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NPR Ed
Professors Are
Targets In Online Culture Wars; Some Fight Back
Anya Kamanetz
There is a red light flashing in professor Albert Ponce's cubby-sized
office. The light comes from an old-fashioned answering machine.
Lately, he doesn't like to listen to the messages by himself. When he
presses play, it's obvious why. Here are a couple of messages:
"Albert Ponce, you are a piece of s*** f****** gutter slug that needs
his neck snapped, OK? Call me if you need me. I'll do it for ya.
"F****** race-baiting f****** piece of trash."
Ponce teaches political science at Diablo Valley College, a community
college in California's East Bay. It all started in October when he was
invited to give a public lecture on campus on an area he specializes
in: race and politics.
In the speech, which was filmed, he called the United States "a white
supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist system." He also
mentioned Karl Marx in passing, praised civil disobedience and referred
to a white supremacist in the White House. The result: attacks on
Facebook and threatening voice messages and emails.
Colleges are meant to be a home for free inquiry. But these days, not
all professors feel that freedom. Across the country, in the past year
and a half, at least 250 university professors, including Ponce, have
been targeted via online campaigns because of their research, their
teaching or their social media posts. Conservative professors have been
attacked from the right and the left, both with equally dire language.
Some have lost their jobs, and others say they fear for their families'
safety.
Ponce says his ideas, in context, are "not controversial at all" in his
circles of academia. For example, when he talks about white supremacy,
he says, he is talking about a system of power, not about individual
white people.
But in today's highly polarized political climate, almost any statement
about race or diversity can prove extremely controversial. Here are a
few examples:
Josh Cuevas, an associate professor in the school of education at the
University of North Georgia, came under inquiry from his congressional
representative after getting into an argument on Facebook about
President Trump and voter turnout.
Eve Browning, the chair of the department of philosophy and classics at
the University of Texas, San Antonio, was targeted, as was her entire
department, when a student surreptitiously recorded a disciplinary
conversation that touched on his negative comments about Islam.
Laurie Rubel, a professor of education at Brooklyn College, published a
National Science Foundation-funded research paper about race and
mathematics education. Rubel tells NPR that she was looking at how to
support high school math teachers who teach in hypersegregated urban
schools, in part by being critical of the concept of meritocracy. The
on-air take of Fox News commentator Greg Gutfeld was: "A math professor
... claimed that merit-based education is ... a tool of evil whiteness."
George Ciccariello-Maher, an associate professor of politics and global
studies, was placed on leave and ultimately resigned from Drexel
University in Philadelphia last fall after tweeting, "all I want for
Christmas is white genocide." "White genocide" is a white nationalist
conspiracy theory; Ciccariello-Maher says he meant to be satirical.
People on the right don't have a monopoly on threats to free speech or
academic freedom. Campuses like the University of California, Berkeley,
the home of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, have become national
flashpoints with sometimes violent responses to conservative speakers.
And professors have sometimes been subject to attacks and harassment
from the left. Bruce Gilley at Portland State University in Oregon, for
example, was attacked online and over the phone when he published an
academic paper titled "The Case for Colonialism." His paper on
colonialism, he tells NPR, argues that "there is a wealth of evidence
... that shows quite overwhelmingly positive benefits in terms of
democracy, public health, human rights."
He calls the response "a mass global mob." The article was withdrawn
after threats of violence were made against both him personally and the
editor of the journal that published it, Third World Quarterly.
Experts who study the spread of hate speech online say there is a
difference in patterns of online harassment between the right and the
left. Attacks from the left tend to originate from within campus
communities. Thousands of self-identified academics, for example,
signed online petitions calling for Gilley's article to be retracted.
On the right, though, a network of outside groups and sites has
mobilized against academics. Their views range from libertarian to
conservative to white nationalist.
Sites such as The College Fix and Campus Reform pay student reporters
to contribute stories titled: "Meritocracy is a 'tool of whiteness,'
claims math professor" (Campus Reform) or "History professor calls for
repeal of Second Amendment" (The College Fix).
Jennifer Kabbany, editor of The College Fix, told NPR that the site's
purpose is to train future journalists, not to foment hate. "The
College Fix has publicly denounced any vile emails that a professor
might get," she said. "I'm sorry if professors received that kind of
backlash." In reference to Ponce, of Diablo Valley College, she added,
"It appeared the lecture was not balanced and didn't do academic
inquiry and debate justice."
The College Fix is run by the Student Free Press Association. The
association has had Education Secretary Betsy DeVos' son listed on its
board of directors and is funded by an anonymous conservative donor
fund.
