Selective Outrage: An Open Letter to CMU President John Marshall

by Shayla Trowbridge

On Friday, September 12^th, CMU President John Marshall sent a campus-wide email regarding the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah just two days prior. In that email, he stated that he does not “often weigh in on national or world events.” This is true. I have been a student at CMU for four years. In that time, John Marshall has addressed students as a whole regarding national politics exactly twice. The first time was to condemn the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7^th, 2023. The second was on Friday. In my time at CMU, I have grown as a person and an intellectual. I can say confidently that John Marshall’s ‘Human Scale’ University has nothing to do with that growth. This letter is intended for John Marshall, but I encourage everyone reading to consider carefully how his words represent CMU to the world. 

John, shortly after your email regarding the Oct. 7^th attacks, I spoke with you in your office hours. I came to you as a Jewish student on CMU’s campus who has previously resided in Israel, and as a student of Political Science. Primarily however, I came to speak with you as a human about how the words in your email were perceived by your students. At that time, the events in Gaza were just beginning to unfold, and I was watching in terror as the death toll for both Palestinians and Israelis kept climbing. I spoke with you for nearly an hour that day. When I spoke to you about the fear and anxiety that was being felt across campus by Middle Eastern students for fear of unjustified retaliation, you told me that your actions were meant to protect Jewish students like me. I explained to you that I did not need your protection, and that other students were in a more vulnerable position. I pleaded with you about sending out a revision, acknowledging the death toll on both sides, and indicating a genuine concern for the tragedy of human lives being lost at alarming rates. 

John, what I have learned about you in my time at CMU is that you say that you hesitate to speak on world events to the student body, but one thing you will never do is admit to a mistake. Being able to acknowledge when you have handled something poorly and taking accountability is a valuable quality for a leader that claims to hold your values. What purpose is discourse if not to create growth, to allow for mistakes and the ability to learn from them? I spoke with you for a long time about Palestine just days after the Hamas attack – when we did not have all the information. I was horrified when my plea to you was met with an offer to allow me to conduct an event on Israel as a counter to a student conducting an event on Palestine, a ploy for sensationalism in the name of ‘discourse.’ What was even more horrific for me was watching the Israeli death count slowly crawl to a stop, while for Palestinians, the number began to multiply. It has been two years, and you have never made another statement. This demonstrates to your student body that you value some lives over others, and that sticking to your initial reaction is more important to you than course-correcting.

Your email this week about Charlie Kirk has only served to further demonstrate your utter disregard for how all your students might be feeling. What happened to Charlie Kirk should not have happened to him, but the most important thing is that it should not have happened to anyone. Where was your horror regarding the lawmaker and her husband that were shot in a political assassination just months ago? Where is your horror about the school shootings that happen nearly daily in this nation, or even just the one that happened in our very state the very day that Charlie Kirk died? Where is your horror about the thousands of dying children in Gaza? Once again, your email is one of impulsivity, of a personal belief that simply overrode your ‘value’ of not telling students what to think. Your email places Charlie Kirk on a pedestal and gives his life and memory more value than the other deaths that happen on our timelines every day. There is no denying that a father of two children should not have died, but Kirk being a father is not where the controversy is. The criticism that I, along with my peers, have for him is that the rhetoric Kirk preached in public settings is the antithesis of what your email is calling for. Charlie Kirk made his reputation less from “courage, conviction, and facts,” as you state, but rhetoric that dangerously conflated logical fallacies as being factual. This rhetoric was rarely to start healthy and civil conversations and more about him trying to get reactions out of as many people as possible. 

If you truly stand for a university campus that values Love, Dignity, Respect, and Integrity, you should be able to accept when you have miss-stepped, you should have more appropriately addressed the situation in Gaza, and you should not have sent such a clearly biased email to your student body about Charlie Kirk. Rather, you state that you are seeking to promote civil discourse and open dialogue, while all the while side-stepping any real accountability or difficult conversation.  You seek less to create a conversation and more so to create a space that is tolerant of hate speech and of the ideas that have led to the direct harm of thousands of people. This sentiment is something that I am not alone in, and the fact that you have downplayed me and voices like mine in nearly every civil discourse that your students have tried to have with you has demonstrated that you only care about this discourse when it is with people who look like you.

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