Scholars are responding to calls for Charlie Kirk memorial statues on college campuses, saying it's "really distasteful" and a "mistake."
After the 31-year-old MAGA influencer was fatally shot on a Utah college campus last month, more than a dozen House Republicans called for a statue at the U.S. Capitol to memorialize him, The Washington Post reports. Legislation was introduced in Oklahoma requiring each state university to add a Kirk statue. And in Texas, a similar call happened with Republican Rep. Nate Schatzline also saying public campuses should have them.
Then, a public liberal arts school, New College of Florida, which "has recently undergone a conservative overhaul," announced it would add a Kirk statue.
It was unusual, according to scholars.
“Any time someone is murdered, there is respect and a moment of reflection, but maybe even more importantly, it’s an opportunity to have serious discussions,” Brian Cody, a graduate of New College of Florida and Novo Collegian Alliance, a group opposing the school’s conservative turn, told The Post.
He said he was shocked, calling the announcement “inappropriate for an institution, and just really distasteful."
Over the last several years, people have pushed to remove public statues that memorialize Confederate soldiers, colonizers and polarizing figures.
Kirk's nonprofit Turning Point USA told The Post “everyone in our chapter is fully supportive” of a statue. But some argue that Kirk's rhetoric around race, sexuality and other political topics are divisive, as right-wing supporters have begun to view him as a martyr in the weeks following his public killing.
The calls to remember Kirk from "roadside memorials that we see every day" to "straight to ideology" are “an obvious backlash to what [conservatives] perceive as the taking down of great monuments,” according to Erika Doss, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author of "Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America."
“That’s a mistake,” Doss said. “Public art is about place making and community gathering and history telling.”