We have talked for decades in higher education about the heckler’s veto and its threat to free expression. The shooter’s veto is a whole new level of terrorism endangering political speech in America. That we have a full-blown roll call of recent victims – Donald Trump, Melissa Hortman, John Hoffman, Josh Shapiro, and now Charlie Kirk – is appalling. No one should have to fear being physically attacked for their politics.

The assassination of Kirk on a college campus brings it home for those of us who have been working for years to encourage viewpoint diversity and tolerance in higher education. One need not feel any alignment with Kirk’s views to recognize those opinions could never stand as a reason to render his wife a widow and his children fatherless.

If there were any illusions that the ivory tower still exists, the murder of Kirk should end them. Because they have been the home to marketplaces of ideas, college and university campuses are necessarily hotspots of political controversies, and no amount of localized respect for the pursuit of truth through constructive engagement can change the fact that they exist within our wider national context. That context includes inflamed political dialogue and cultures of violence alongside social media systems that promote and reward division, because those algorithms keep our lizard brains coming back for more.

Those of us working at organizations like Heterodox Academy necessarily pause at horrifying junctures like this one to ask if there is anything we can do to try to help dial back the violent impulse. Nothing we can offer is likely to speak to someone terrible enough to obtain a specialized weapon and carry out a cold-blooded murder.

But there is work we must do to help far more people learn how to understand and tolerate competing viewpoints. Most critically, that includes understanding how unacceptable the violent suppression of speech is – how we must all be unified around the right of everyone to speak unpopular ideas.

Heterodox Academy has chosen to focus on campus cultures, looking to share enthusiasm for core principles of open inquiry along with tools for promoting the freedoms to speak, teach, learn, and research. We don’t have any illusion that we can prevent political assassinations with this work, but we also know that we can’t give up on the pursuits of academic freedom, constructive dialogue, and freedom from forced political speech and censorship just because we don’t have the power to stop the shooter’s veto on the campus green.

As our friends at FIRE write, “[W]e cannot let the censors win. We cannot let violence prevail. We can and must come together in defense of our rights to be who we are and to speak our minds.”

Let us recognize, regardless of our politics, that while they have become scenes of political violence, our universities and colleges must remain extraordinary loci of intellectual freedom, and we must all do what we have the power to do to protect those sacred spaces.