A University of Michigan professor bankrolled by the Gates Foundation and Harvard has come under fire for defending the murder of Charlie Kirk, calling the conservative leader’s assassination a “solution.”
Charles H.F. Davis III, who teaches at Michigan’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, dismissed Kirk’s death, writing that the 31-year-old husband and father of two “should not be mourned or celebrated.” Kirk was gunned down Wednesday while speaking at Utah Valley University during his Turning Point USA campus tour.
Davis claimed Kirk’s killing was the result of “violent conditions and violent rhetoric spewed by empowered people that create them.” He added, “Charlie Kirk is not a martyr.”
Financial disclosures show Davis has received nearly half a million dollars from the Gates Foundation since 2020, along with hundreds of thousands more from Harvard University and other institutions to fund his activism-driven research. In 2020, Davis founded the Campus Abolition Research Lab to push for “police-free futures,” even as violent crime rose on Michigan’s campus.
The University of Michigan distanced itself, with spokeswoman Kay Jarvis saying faculty “are free to speak and debate issues of the day; but, to be clear, those individual expressions do not represent the views of the university.”
President Donald Trump, who ordered flags lowered to half-staff, described Kirk as “a martyr for truth and freedom.” His words stand in stark contrast to Davis’s rhetoric, reminding Americans what Kirk stood for: “truth and freedom.”
