with, it should be said, just as objectified and utilitarian a relationship to Kirk as a wide receiver has to the pigskin. Charlie would have hated the place, and the old version of the school would have hated him right back.