TL;DR
Charlie Kirk’s 2018 book on conservative students and American universities, with a foreword by Donald Trump Jr. It describes the campus activism Turning Point USA was built on and defends the organization’s Professor Watchlist.
The image most people have of Charlie Kirk is a folding table on a campus quad.
Campus Battlefield is the book behind that table.
What is Campus Battlefield about?
Kirk’s argument that conservative students are outnumbered and outmatched at American universities, and his plan for changing that. The publisher’s summary puts the case in three parts: the left dominates campuses, universities suppress free speech and open debate, and some professors work to shape students’ views. Kirk writes from six years of building Turning Point USA chapters, and he lays out how conservative students can organize, recruit, hold events and make their case in public.
Along the way he mentions meeting Donald Trump more than fifteen times and appearing on cable news more than five hundred times, and he quotes his own tweets at length.
A chapter covers the Professor Watchlist, a website Turning Point launched in 2016 to list professors the organization said discriminated against conservative students or advanced political agendas in class. Faculty groups criticized the list, arguing it singled out professors for their views. Kirk defended it as a way to give students information.
The last chapter is titled “Join Us in Our Fight for America’s Soul.”
Donald Trump Jr. wrote the foreword. Post Hill Press published it on October 9, 2018, a short book of 160 pages.
What did critics say about Campus Battlefield?
Along the lines you’d expect. The Washington Free Beacon named Kirk its 2018 Man of the Year and called the book his call to intellectual arms. Some conservative critics were harder on it. Writing in Quillette, a former College Republicans chairman called it a bad book in style and substance, made of statements instead of arguments.
Why does Campus Battlefield matter now?
Because the campus was where Kirk did his most visible work, and where he died. He spent years at tables under a Prove Me Wrong sign, taking questions from students who disagreed with him and letting them finish. The book explains why he thought those conversations mattered.
Keep reading
My tribute to Charlie Kirk: the folding table, the Prove Me Wrong sign and the young man who let people finish their sentences.
