At Loyola University New Orleans, more than 100 students packed a student Senate meeting for a single purpose: to block a Turning Point USA chapter from being chartered on campus. They succeeded. At St. John's University in New York, a conservative student named Massimo Guerriero watched his proposal get derailed not by procedural objections but by questions about TPUSA's founder — a man who was no longer alive to answer them.
Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Fifteen universities decided that was a good time to shut his movement out.
15 Turning Point USA chapters were blocked from forming on college campuses during the 2025-2026 school year. More than seven of those remain blocked. Separately, 13 different TPUSA clubs faced violent protests or physical attacks. The campuses involved stretch from UC Berkeley to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, from Fort Lewis College in Colorado to Saint Mary's College in South Bend.
The pattern is consistent. At Loyola, Juleea Berthelot, vice president of the National Students for a Democratic Society, described the blocking as a victory. "TPUSA chapter is trying to get chartered on our campus, and we said hell no," she said. "We showed up to the student Senate meeting with over 100 students… and they were denied their charter, which was a huge win for us."
Berthelot was more explicit about her goals at a November 2025 conference for the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression. "We're fighting back against the expansion of the Trump agenda and his goons' control on college campuses," she said. And then: "In a f---ed-up way, thank you, Trump."
At St. John's, Guerriero said the process wasn't even pretending to be neutral. "Many of the questions posed were not centered on our proposal or compliance with university requirements but instead focused on how we would respond to potential backlash tied to the ideologies of TPUSA's founder," he said. The founder in question was murdered. The university's concern was apparently about his ideas, not his death.
Charlotte Arneson, a campus rights advocacy program officer, pointed out the legal standard that's being ignored. "Colleges and universities may deny recognition to a student organization only for legitimate, viewpoint-neutral reasons," she said. Asking a club to answer for the political beliefs of its assassinated founder does not meet that standard by any reading.
The blocking happened at schools including Lawrence University in Wisconsin, Point Park University in Pittsburgh, and Utah Valley University. These aren't fringe cases at a handful of activist campuses. This is a pattern — a coordinated one, by the numbers.
Nobody banned left-wing student groups after the 2017 Congressional baseball shooting. Nobody shut down Democratic Socialists of America chapters after politically motivated violence from the left. The standard being applied to TPUSA is not about safety. It's about silencing a viewpoint while the excuse is still warm.
Fifteen chapters blocked. Thirteen attacked. A founder murdered. And the institutional response from American higher education was to make it harder for his supporters to meet in a room with a faculty advisor.