Charlie Kirk spent much of his career trying to reshape higher education, frequently attacking professors by name and crusading against colleges and universities across the country.

After the conservative activist and founder of Turning Point USA was assassinated Wednesday, some of the professors he targeted worry for their own safety and feel anxious about the climate of distrust the 31-year-old sowed among young people.

“I feel less safe after Kirk’s murder,” said Nathan Connolly, a history professor at the Johns Hopkins University. “I think that his death, like his life, ripens murderous fruit.”

Connolly and more than two dozen other university faculty in Maryland appeared on Turning Point’s “professor watchlist,” a website the conservative activist group founded in 2016 to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

A U.S. historian, Connolly said he takes no joy in Kirk’s murder, which occurred during a debate at Utah Valley University. Kirk also targeted Connolly’s late wife, Hopkins professor Shani Mott, who was at the time battling cancer.

The two were placed on the watch list not because of anything they taught in the classroom but because of a lawsuit they filed, claiming an appraiser dramatically undervalued their home because they were Black. The couple’s suit was dismissed.

“It was incredibly unsettling,” Connolly said, adding that the couple received hateful messages after they were posted on the watch list. “You never know who’s going to see the information and try to take matters into their own hands.”

Christabel K. Cheung, a cancer researcher and associate professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, was placed on the watch list for “racial ideology” after she gave a talk about health equity for young cancer patients.

“I would have never thought that there’s anything controversial about anything I do,” said Cheung, who is a two-time cancer survivor.

After she was placed on the list, Cheung was repeatedly harassed. She said she received hundreds of threatening emails, stopped giving out her phone number to students and deleted her office location from her faculty page.

“I removed my name from a lot of my work,” Cheung said. “It’s a bummer to have to start using pseudonyms and not get as much credit for my work, but it’s not fun being harassed.”

Cheung said she doesn’t condone political violence. She also said she feels “uncomfortable” with the way some politicians and large organizations are characterizing Kirk and his activism.

“I know firsthand a lot of the damage that his advocacy has done to the populations that I serve and I care about,” she said. “I think some of the coverage that valorizes his influence is quite disturbing.”

Like Cheung, Stacey Patton, a research associate at Morgan State University’s Institute for Urban Research, was “deluged” with abusive messages threatening violence after she was placed on Turning Point’s watch list for “racial ideology” and “violence.”

“The flood was so relentless that the head of campus security reached out to offer me an escort, because they feared one of these keyboard soldiers might step out of his basement and come do me harm,” she wrote on her Facebook page. “And I am not unique.”

Drew Daniel, an English professor at Hopkins on the list, recalled receiving similarly abusive messages.

He was placed on the watch list after he signed a letter in November 2023 that condemned the “horrific ongoing violence inflicted on the Palestinian people.” The Turning Point website labels Daniel a “terror supporter” and an antisemite.

Soon after he was added to the list, Daniel, who was raised in a mixed Jewish household, started to get abusive emails and messages from people across the country.

“I got to see firsthand the new wave of hostility towards academia as a sector,” he said in an interview Friday. “Charlie Kirk represented a smiling face that seemed to be open for debate, but in terms of the effects on someone like a professor, the watch list is much closer to the legacy of someone like Joe McCarthy.”

U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, claimed in the 1950s to have a list of known Communists in government, Hollywood and universities. He became synonymous with Communist fears during the Cold War.

Daniel said he has grown increasingly worried about being surveilled while teaching, which he said would be a “betrayal of the kind of trust and intimacy that takes place in a classroom.”

Because he’s tenured and at a private university, Daniel isn’t as worried about losing his job. But he has friends who teach at public colleges, especially in Republican-led states, he said, who have become more cautious about what they teach.

“Charlie Kirk’s legacy is empowering classroom surveillance and encouraging young people to harass professors that they disagree with,” he said. “I don’t see Charlie Kirk’s actions with the professor watch list as at all consistent with a belief in free speech.”

The story has been updated to correct the spelling of Drew Daniel's surname.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.