UVU and a New Saint

Utah Valley University and I have a close relationship. 

I walked its halls for twenty-two years as a professor. I appreciated my job and had great students. Nonetheless, it always felt strange: a hybrid that has learned to function. 

Though I am retired and live thousands of miles away, I could not help but be very moved by the assassination of Charlie Kirk in a patio I often tread and in which I sat and read or just conversed.

UVU, formerly UVSC, was a technical school that became a university, an officially secular university in a highly religious county, a university of open enquiry in a dogmatic and extremely ultra-right wing count, an open enrollment school in a valley with strong academic elitism. 

Most of its students and maybe a majority of its faculty were conservatives, though that latter is hard to know. Its administration certainly tended to the right, though we saw little in the way of overt politics from them. 

We lived the various jeremiads that Kirk exemplified, created, and led against the main stream university in the US. His world of of struggle against entrenched supposed academic left-wing ideology imposed on students always seemed a fantasy and far removed from any reality we lived. 

Perhaps I and many of my colleagues were naive. We misunderstood the degree to which. most of mainstream humanities and social sciences were defined by Kirkians and allies as left wing in opposition to the new nationalist world of Trumpian-style patriotism. 

Their’s seemed a John Birch dream-verse.

Well, after Wednesday a family has been left fatherless and a school traumatized.  A new martyr has been born for what still seems to me a Taliban-style cause against foundational freedoms and intellectual rigor. 

As with most popular saints, as long as there is social value, St. Charlie, will continue to gather adepts. A myth, a sacred story, what we academics call a hagiography, will be created around him and the event whose point is less truth, than truthiness.

Pamphlets and books will appear. Devotional documentaries, reels, and Tik Toks will appear like flies and vultures near a cadaver.

While skeptics like me may wonder if the assassination wasn’t an action from within the factions of the Right, as long as there is Trump and Trumpism—or this strange American Right with international connections—St. Charlie will continue to grow. 

Pilgrimages will appear, as people come to participate in the sanctity of where he died. 

Ritual to expel the demon, envisaged as the assassin and all the mentally unbalanced leftists (demons) who enabled the murder, will abound. 

A cause will take greater form and expand. 

But I worry about those left behind. A university president who just lost her husband and who has spent body and soul working to make UVU a better and more successful place.   Deans and Department Chairs who have spent decades developing this University into the fine place it is / was. 

I worry about the students who were there or simply part of the community who have now had terror driven deep into their hearts with an image of blood spurting from an ivory neck. They are marked and will live with this forever. 

In whatever happens in this case, whether they find the assassin or not, I hope people can spare some time and effort to help a community and University heal and regain its quality, value, and aplomb.

They and it deserve your compassion and concern.