Over 600 students at Utah Valley University signed an open letter demanding the school cancel a memorial for Charlie Kirk — the Turning Point USA founder who was shot and killed on that same campus one year ago tomorrow.
The letter didn't ask for a different venue. It didn't request a schedule change. It called UVU President Jon Anderson complicit for allowing the event at all.
Kirk was fatally shot on September 10, 2025, at UVU's campus in Orem during a Turning Point USA event. The university announced it would shut down classes on the anniversary for a day of reflection, with TPUSA hosting a memorial at the UCCU Center. The event will be livestreamed across Turning Point's social media channels so that, as TPUSA put it, "Americans from every corner of the country are welcome to share the moment."
That was apparently too much for UVU's Students for a Democratic Society club, which organized the open letter. The signatories wrote that they "strongly condemn" the campus shutdown and that students will be "negatively affected" by the memorial. They accused President Anderson of having "aligned himself with the interests of Charlie Kirk's openly racist and antagonistic organization."
An openly racist and antagonistic organization. That's how they describe the group founded by a man who was murdered on their campus. Not a tragedy. Not a loss. An inconvenience to their schedule.
Anderson, to his credit, didn't fold. He stated publicly that allowing TPUSA on campus aligns with university policy permitting any organization to host an event and not blocking any group based on its political affiliations. The university conducted a security review of the event plans but made clear it is not officially sponsoring the memorial — just permitting it to happen on its grounds, as reported by Just the News.
Which is the part that enrages these 600 signatories. Not that Kirk was killed. Not that political violence claimed a life at their school. That the school won't pretend it didn't happen.
The "openly racist" framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that letter. Turning Point USA is a mainstream conservative youth organization. Kirk spoke on hundreds of college campuses. He registered voters. He debated students who disagreed with him. He did the thing universities claim to exist for — open discourse. And he was murdered for it.
But the letter doesn't mention the murder. It doesn't grapple with the fact that a speaker was assassinated at their university. It treats Kirk's death as a political opportunity and his memorial as a political threat. Six hundred students looked at a one-year anniversary of an assassination and decided the real problem was that someone might honor the victim.
The campus will shut down tomorrow. The memorial will go forward. The 600 students will presumably find something else to protest by Thursday.
A man was killed for talking. A year later, the objection isn't to the killing. It's to the talking.