Campus Reform is a project the Leadership Institute, a conservative
think tank. Professor Watchlist, which lists more than 250 professors
who advance what it calls a "radical" left-wing agenda, is maintained
by Turning Point USA, an on-campus group that has been labeled
"alt-right."
Campus Reform and Professor Watchlist did not respond to requests for
comment.
The Red Elephants is a pro-Trump "alt-right media collective" founded
in November 2016. Founder Vincent James Foxx has reportedly denied the
Holocaust and been accused of urging violence at rallies. The site
posted an edited video of Ponce's talk on YouTube with commentary
calling it "Marxist, Communist, disgusting rhetoric that they spew in
these classrooms to indoctrinate these children." It used the video to
kick off an initiative called "Film Your Marxist Professor."
The administrator of the "Film Your Marxist Professor" Facebook page,
who gave his name as Aaron Burr, told NPR via Facebook message: "We
receive around 10 submissions per day. Our goal is to stop the
anti-white and anti-American rhetoric that is being spewed on college
campuses all across the country."
From these specialized sites, content travels to alt-right media
sources like Breitbart and Infowars and neo-Nazi sites like Stormfront,
and then, sometimes, to Fox News and the New York Post, CNN and other
outlets.
Meanwhile, harassment is coordinated out in the open on anonymous,
uncensored forums like 4chan, 8chan and Reddit, where self-identified
"trolls" uncover and post people's personal information, known as
doxing, and try out strategies of attack. Cuevas at the University of
North Georgia obtained screenshots of the 4chan forum on which people
were fabricating social media posts in an attempt to paint him as
anti-Semitic and racist or, alternatively, as pushing anti-Trump views
onto his students.
"Their stated goal was to get me fired," he says, but he fears that is
not the worst of it: "Georgia had just passed the campus carry law [for
firearms], and what worried me was a lone nut case."
Ponce says he sees a fresh wave of abusive calls and letters every time
a new media story hits. He has gotten letters in the mail, emails and
Facebook messages, and his colleagues and administrators have gotten
calls and emails. He has found his personal information on a Hungarian
right-wing website and gotten calls from South America. He, like other
professors, has called the police, but the messages keep coming.
Most troubling, he says, are "the real threats against my family" and
"pictures on the Web of my 9-year-old daughter."
He and his wife are trying not to park their cars in the same places
every day, peek out into the street at night and warn their daughter
not to touch the mail.
Hans-Joerg Tiede of the American Association of University Professors
says no matter what side you're on politically, it's clear that
academic freedom is under assault, as it has been many times in the
past.
"There have always been instances of faculty being targeted in
particular for what they say, for what they teach," says Tiede, a
former computer science professor at Illinois Wesleyan University.
Anti-communist academic blacklists go back to the 1930s, and professors
were targeted for taking desegregationist stances in the 1960s, he
adds. The difference is that momentum builds very fast, and it doesn't
take time to reach far-flung destinations. The AAUP has been tracking
this latest wave of targeted harassment and issuing recommendations for
policymakers.
Jessie Daniels, a professor of sociology at Hunter College, is among
scholars who say the rise of the Web and social media have given
right-wing groups new means for targeted harassment and for spreading
their ideology.
"With the rise of the popular Internet, everybody's an expert," she
says. "White supremacists really saw that as an opportunity."
In contrast to the sometimes-violent confrontations on campus around
speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos, NPR was not able to find a case of an
online harassment campaign, targeting a professor for his or her work,
that resulted either in violent threats being carried out or in any
legal action against the perpetrators.
What concerns experts like Tiede is the potential chilling effect on
researchers, especially untenured graduate students and adjuncts, who
might fear broaching any topic that could touch off a firestorm.
But as this pattern of behavior becomes better known, professors like
Rubel and Ponce are no longer keeping quiet. They are fighting back.
Rubel responded by posting many of the foul voicemails and emails and
messages she received on Twitter and Facebook and by collecting
statements of support from colleagues. "I think they messed with the
wrong person," she tells NPR.
For his part, Ponce, who does not have tenure, and his colleagues are
urging the board of governors of his community college's district to
adopt a resolution in support of academic freedom, making clear that
the colleges will stand behind its scholars no matter how provocative
their work, as long as they are grounded in research and evidence.
"In a democracy, these places of higher learning should be the spaces
where we engage in a rigorous scholarship, not necessarily an
ideological one," Ponce says. College, he says, is the place for a
quest for truth, not merely opinion.
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