Assassination on Campus | Should UVU Memorialize Charlie Kirk?

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Charlie Kirk, the late co-founder of Turning Point USA, made a name for himself by debating college students on topics like Access to abortion, gun control, LGBTQ rights, and more. He aligned himself with the far right, openly criticized civil rights and promoted a number of false conspiracy theories.

But he managed to gain a substantial following online and built relationships with powerful figures like President Trump.

In early 2025, shortly after Trump took office for the second time, Kirk and Turning Point USA launched the American comeback tour, where Kirk would travel across the country, hosting forums that what he described as "one of the last strongholds of the left, the American University." But the tour was cut short on September 10, 2025 when Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck during an event at Utah Valley University. He died the same day. Pricing news political activism, conservative media personality, Charlie Kirk, shot and killed while speaking at an event in Utah Valley University this afternoon.

In the weeks following Kirk's death, public figures across the US grappled with how to handle Kirk's extremely controversial legacy. At Utah Valley University, the site of Kirk's murder, students and the state as a whole have been thrown into a complicated debate of their own. I'm Ian Mont.

“This week on campus files, assassination on campus, should you view memorialized Charlie Kirk?”

What is up, Kirkman? Welcome back to KFTV.

You've got a lot of amazing stuff you guys today.

We'll be hanging out with student council. Not to mention an interview with Andrew Sibot, and we're going to be playing some fun games. I'm Matt, I'm Andrew, and you're watching KFTV. I went to American Fort High School and we had a student broadcast program with the KFTV because our mascot was a K-man. This is Matthew Frankie. He's currently a student at Utah Valley University, or UVU for short.

UVU is a public school in Orom, a suburb of Provo. It's not officially a religious school, but being in Utah means it does have a pretty spiritual student body. It's only 10 minutes from Brigham Young University after all. As from Matthew, back in high school, he helped produce KFTV, the student news broadcast for American Fort High School. He enjoyed it so much that when he arrived at UVU, he was quick to join the student newspaper, the UVU review.

Matthew joined the UVU review as a reporter in the fall of 2023.

He wrote a few pieces in his first year, a movie review piece about some great horror games to play around Halloween,

and a more newsy piece about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., entering the race for president in early 2023. And by the time he started his junior year, he'd been promoted to executive web producer. On the morning of September 10th, 2025, Matthew had a job interview in Provo, a town right next to the UVU campus. I interviewed with the company over in Provo. It was just like the day actually the Wednesday afternoon. And so once I was done with that, I was going to take a public transport over to UVU.

Matthew made it back to campus just before 12.30 pm. Yeah, when I showed up, I didn't even realize what was happening immediately. I saw like a lot of people, there's an underpass tunnel, and I saw like a lot of people coming out of it and so I was like, yeah, he couldn't recall it at the time, but Matthew had seen Promo as for a turning point USA event, featuring Charlie Kirk to be held on campus that afternoon.

“I saw a friend of mine and I was like, hey, you know, how's it going?”

Everything good? She's like, oh, well, there's an active shooter, you know, like really dissociated. And so then that's when I kind of finally started to notice like, there were people that were streaming on their phones, with their loved ones, and you know, just kind of breaking down into tears. And then I finally heard there's a guy after my left and white t-shirt, kind of like, screaming into his phone, he's like, I'm not kidding, you know,

I just saw Charlie Kirk is assassinated right in front of me. Matthew was stunned, but after taking a beat to wrap his head around what was happening, he snapped into a reporter mode. I had just missed the shot by about two or three minutes. I kind of stood on that for a second. And then I realized, oh, wait, I'm a student reporter.

So I always keep my press badge in my backpack, and so I pulled that out and kind of pulled it on.

We have a team's channel.

“So when I threw on my lantern or stuff like that, like my first message I sent out was like, is everybody okay?”

You know, we kind of made sure everybody's okay, and they were in a safe location. Thankfully, Matthew was able to confirm that the UVU review staff were all safe and accounted for. I went through the underpass towards a fuel gateway, which is if you go to a direct, if you go to a fuel gateway, you can directly to a courtyard where it happened. And yeah, just ran out of more people and I started trying to interview people, but it was just, it was okay.

