Is it fair to characterize an academic as “dangerous”? Of course it is. These are supposed to be the grown-ups in the room, responsible for teaching something to impressionable young minds. Many of them abuse their position by using it to indoctrinate their students to their politics.
Many make their grades, and therefore their futures, contingent on the students accepting, or at least spewing back, their political fantasies. They do so under color of academic freedom, as if teaching a course on the anatomy of tree frogs includes the authority to demand that students admit to their racist white privilege and sit silently in the back of the classroom so that they don’t impair the rights of others to express their deepest tree frog feelings about being marginalized.
But make a list?
Welcome to Professor Watchlist, a project of Turning Point USA.
This watchlist is an aggregated list of pre-existing news stories that were published by a variety of news organizations. While we accept tips for new additions on our website, we only publish profiles on incidents that have already been reported by a credible source.
TPUSA will continue to fight for free speech and the right for professors to say whatever they wish; however students, parents, and alumni deserve to know the specific incidents and names of professors that advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.
Deserve? Cut the crap. It’s a blacklist. Joe McCarthy is dead, as is Roy Cohen. It’s repugnant, as was the absurd claim that the WWII travesty of Japanese internment camps wasn’t a blight on America. Just as the extremes of progressives shrieking racist and sexist at everyone who doesn’t adhere to their orthodoxy were outrageous, so too is this attempt to return to the age of political blacklists.
At Fusion, the list was called “terrifying,” because everything is either exhausting or terrifying to progressives:
A conservative nonprofit irresponsibly launched a website this week to keep track of “college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” So basically all those super friendly alt-right and white nationalist folk have a catalogue of people to harass. Oh, and Donald Trump’s got a ready-made list of intellectual dissidents!
The president-elect’s clear lack of respect for the first amendment and one of his surrogates calling internment camps a “precedent” for a national Muslim registry makes the existence of such a list chilling and dangerous.
Because we don’t have enough insane hyperbole being promoted by fake news sites these days. And Slate, naturally, went to town on it:
But what the site did do—what it continues to do—is compile a one-stop shop of easy marks and their precise locations, complete with descriptions of offenses against America, God, and the “children of the sun.” Whether it intends to or not, this list watches over us at our country’s darkest turning point, poised to inflame the tinder-dry, gasoline-soaked pitchforks of a mob that has just stepped boldly into the light.
Don’t misunderstand me. The answer is not to take the site down altogether, for that would be censorship, and censorship is not the solution, just like it isn’t the solution when the 45th president of the United States gets his fee-fees hurt. But in this time of national reckoning, responsible conservatives need to pay attention to context.
Too ironic to mention Trump’s “fee-fees”? Of course, it is. This is an all-American effort, with mindless hypocrites calling other mindless hypocrites mindless hypocrites. That being the case, it was only a matter of time before the NY Times hopped aboard the hypocrite express.
Those familiar with George Orwell’s “1984” will recall that “Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought.” I recently felt the weight of this Orwellian ethos when many of my students sent emails to inform me, and perhaps warn me, that my name appears on the Professor Watchlist, a new website created by a conservative youth group known as Turning Point USA.
I could sense the gravity in those email messages, a sense of relaying what is to come. The Professor Watchlist’s mission, among other things, is to sound an alarm about those of us within academia who “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” It names and includes photographs of some 200 professors.
Kinda sucks when their abuse of “this Orwellian ethos” steps on your abuse of Orwellian ethos. You’re both playing the same game when it comes to abusing your position, your language, your authority over students, but then, you believe you’re totally justified because your politics is right, and right is right because you’re right.
So when I first confirmed my students’ concerns, I was engulfed by a feeling of righteous indignation, even anger. The list maker would rather that we run in shame after having been called out. Yet I was reminded of the novel “The Bluest Eye” in which Toni Morrison wrote that anger was better than shame: “There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth.” The anger I experienced was also — in the words the poet and theorist Audre Lorde used to describe the erotic — “a reminder of my capacity for feeling.” It is that feeling that is disruptive of the Orwellian gestures embedded in the Professor Watchlist. Its devotees would rather I become numb, afraid and silent. However, it is the anger that I feel that functions as a saving grace, a place of being.
Who knows what the creators of this blacklist hope to accomplish, but whatever it is, they’re fundamentally wrong to use this device to achieve it. That said, who are you to abuse your position in the Academy to demand that students accept your “fee-fees” instead of learning whatever it is you’re paid to teach?
You’re all a bunch of self-righteous, narcissistic hypocrites, so taken with your personal self-interest wrapped up in whatever lies you tell yourself about why you’re right and anybody who says otherwise is evil. The list is a terrible idea, both in itself and as a throw-back to McCarthyism.
