The Professor Watch List
The mission of Professor Watchlist is to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.
This website is an aggregated list of pre-existing news stories that were published by a variety of news organizations throughout the past few years. While we accept tips for new additions on our website, we only publish profiles on incidents that have already been reported somewhere else. 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.
So, what are we to make of this? Freedom of association and the aggregation of truthful and publicly available information . . . seems like there should be no reason to object. I, for one, am glad to see someone pushing back against these corrosive "speech codes" that have sprung up on multiple campuses, as documented by the ever-vigilant Jonathan Turley. (For the latest, see
https://jonathanturley.org/2016/11/30/c ... ee-speech/) For those on the "watch list," however, like George Yancy at Emory,
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 . . . that my name appears on the Professor Watchlist . . . .
...
The new “watchlist” is essentially a new species of McCarthyism, especially in terms of its overtones of “disloyalty” to the American republic. And it is reminiscent of Cointelpro, the secret F.B.I. program that spied on, infiltrated and discredited American political organizations in the ’50s and ’60s. Its goal of “outing” professors for their views helps to create the appearance of something secretly subversive. It is a form of exposure designed to mark, shame and silence.
I sense more than a little hyperbole. Evidently, Mr. Yancy was added to the "watch list" because he authored the following
OpEd at the
New York Times:
If you are white, and you are reading this letter, I ask that you don’t run to seek shelter from your own racism. Don’t hide from your responsibility. Rather, begin, right now, to practice being vulnerable. Being neither a “good” white person nor a liberal white person will get you off the proverbial hook. I consider myself to be a decent human being. Yet, I’m sexist. Take another deep breath. I ask that you try to be “un-sutured.” If that term brings to mind a state of pain, open flesh, it is meant to do so. After all, it is painful to let go of your “white innocence,” to use this letter as a mirror, one that refuses to show you what you want to see, one that demands that you look at the lies that you tell yourself so that you don’t feel the weight of responsibility for those who live under the yoke of whiteness, your whiteness.
My view on this: There is no State action, no "big brother." Students and their families have a right to know who is pushing far left agendas, and what colleges employ them, so they can make informed decisions about where to go to school and whether to the school should be financially supported. The more information, the better, and if someone is out there aggregating the data and making it accessible, so much the better.