All I came in, because as soon as I got over there, like a lot of police cars started arriving, and at the Swag guys who didn't even necessarily look like Swampie immediately. I thought they were like National Guard because they were all at deckdown, can't flash.

It was a much more chaotic situation to report on that Matthew had never experienced.

There had been hundreds of people on the scene. The shooter was still on the loose. Campus security, local police, and Swad were working to coordinate off evidence and track the shooter. And amidst all of this, were hundreds of students and members of the public, still terrified and reeling from what they had witnessed. Up until this point, Matthew's work as a student reporter had been a way to have fun.

And now he's standing in the midst of an active crime scene. So when I was really kicking myself for, I was trying to like take some photography and stuff like that, you know, for an article story. But I just kind of couldn't bring myself to do it. I know as far as like being a journalist goes, like there's nothing wrong with, you know, taking those kind of photos, but taking photos of really terrible thing happening.

“I think people can end their worst moments. This is so really weird.”

Matthew did manage to interview a number of witnesses, including one student who agreed to help him get off campus when he was ready to go. So we kind of continue chatting on the way back to the train station. He was in a little processing a lot, because I guess he himself had been a few active shooter situations. And so this brought up the law for him. And so I was like, oh man, yeah, this is really feeling real.

All of sudden, and so he's telling me about his experience. He was in canlet the front rows. And he was describing, watching a man die essentially. UVU canceled classes for the rest of the week after the shooting. And gradually began reopening in mid-September.

On the week they returned, Matthew remembered seeing an announcement from UVU's administration. It was the end of the week when they had made the announcement. The announcement read, quote, following the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025. The university is creating a committee to develop a memorial. It went on to invite students to share their thoughts and ideas.

The wording made it seem like a memorial was a sure thing. But for some in the UVU community, this idea was unacceptable. After all, while Kirk was an advocate of free speech, he used his free speech to promote a number of harmful ideas, like the notion that some gun deaths are worth it, or that Martin Luther King Jr. was an awful person. He was also a proponent of conspiracy theories, like the Great Replacement,

which claims white people are intentionally being replaced as part of some sort of grand plan. So UVU students who, less than two weeks earlier had experienced an active shooter and witnessed a murder, they now had to wrestle with the question of whether or not to build a memorial to Charlie Kirk.

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The days after Charlie Kirkstas were intense for the staff of the UVU review. They cleared out campus and everything, and so we kind of started to regroup a little bit

“and try and figure out, OK, we've got to piece something together like what do we know?”

Then we started getting, like it's just a ton of emails and phone calls and stuff like that from other news organizations. By the time you're listening to this, you may have forgotten just how crazy things got. So we know it was going to be like a relatively big story because we were aware that he had pretty large social media presence, but if blowing up to the scope that it has,

there was no way that we could have anticipated that at all. Kirk was a controversial figure to say the least, and his death triggered extreme reactions. Trump spoke in an address from the Oval Office, and ABC temporarily pulled Jimmy Kimmel's show after he claimed conservatives were trying to score points of Kirk's death. Kirk's death had become another battle in the ongoing cultural war between the right and the left.

But from Matthew and other students at UVU, the controversy and pain were much more close to home. When I got back to campus, like there were people putting together like a little, you know, memorial, tough stuff like bringing photos and flowers and writing chalk and stuff all over campus.

I was all over the courtyard, and then that already was really just kind of powerful seeing people come together

and say like this was a terrible thing. The middle of September was very quiet on the UVU campus. Class had been temporarily canceled, but Matthew had a campus job, so he came back before most. It was really dead for the first couple of days. People like sort of trickled back in because nobody really wanted to be there after that had happened.

And the whole atmosphere for a little while was just really kind of tense because everyone was kind of super on edge. We could kind of see like people were sort of looking down on their feet and not trying to make eye contact with anybody. While the country had erupted into a loud and intense fight over what to make of Charlie Kirk's death, the campus at UVU was quiet, tense and on edge. They've been working on doing some construction for the others at dance studio.

