Liberal professor ‘watchlist’ is the new McCarthyism
Anthea Butler is one of the targets.
A religious studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a black woman who teaches a class about the religious right in America and has a fiery liberal persona on social media…
…she’s gotten used to the call-outs by angry conservative “eggs” on Twitter, to the emails that call her an “n-word” who doesn’t belong on an Ivy League campus, and to the calls to her department chair from people posing as Penn alums, demanding that this professor with an expansive Afro who calls herself “dangerous” in her online profile be fired ASAP.
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But when a fellow professor contacted her a few weeks ago and told her she’d been placed on a brand new nationwide “professor watch list” intended to help conservatives identify faculty liberals, Butler felt like rising McCarthyism on America’s campuses just surged to a new high water mark…
It hasn’t escaped the attention of Butler and others that a list targeting liberal profs came out at the same time that Donald Trump – who campaigned in an often-bullying style against so-called elites like the media and the academic community – is ascending to the presidency…
But there is also something new and frightening about an era of emboldened white nationalists and others on the fringe far-right and their ability to use the Internet, social media and other technologies to bully and try to silence voices they don’t agree with. Since Trump’s election victory on November 8, there’s been a surge in reported “hate crimes” on college campuses as well as high schools in middle schools, from swastikas on bathroom stalls to racist texts, with growing concern over physical violence. Conservatives have countered that the minority of students who support Trump or right-leaning causes are the ones being harassed.
The watch list, created and promulgated by a nationwide youth-oriented conservative group called Turning Point USA, feels like dousing that smoldering flame with kerosene. What’s more, what purpose could the list serve beyond intimidating liberal-leaning academics from speaking freely? A motive that seems absurd considering that the No. 1 right-wing complaint about college campuses has been so-called “speech codes” and “political correctness” they claim (occasionally with justification) can assault the 1st Amendment.
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