Big Brother: Welcome the College Professor Watch List

Happy Thanksgiving. Honoring the fascist tradition, a new online watch list has just formed to target liberal college professors in the United States, urging students and others to hunt them out and spotlight them.

According to insidehighered.com: 

A new website is asking students and others to “expose and document” professors who “discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

The site, called Professor Watchlist, is not without precedent -- predecessors include the now-defunct NoIndoctrination.org, which logged accounts of alleged bias in the classroom. There's also David Horowitz's 2006 book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. But such efforts arguably have new meaning in an era of talk about registering certain social groups and concerns about free speech…

Professor Watchlist, launched Monday, is a project of Turning Point USA. The group’s mission is to “identify, educate, train and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets and limited government.” Its national college and university field program works to “identify young conservative activists, build and maintain effective student groups, advertise and rebrand conservative values, engage in face-to-face and peer-to-peer conversations about the pressing issues facing our country,” according to its website.

The watch-list website should be a natural playground for the likes of the National Security Agency, which licks up every bit of online data it can on American citizens and the world.

Also, nyulocal.com, which reports on activities at New York University in Manhattan, wrote of Professor Watchlist: 

The site’s founder, Charlie Kirk, is a rising star in the conservative party. He was profiled by The Atlantic in 2015 as young, smart, and inspiring, a spokesperson for the GOP who had a firm grasp on policy and who was an incredibly rousing and charismatic speaker. He, along with Bill Montgomery, founded Turning Point USA, which has a presence in high school and college campuses all over the country. They aim to “re-brand free market values” through grass roots movements. 

In its report, nyulocal.com called the website’s founding “disturbing news”, noting that it so far already lists three NYU professors: Frank Roberts, Arthur Caplan, and Mark Crispin Miller. 

 

The article, as student-aimed writings often do, mixes a little tongue-in-cheek along with serious concerns, noting: 

We at Local were actually a little insulted, because for the number of times we’ve heard that NYU was a petri dish filled with liberal zombies, we were really expecting more of our commie hero professors to be featured. A junior majoring in sociology and philosophy in CAS was genuinely surprised when none of their professors were listed on the website. 

What’s more upsetting however, is that the website features full names and photos of the professors they accuse, and list the University they teach at as well as their supposed offenses.  

The close of the Local article includes an email interview with Turning Point USA. In the interview, TP USA states: 

In order to be included on the list, the story must be documented by a news source or otherwise documented (i.e. a syllabus or powerpoint slides). Hearsay accusations will not be accepted. 

Of course, there are a number of right-wing publications which cater to such “news”. So “documenting a news source” may not be that hard.

You can read the Local article, including the interview here.

Meanwhile, America’s president-elect Donald Trump has picked a billionaire as Secretary of Education: Betsy DeVos. The Washington Post reports: 

Betsy DeVos is hardly a household name, but the Michigan billionaire and conservative activist has quietly helped change the education landscape in many states, spending millions of dollars in a successful push to expand voucher programs that give families taxpayer dollars to pay for private and religious schools. 

This should expand the conservative push to privatize everything from molding young minds to water supply.

If you agree with this, then have a good life. If you disagree, you might want to get organized (you can’t do it alone), get educated, and get active.