In a Sunday interview on Meet the Press, Utah governor Spencer Cox said it’s important to find out what “radicalized” Tyler Robinson, who allegedly shot and killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk last week on Utah Valley University’s Orem campus. Cox, a Republican, said he didn’t yet know the answer, but the radicalizing apparently didn’t occur at college.

“This was a very normal young man, a very smart young man, 4.0 student, I think a 34 on the ACT, went to my alma mater, Utah State University, but was only there for a very short amount of time, dropped out after less than one semester, and it seemed to happen kind of after that,” Cox said. (Robinson later enrolled in Dixie Technical College.)

“Clearly there was a lot of gaming going on,” the governor said, adding that Robinson’s friends referenced the “deep, dark internet—the Reddit culture and these other dark places of the internet—where this person was going deep.”

While Cox took pains not to explicitly point fingers before receiving more evidence, some conservatives and right-leaning media organizations are blaming higher ed for “political violence” in the wake of Kirk’s death. Referencing the killing—and sometimes what they say are offensive comments various university staff and faculty have since allegedly made about the shooting—they’ve called for defunding universities, increasing the number of conservatives on campus, firing professors and more.

Kari Lake, the failed Arizona Republican gubernatorial and senatorial candidate who now claims to be acting chief executive officer at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, said at a prayer vigil for Kirk Sunday that college “brainwashed” Robinson.

“How does a 22-year-old become so filled with hate?” Lake asked. “Five years earlier, I was told, he was a Trump supporter. And we send our kids off to college and they brainwashed him. I am making a plea to mothers out there: Do not send your children into these indoctrination camps.”

“He was sent off to be brainwashed,” Lake said. “We have lived through the most horrific brainwashing campaign in the history of mankind.”

On Fox News, host Rachel Campos-Duffy said, “You heard the family members say this young man became more political in recent years. Well, what did he do in recent years? He went to college. That’s where kids are getting radicalized. It’s not just online.”

The editors of The Free Press, a right-leaning publication, published an editorial Friday about Kirk saying the country’s “acceleration of political violence has been frightening.” Unlike President Trump in his speech on Kirk’s death last week, The Free Press didn’t leave out this year’s killing of a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker in its list of examples.

“There are many guilty parties in the rise of political violence,” the editors wrote. But they went on to say that “among the biggest culprits are the universities. In the same way that madrassas radicalize jihadis, America’s campuses are among the places in the U.S. most hostile to disagreement and debate. Where they preach ‘inclusion,’ they actually practice exclusion—shouting down speakers they disagree with, for instance.”

They called campuses “toxic, hostile, illiberal environments.”

Over at The Federalist, another conservative outlet, White House correspondent Breccan F. Thies wrote a column titled, “We Can Give No Clemency To The Assassination Left.”

“Clearly, the only way to truly guarantee security is to destroy the left,” Thies wrote. “But as an olive branch, perhaps they should just be forced to interact with conservatives on a daily basis. Whether it is calling for violence, doxxing, intimidating, censoring, debanking, assassinating, or more, these people have proven for the past century they are incapable of wielding the power they have had, and so it must be forcibly taken from them.”

In the same way that madrassas radicalize jihadis, America’s campuses are among the places in the U.S. most hostile to disagreement and debate.”

—Editorial, The Free Press

Thies wrote that “staff, faculty, and students need exposure therapy in order to not be motivated to kill their fellow citizens,” adding that universities “should be required to commit a (high) percentage of their endowment to hosting, protecting, and advancing conservative speakers and causes.”

“If a university cannot find effective security for a conservative speaker on its own dime, then they should lose federal funding immediately,” Thies wrote.

He said universities should be required to have “a minimum of 50 percent conservative faculty, or lose federal funding,” and should “fire any employee, tenured or not, who cheered the assassination of Kirk.”

(He also wrote, “Some have posted publicly, and others have confided privately, that a public execution for the alleged assassin and co-conspirators is in order.”)

Laura Loomer, the influential conservative who now hosts Loomer Unleashed, reposted on X an alleged screenshot of offensive comments from a race and equity director at a university. In her repost, Loomer wrote, “It’s time to defund American universities. You don’t need to go to college. Charlie Kirk didn’t go to college.”

Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, then reposted Loomer’s repost, writing, “I’m on it.”

In a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon posted on X, Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, also called for financial repercussions for institutions that tolerated gloating over Kirk’s death. “We are urging Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to take decisive action to cut off federal funding from any elementary, secondary, and post-secondary educational institution refusing to hold teachers or administrators accountable for celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk,” she wrote.

Elon Musk, the owner of the platform they were saying this on, himself reposted someone who said, “So far, teachers and professors are by far the most represented” in her spreadsheet of “people who’ve said vile things about Charlie Kirk’s assassination.”

To this, Musk added his own comment: “They are the ones poisoning the minds of our children.”

Conservatives have also attacked “radical left organizations” more broadly, which may or may not include colleges and universities. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, referenced on Fox News “tape after tape after tape of federal workers, bureaucrats, staffers in the Pentagon, educators, professors, health care workers, nurses, celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk. These are radicalized people. There’s a domestic terrorism movement in this country.”

“The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me, before he joined his creator in heaven, was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” Miller said.

Asked whether Miller was referring to universities as needing to be dismantled, the White House press office sent a video of further comments from Miller that don’t mention universities.

Higher Ed as ‘Scapegoat’

People in and outside higher ed have said the facts aren’t there to connect the shooting to postsecondary education, yet conservatives are doing it anyway, in an apparent attempt to push a political agenda.

“What [Robinson allegedly] did—which we condemn in the strongest possible terms—they have blamed it on left voices, they have blamed it on higher education consistently,” said Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors.

Wolfson noted it’s currently unknown why Robinson allegedly shot Kirk, but it seems pretty clear it’s unrelated to universities.

“They’re using this case to make a broader argument about higher education that they’ve been making since Trump was re-elected,” Wolfson said, calling it another avenue to take control of higher ed. He compared it to the Trump administration punishing universities for alleged Title VI violations without actually conducting full Title VI investigations and presenting sufficient public evidence that they tolerated antisemitism.

“We’re seeing people making broad claims not based on evidence in order to move forward political agendas, and so I find that very dangerous,” Wolfson said. “I think we need cooler heads to prevail.”

Unfortunately what we’re seeing is people using this moment, and our collective horror at another act of gun violence, to justify a purge of faculty and university employees.”

—Amy Reid, PEN America

Don Moynihan, a tenured public policy professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who wrote a Substack article about this conservative phenomenon, told Inside Higher Ed that “using higher education as a scapegoat for Kirk’s tragic assassination doesn’t fit the facts of the situation.” He noted Kirk had been allowed on campuses.

“Kirk built his career and his political movement on campus,” Moynihan said. “He died talking to thousands of students at a campus-organized event. While he might have been critical of many members of campus, he was still able to find a space at universities to make that criticism. So for me this discredits the notion that somehow universities are culpable in his murder.”

“I do worry that his assassination will be used to justify the pre-existing culture war upon higher education at both the state government level and at the national level through the federal government,” he added.

“It seems like universities are being pressured to target faculty for those comments [about Kirk], to punish them,” he said. “Staff are also being caught up in this wave of cancellations. And it does feel like an important time for universities to stand up for values of free expression and to illustrate the same tolerance that they did when they invited dissenting voices onto campus.”

But Chance Layton, spokesperson for the conservative National Association of Scholars, placed part of the blame on higher ed.

“He most definitely was radicalized after college,” Layton said of Robinson, but added that the ideas he was engaging with “don’t appear in a vacuum.”

“I think that the consistent rejection of intellectual diversity” within universities “is a very strong reason for why this happened,” Layton said. The idea that speech is violence took off on university campuses, and “now we’re kind of reaping the rewards of that awful idea.”

Amy Reid, former gender studies program director at New College of Florida and now PEN America’s Freedom to Learn interim program director, said, “Unfortunately what we’re seeing is people using this moment, and our collective horror at another act of gun violence, to justify a purge of faculty and university employees.”

“Higher education is not responsible for Charlie Kirk’s death but is being used as a scapegoat,” Reid said. “If Charlie Kirk stood for the value of free expression and civil debate, then let’s honor that. If you don’t like something someone says, explain why, make your case and engage in civil debate.”