But that by no means vindicates academics who abuse their students for their ideological obsessions. A pox on both your houses. And you are dangerous profs, even if this list is the worst possible means of making the point. You shouldn’t be silenced because of the list; you should silence yourselves because you are abusing your positions and harming students by depriving them of the full panoply of thought and allowing them to choose the ideas they find most compelling.
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I confess myself disappointed by Professor Yancy. He drops references to everyone from Orwell to Toni Morrison, from Socrates to Audre Lorde, but leaves out Gilbert & Sullivan? What, too low-brow?
Too something.
You are being a little bit unfair to Prof. Yancy. Certainly, if one is teaching about tree frog anatomy, political and cultural issues have no place. But Prof. Yancy’s specialties are: Critical Philosophy of Race, Critical Whiteness Studies, and African-American Philosophy and Philosophy of the Black Experience. (If you don’t really know what those are, go to his Emory U. faculty page and read the specific subspecialties and you still won’t know what they are.)
By their nature, these topics involve both political and social issues (I figured out that much). It is part of his job to discuss them, and to give his opinion on them.
That’s true, though there are questions about whether he should be using his course to educate on all issues or indoctrinate to his specific brand of politics nonetheless. That said, this wasn’t just about Yancy.
I agree that a watchlist is a bad way to get one’s point across? But is this list any different that the list of extremists maintained by the SPLC? They’ve been maintaining it for years, but it rarely seemed to bother anybody until recently when they added some controversial names to it. It’s even often cited by academics.
We’ve been down this road too many times. That the other guy is bad doesn’t make it any better for you to be bad. It’s an irrational argument preferred by 3 year olds. Don’t do it.
Huh. They have Melissa Click on the “list” but her batshit craziness had nothing to do with anything that happened in a “lecture hall.”
That’s parsing it a bit finely — she was on campus, agitating students.
Absent some sort of heretofore-unobserved law of conservation of batshit-craziness, there’s plenty more where that came from, and it likely was leaking out all over her classroom. Anyway, if there is to be a list, leaving her off would probably piss her off, and nobody wants to see her when she’s angry.
In any case, that she made the list is not even close to the most surprising factoid about Ms. Click, given that she’s apparently married.
That puts me in mind of a Robert Burns song, about an old carl in Kellyburn Brae. I read once that there is also an older, English song of similar approach, dating from Elizabethan times, but I have not heard that one performed. Suffice it to say that wives like Ms. Click have been around for a long time.
Shhhh! Don’t even intimate she’s not unique! She’s one-of-a-kind, just like everybody else.
You do a much better job than I do of articulating the idea that free speech should be a social norm rather than just a first amendment issue. I think we agree that criticism isn’t censorship, but I keep running into the problem of how to distinguish illegitimate criticism from legitimate criticism. Then there’s the corollary question: if illegitimate criticism is bad for society, should I try to exercise social consequences on those who do it, or merely refrain from doing it myself?
I don’t think list making is a good demarcation, mainly because of the beard fallacy.
You raise important and difficult questions, made even more difficult by the reality that each of us has our own threshhold for what’s “not okay” to what demands social consequences to what should be criminal. As we become increasingly polarized and inflexible in our positions, the begin to believe that more severe consequences are necessary because things we believe to be illegitimate become more harmful, and the need to do something to stop them more imperative.
There is no good demarcation that works for everyone, but the place to start might be for all of us to get a sense of humor and be more reasonable. In my view, this is the natural outgrowth of putting feelings ahead of thinking. We can’t “be reasonable” when every reaction is visceral.
If one goes through that list it becomes apparent pretty quickly that most of the “charges” against these profs are along the lines of, “(S)he posted to Twitter…” or “On Facebook (s)he said…” or “(S)he went to social media to…” Very few of them have any mention of profs forcing their opinions via their curricula (though there are certainly examples of that). These “incidents that have already been reported by a credible source” are mostly just opinions the list makers don’t like and spoken outside of the classroom. And the “credible source” just happens to be campusreform.org much, much more often than not.
Of course, it’s easier just to tell the profs they are “abusing your positions and harming students” isn’t it?
Sucks when one side does what the other sides does. Neither should.
The real dangers of such a blacklist are not the people the list includes; it’s those who will be silent for fear of being on the list, and for those people who others think (rightly or wrongly) should be on the list, and that more vigorous action besides ‘calling them out’ is required.
Such lists and ideas never stay confined to official and/or respectable groups.
The chilling effect is an additional danger, not “the real dangers.” They’re all dangers.