Alessandro van den Brink | The blue scare

Small Talk | The Professor Watchlist is the latest threat to academia

By Alessandro van den Brink 11/30/16 10:49pm

On Nov. 21, the conservative activist group, Turning Point USA, announced their latest creation: the Professor Watchlist. The goal of the website is “to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Discrimination and bias in academia is a very serious issue, but even a cursory look at the Professor Watchlist proves that it’s just a McCarthy-esque ploy to vilify anyone who doesn’t buy into a narrow conservative worldview.

The project is the brainchild of conservative wunderkind Charlie Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA in 2012 as an alternative to popular liberal activist networks such as MoveOn and Organizing for Action. However, the 22-year-old Kirk — whom some conservatives have even touted as a future Republican presidential nominee — never went to college. Surely if conservatives want to attack leftist propaganda in universities, they could have at least chosen someone who has actually experienced it firsthand to spearhead their crusade?

While some of the professors listed in the watchlist’s database of over 200 academics have indeed committed ethical violations, many of the crimes these professors are guilty of include the basic act of being card-carrying liberals.

My personal favorite listing in the Professor Watchlist is Penn Law’s very own Regina Austin, whom they label a “chief indoctrinator.” Austin, the site claims, “espouses ‘critical race theory,’ a Marxist-inspired ideology that views white racism as the cause of most societal problems” and “uses her classes to promote the ideas of social justice as well.” A professor believing that racism is a bad thing? Marxism? Social justice? Pure liberal drivel!

The logic behind the Professor Watchlist is that if a professor openly holds liberal beliefs or has some form of discontent with contemporary conservative thought, he or she can not possibly stay neutral when teaching students. This is an outright attack on the academic integrity of these professors based on no evidence other than the fact that they may not agree with conservatives on certain elements of policy.

This calls to mind when Donald Trump claimed that United States District Judge Gonzalo Curiel couldn’t possibly fairly preside over a trial on Trump University due to Curiel’s Mexican heritage. Even Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan dubbed Trump’s musings “the textbook definition of a racist comment,” yet many conservatives seem to think this is acceptable when it is done on an ideological basis as opposed to a racial one.

The Professor Watchlist also makes the assumption that academic bias and propaganda is only propagated by the left. The site conveniently fails to mention the fact that at Liberty University, students can major in “Creation Studies,” a discipline that “seeks to equip students to defend their faith in the creation account in Genesis using science, reason and the Scriptures.” Of course being taught how to defend one’s prior conceptions defies the basic academic principle of challenging one’s own beliefs, but hey — at least it isn’t liberal propaganda.

Jerry Falwell Jr., the current president of Liberty University and vigilant Trump apologist, also notably denied a student from publishing an anti-Trump column in the school’s official newspaper. This was a clear act of censorship on Falwell’s part and violates freedom of the press, yet I wasn’t surprised that Liberty University and Falwell’s name didn’t make the cut on the watchlist.

Kirk defends the Professor Watchlist by claiming it is an exercise in free expression but by creating it, he has created a way for conservatives to shelter themselves from opposing viewpoints using the dog whistle of “propaganda.” This will only spur greater animosity between the political parties and convince even more conservatives that general academia is out to get them.

The Statesman, a conservative publication at Penn, recently claimed in an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian that liberals are “putting up barriers to conversation rather than actually engaging.” However, the Professor Watchlist is discouraging the very kind of intellectual dialogues most conservatives seem to be calling for.

I urge The Statesman and all other conservative voices in higher education to condemn the ignorance of efforts such as the Professor Watchlist. If they fail to do so, they are simply miring themselves in their own hypocrisy.

Liberals need to do better to make sure that conservatives feel more accepted in higher institutions, but the Professor Watchlist only serves to stoke the fires of division between the right and the left. We can find better ways of tackling malpractice in universities without waging a total war on liberals.