And one of the construction workers I'm pretty sure dropped if she applied wood, but had like a really loud bang. And so that kind of made everybody like jump a little bit like what's going on. To their credit, UVU administrators quickly brought in resources for students. Free counseling, therapy animals, walking buddies to safely escort students around campus, and even care stations with water, snacks and resources available around campus.

Because you know this is kind of thing where some people, they either can cross us in pretty quickly and it kind of just sits in like a freight train medially or kind of stews for a little while. But bills until they don't have any choice but to deal with them. But when Matthew saw the announcement about a possible memorial, less than two weeks after Kirk's death, it seemed notable. It's like, oh, that's interesting.

I wonder what's going on there, so I started doing more digging. I tried to work with the University and kind of get one information I could. The announcement was a bit light on details. It gave the names of two people who would co-chair the committee. A UVU trustee and a member of the State Board of Education.

As soon as I started doing a little bit of digging, I found the fundraiser.

“It was a giftsandgo.com fundraiser and really kind of made me curious that this was in your game, okay?”

Who would moshed it? Givesandgo is a Christian and conservative alternative to GoFundMe, the crowdfunding website. It's got much loose or content moderation and has been used to raise money for anything from January 6 defendants to Luigi Mangioni, the alleged shooter of the United Healthcare CEO. The day after Kirk was shot, Utah State Senator Daniel McKay created a giftsandgo fundraiser,

seeking $150,000 to fund a memorial to Charlie Kirk on the UVU campus. Shortly after, McKay was invited to join the Memorial Committee at UVU. State Senator McKay visited campus and then spoke about the memorial in a podcast interview with KUTV. The Salt Lake City CBS station. The one thing I thought was really interesting is because I then got the tour around the geography of the campus and what happened.

And it was amazing. There were a number of people like I didn't agree with Charlie, but I really appreciated the way, you know,

he debates or has these conversations, we need more of them that kind of stuff. I was enlightened. Listening to this interview, I was struck by the response of one of the co-hosts. Mara Carabelow. In addition to co-hosting this show, Carabelow is a political advisor in Utah.

“I think her response to State Senator McKay helps put into words the complicated feelings many on and off campus had about a possible memorial.”

This was a private citizen, albeit a really influential private citizen. And this person was intentionally electrically charged.

I mean, his very speech was set up to sort of be a challenge, right?

Prove me wrong. So he lost his life and I want to respect that. But I do know that when you're bringing people together, you can't bring them together around a device of figure. And I do know that if we're going to represent Utah, the conversation needs to feel like it's broader to me. And we have to ask ourselves the question about what it is where memorializing.

There was a really interesting quote from a student who was like, I don't know. I feel like we're canonizing this person, not talking about the ideals in which maybe he represented. Again, I'm not trying to minimize him.

“So how do you do it right if they're going to do something?”

Well, one, you don't have the conversation two weeks out.

Carabelo argues that this idea is way too early.

State Senator McCay responds. I'll just say the hard part is everybody's fine with a George Floyd Plaza. There's like eight George Floyd statues around various places in this country, right? And we can all agree. He was being arrested and not a great stand-up individual based on his criminal record.

There's some reason the country felt it was really, really important to memorialize him and where he died. And until not long ago, there was a mural here dedicated to him here in Utah. McCay and others have pointed to memorials of victims of police violence like George Floyd when criticized for their desire to memorialize Kirk in spite of the differences between the two figures. Floyd was not a politically active figure when he became the victim of a century's long pattern of police abuses. It's memorialized not because of who he was, but because his death captured the public attention for a national crisis, a racialized police violence.

In contrast, Kirk openly and intentionally created conflict.

He raised the political temperature by openly vilifying others, including George Floyd. Some of his last words accused transgender Americans of being predisposed to violence. And in a political environment where so much is made of what ideas should and shouldn't be allowed on campus, the reasonable question to ask what good a memorial to Kirk would do, and what ideas that memorial would promote. Safe.

