“I might be the first speaker at a National Leadership Seminar not to go to college,” Charlie Kirk joked during a speech at Hillsdale College in February 2025.

Then he added: “I’m on pace to complete every single Hillsdale online course, so I think I’m making up for it.”

“So you’re going to fix the world, and you don’t know much about it,” Arnn told him. Instead of taking offense, Kirk got to work.

Unconventional path

Kirk’s route to national prominence was as unconventional as his education. Raised in the Chicago suburbs, he briefly attended Harper College before leaving to pursue political activism full-time. At 18, he founded Turning Point USA, which grew from a fledgling campus organization into a national conservative youth movement. Over the next 13 years, Kirk became a prominent author, broadcaster, campus debater, and ally of President Trump — all without earning a college degree.

To mark the first anniversary of Kirk’s death, Hillsdale has assembled 28 of the online courses in which he enrolled into a “Charlie Kirk online course path.”

Hillsdale is a small, independent Christian liberal arts college in Southern Michigan with an outsized influence on conservative intellectual life. Founded in 1844, the school refuses federal and state funding — including grants and loans accepted on behalf of students — in order to preserve its independence.

It has also made much of its classical liberal arts curriculum available online for free, drawing more than 5 million course enrollments.

From Aristotle to American history

The courses in Hillsdale’s new Kirk path were already free and open to the public. What the college has provided is a map through its extensive catalog: a self-directed liberal arts education spanning American history, constitutional government, economics, philosophy, theology, literature, mathematics, and statesmanship.

Kirk studied Aristotle’s “Ethics,” Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” C.S. Lewis, the book of Genesis, the Federalist Papers, the Roman Republic, Winston Churchill, and the history of Western theology. His political courses ranged from “Civil Rights in American History” and “The U.S. Supreme Court” to “The American Left: From Liberalism to Despotism.”

The breadth of the list offers a glimpse of the work behind the public figure.

Kirk said in his February speech that he had completed more than 30 Hillsdale courses and intended to take them all — “yes, even the Euclidean geometry one.”

He reserved particular praise for "Constitution 101: The Meaning and History of the Constitiution," which he argued should be required for every police officer, firefighter, and member of the military who takes an oath to defend the Constitution.

“As you take these courses, you realize how little our own elected leaders know about the country that they’re supposed to be protecting and defending,” Kirk said.

RELATED: Remembering Charlie Kirk, one year later

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Formative years

The remainder of his speech demonstrated how directly he applied that education to politics. Drawing on Hillsdale’s teaching about Woodrow Wilson and the rise of the administrative state, Kirk framed the opening weeks of Trump’s second term as a confrontation over the constitutional authority of the executive branch.

Appearing on "The Charlie Kirk Show" last week, Hillsdale President Larry Arnn recalled meeting Kirk12 years earlier, when the young activist was just 19. Arnn responded to Kirk’s ambitions by asking him a series of questions he could not answer.

“So you’re going to fix the world, and you don’t know much about it,” Arnn told him.

Instead of taking offense, Kirk got to work.

A month after their first meeting, Arnn received a text containing a photograph of a Hillsdale online course certificate. It was from Kirk.

“I knew him for 12 years. He grew so much,” Arnn recently said. After hearing Kirk deliver a Hillsdale speech several months before his death, Arnn approached him with a new assessment: “Okay, boy, you have learned a lot.”

Lifelong student

That willingness to be corrected was central to Arnn’s memory of his friend.

“I beat him up, and his reaction to that was exactly right,” Arnn said. “He was a student, right? He wanted to know.”

Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, described the effect of that education during Hillsdale’s commencement ceremony in May. She said the college helped her husband look beyond daily political commentary toward larger questions of what is good, true, and beautiful.

“He really understood that this institution wasn’t normal," she said. “It was something that elevated his thinking to be a thought leader and really become a serious person.”

At Kirk’s memorial service last September, Arnn placed him among the finest young people he had encountered during his career in education.

“Charlie is the only one who was never a full-time student at Hillsdale College who was on that list,” he said. “We will miss him dearly. He can’t be replaced.”

Hillsdale’s new course path offers a fitting memorial to the man Arnn called the college’s “best unofficial student of all time.”

Kirk was not content simply to lecture young people or ask them to take his word for anything. His signature campus events were invitations to challenge him: “Prove me wrong.” Hillsdale is honoring him in the same spirit — not by handing his admirers a set of conclusions, but by giving them access to the books, arguments, and teachers that helped him reach his own.