Turning Point USA developed a Professor Watchlist in 2016 to highlight some of the more radical members of the academy. At the time, TPUSA wrote, “The mission of Professor Watchlist is to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”
The searchable database now features more than 300 professors. They’re grouped into categories, including DEI, climate, feminism, abortion, terror supporter, racial ideology, and LGBTQ.
Many professors whose names appear on that Watchlist are expressing relief that Charlie Kirk was assassinated last week. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Watchlist made some professors’ lives “a living hell.”
Tobin Miller Shearer, a professor of history at the University of Montana, says he received death threats after appearing on the Watchlist. Kirk’s death brought a “flood of emotions.”
“I cried for our nation, for what this will mean for his family, for all the harm he did in his life, for all of us,” he said. “It was a horrible moment in all of its complexity.”
If this were solely about Shearer’s rancid views about race and “systemic racism,” he might get a pass based on the concept of “academic freedom.” But Shearer’s treatment of conservatives and conservative scholarship has no place in any institution of higher education.
David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, claims he explores the “intersection of constitutional law and gender, emphasizing how the law impacts abortion provision, including violence against abortion providers, as well as sex segregation and masculinity.”
Dripping with sarcasm, Cohen commented on Kirk’s murder.
“See, Charlie Kirk was a good guy who should be honored because he valued free speech,” Cohen wrote on Facebook last week. “So much so, in fact, that he put me and many of my friends and colleagues on his Professor Watchlist. No, not because he wanted us targeted — why would you think that you cynical fool?! Rather, because he was being so kind and thoughtful to highlight our work for his rabid, highly-armed rightwing extremist audience. I’m so grateful for all he did to promote us to this new group of people!”
This guy is teaching the law to students?
Accusing Kirk of encouraging murder and deliberately (or ignorantly) misinterpreting Kirk’s motive in presenting the Watchlist in the first place should cause any university to question what this person is doing on the faculty.
Saida Grundy, a professor of sociology and African American and Black diaspora studies at Boston University, said she experienced “epistemic terrorism” as a result of being on multiple professor watch lists, including Turning Point USA’s.
Grundy first appeared on conservative watch lists in 2015 as an incoming professor to BU for her tweets calling white male college students a “problem” for America’s colleges.
Grundy said she received countless death threats and demands that the university fire her. In her first year on the faculty, her office was broken into and vandalized, she said.
“It was the greatest stress of my life, and I literally was just coming off having stage-three breast cancer,” Grundy said. “It was far more stressful than the cancer, far more stressful.”
What Grundy was “teaching” was racist claptrap and hysterical posturing. There is no such thing as “epistemic terrorism.” It doesn’t exist. It’s a political creation to couple the explosive term “terrorism” with whatever pushback Grundy got because of her nauseating views.
Grundty tweeted, “Every MLK week, I commit myself to not spending a dime in white-owned businesses. And every year, I find it nearly impossible.” Her tweets were so rancid that the president of Boston University felt compelled to address the controversy on the school’s website.
Why do leftists think that free speech means not experiencing any consequences for what they say? I believe this is an area that demands care and circumspection when punishing people for an attitude or a non-contextualized thought. But yes, there are limits to what can be said at any time, especially at a time like Charlie Kirk’s murder.
We don’t need radicals on either side teaching anyone. The radicals on the TPUSA Watchlist should be called out for their views, and parents who are footing the bill for their children’s education should be made aware of the kind of school their children are attending.
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