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Because your special remains as neutral and unbiased as possible. This is Matthew Frankie, the UVU review reporter. But I guess my initial thought was kind of well that worries me a little bit. Because if it was something that were to depict his likeness,

“I think that I would kind of stir up a little bit more division across campus.”

Shortly after the memorial idea was proposed, a group of students organized a protest. Matthew went to cover the protest. It was surprisingly difficult to find people who were actually in support of that. There's also a good amount of people who are afraid about retaliation and sharing their opinion on the topic.

Even if they are necessarily in support of that, someone might not think that they're in support enough of it. And so the sand goes for, you know, as well for people who are against it as well. And if there's a lot of people who are in the LGBTQ minority on campus as well, who don't feel safe expressing their opinions for that reason.

Matthew and other UVU review reporters have covered Kirk's death and the reaction on campus with a lot of care. In one case, they recorded anonymous interviews with students about their feelings returning to campus. Coming back to campus has been sad,

but it has also been very cool to the community for the love and happiness that was coming together. I just say that this isn't the way

I think after tragedies like this,

we all kind of relates that we are all children of God and we're all united and Christ. And we all want to help. I think it's devastating what happened, but, amountlessly, disgusted that everyone's comparing him to Christ.

We all want to help and share and spread the love. And so there really has been a cool spirit here on campus. I think we've seen a lot of love and a lot of beauty and a lot of service. Through every converse talk.

“That's the only way we're going to make it as a society.”

As someone who grew up, believing in Jesus Christ and someone who still tries to follow his principles, he was the complete opposite of who Jesus Christ is. Of course, the campus was still reeling. People's opinions and thoughts on Kirk and his death

were being closely policed,

not just on campus, but across the country.

Do you have a sense of which argument is winning out more on campus? My guess is saying that it's in favor. Matthew thinks most students support some kind of memorial, but that doesn't mean they support any kind of memorial. General consensus actually kind of seems to be like,

"Well, we agree that it wouldn't necessarily be good to create something with his likeness." When considering the story, I can't help but think back to the push to take down Confederate memorials. This debate at UVU centers around more or less the same question

of what were comfortable memorializing. A memorial that centers Charlie Kirk's name and likeness is fundamentally different from one without. Because like a statue to Robert E. Lee, a memorial centered around a person

“valorizes them and all that comes with them,”

the good, the bad, and the ugly. With Robert E. Lee, there is far more bad and ugly than there is good. After all, he dedicated his life to ensuring slavery continued, hence the push to take down memorials. Now, Charlie Kirk was no Confederate general,

but there are many in this country and on the UVU campus that felt endangered by his rhetoric. And even without a memorial, the UVU campus has felt at times unsafe in the month's sense. One of the things that kind of have lost students on edge

a little bit is that campus has become very much a tourist hotspot. It's not uncommon for the site of a murder to become a tourist attraction. The Ford Theater where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated is a tourist attraction to this day. But what's unique about the situation

is that many of the tourists motivated to visit UVU are also the sort of people who's presence can feel dangerous to some students. Like transgender students, LGBTQ students, immigrants or any of the communities that Kirk and his followers

openly attacked and vilified.

“So a lot of people haven't had express feelings”

uncomfortable with people bringing their families to come see where it happened. You know, some of those minorities, again, talking about how if you're less safe, seeing a bunch of people wearing, you know,

red, make America great again, all caps walking around campus. The memorial question is an incredibly complicated one. Especially given that a memorial would make a temporary tourist attraction into a permanent one.

It's true that September 10th, 2025 was a monumental day in Utah and at UVU. And there are certainly lessons to be learned and takeaways to memorialize. But those lessons and takeaways are

wrapped up in countless layers of meaning which it will take many years to begin to unravel. The rush to memorialize Kirk began less than a day after his death. Well, before it can be looked at with a clear eyes

only years of hindsight can give. Personally, I can't help but wonder how different Kirk's role in American history will look in 10 or 20 years. And whether a monument would still feel like a good idea then.

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