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There is a great deal to be said about the rise of the Alt-Right over this past year, and while I understand the argument for identifying its platform with the ascent of white supremacism, I\u2019d argue that \u201cAlt-Right\u201d encompasses something far more ambitious and dangerous, especially with respect to the country\u2019s most vital institutions: free elections, a free press, an open public square, and academic freedom. The Alt-Right endangers all of these in ways both as flagrantly racist and anti-Semitic as \u201cUnite the Right\u201d rallies\u2014and as quietly cancerous as the growth of organizations aimed specifically at recruiting a young cadre of future white nationalists. Despite their misleading \u201cfree market,\u201d libertarian-sounding mission statement, Turning Point USA, and its McCarthyesque Professor Watchlist demonstrably belong to the latter. Make no mistake, while the former and its\u00a0Daily Stormer<\/em>\u00a0sycophants offer an ugly spectacle, it\u2019s the latter that\u2019s postioning itself to undermine the critical\u2014existential<\/em>\u2014value of the university:\u00a0the freedom to pursue evidence, ideas, arguments, and artistic expression to ends uncensored and unimpeded by ideological or economic constraints<\/em>.<\/p>\n The very moniker, \u201cAlt-Right,\u201d offers polite cover, however thin, for the bigot who sports a tie (or Steve Bannon\u2019s polo shirts), spouting the populist rhetoric of \u201claw and order,\u201d \u201ceconomic nationalism,\u201d \u201cderegulation,\u201d \u201cRadical Islamic Terrorism,\u201d and the like. But the necessity for\u00a0cover<\/em>\u00a0hints at the profoundly dark and paranoid worldview that lies beneath, one that quite literally operates according to a dichotomy of white and black\u2014good and evil\u2014to support the kleptocratic authoritarian objectives of its beneficiaries. \u201cAlt-Right\u201d functions as both dog whistle and prophylactic; it\u2019s as cool as an Indy Band or a video game, a crucial ingredient for the young folks Turning Point USA seeks to recruit. Most importantly, however, \u201cAlt-Right\u201d comes with its own built-in mechanism for\u00a0plausible deniability<\/em>, and it\u2019s this that\u2019s poised to become a weapon of mass destruction in the academy. Here\u2019s why: what Turning Point\u2019s Charlie Kirk\u00a0 (and his functional analogues at\u00a0Project Veritas<\/em>,\u00a0Campus Reform<\/em>,\u00a0Truth Revolt<\/em>,\u00a0FrontPageMag<\/em>,\u00a0The Daily Caller<\/em>,\u00a0Breitbart<\/em>,\u00a0NewsMax<\/em>,\u00a0InfoWars<\/em>, and even the\u00a0Daily Stormer<\/em>) has figured out is that the debilitating risk aversion endemic to university administrations virtually guarantees their complicity in the repression of academic freedom. Faced with the prospect of liability on the fictitious grounds that the refusal to offer formal recognition (and university largesse) to an organization somehow amounts to the denial of the free speech rights of its student chapter members, university bureaucracies not only hide behind the misleading mission statements offered by groups like Turning Point USA, in doing so they effectively choose the\u00a0appearance<\/em>\u00a0of respect for free speech over its\u00a0reality<\/em>. Indeed, the sad truth at my own institution and many others is that while presenting the\u00a0appearance<\/em>\u00a0of a commitment to diversity, inclusion, free expression, and even safety is crucial to the university\u2019s brand, it turns out to have neither the capacity nor the courage to come to the defense of these values\u2014at least where its faculty are concerned. I don\u2019t doubt there are exceptions, but what\u2019s also true is that within hours after I posted \u201cLetter to my Colleagues\u201d to\u00a0my Academia.edu page<\/a>\u00a0profiling my own experience at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, I began to receive responses detailing the harrowing experiences of my colleagues not only with Professor Watchlist, but with administrations who chose the path of avoiding liability over the protection of academic freedom\u2014indeed, even their faculty\u2019s safety.<\/p>\n The very fact of Professor Watchlist puts the lie to any claim Turning Point can ever make to respect free speech. It exists for the purpose of repressing the speech, pedagogy, and scholarship of precisely that class of persons without which there is no university:\u00a0professors<\/em>. Indeed, it doesn\u2019t really matter what my local chapter of Turning Point USA\/Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania does; that they\u2019re formally recognized on my campus has already generated a chilling and repressive atmosphere. And there\u2019s irony: the effect that Turning Point\/Professor Watchlist will have for my university can only redound to a less daring and worthy education for the university\u2019s students. This certainly serves the authoritarian purposes of the Alt-Right who, under the insipid guise of protecting \u201cconservative\u201d students from predatory \u201cliberal\u201d professors, insures not that students will be spared indoctrination, but that education will be eviscerated of its central value:\u00a0critical thinking<\/em>. Fact is, projects like Turning Point USA are profiles in hypocrisy; they promote free market values all the while they seek to undermine the marketplace of ideas; they \u201cdefend\u201d conservative students against attacks for which the evidence is scant or non-existent; they pretend to value truth, yet utilize entirely unfounded and bigoted Alt-Right sources in their efforts to castigate, intimidate, and defame professors. They profess respect for evidence yet deny climate change. They profess inclusion yet excoriate professors whose pedagogy and scholarship include feminist, queer, Muslim, Jewish, environmental, and animal rights voices. They\u2019ve no place at all for the criticism of their preferred electeds, and plainly hold that there\u2019s no place in the academy for this critique either.<\/p>\n I began to track Turning Point USA\/Professor Watchlist in 2016, and have assembled a bibliography of it and its many layers of association to organizations and persons identified as the Alt-Right. From David Horowitz\u2019s\u00a0101 Most Dangerous Professors<\/em>\u00a0to Ben Shapiro, from websites like\u00a0Truth Revolt<\/em>\u00a0to characters like Ann Coulter, Steve Bannon, Ivan Throne, James O\u2019Keefe, and Lucian Wintrich, I has come to a pretty good understanding of Turning Point\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0objectives. Still, nothing could have prepared me for the unfettered viciousness of its attack on my character and career, and nothing could have prepared me for my administration\u2019s failure to protect me and worse: their knowing concession to everything Professor Watchlist represents for my campus, my colleagues, and my students. As the AAUP\u2019s\u00a0Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>makes clear, the conditions under which students are afforded the opportunity to learn depend vitally on the protection of the academic freedom of teachers to teach. Like many others, my own account begins with the effort to alert my university administration of the real motives of Turning Point USA\/Professor Watchlist (see the full account and a bibliography\u00a0here<\/a>), but the upshot is this: Bloomsburg University administration refuses to rescind the formal recognition of the BU chapter of Turning Point USA\/Professor Watchlist despite the fact that:<\/p>\n If university administrations are unwilling to take a stand against this kind of assault on academic freedom, even the protections of tenure will soon ring hollow since, while targeted professors may or may not be fired by their institutions, repression comes in many ways to the same ends, as is clearly demonstrated by the evidence:<\/p>\n For all of these reasons the reference to organizations like Turning Point USA\/Professor Watchlist as a potential weapon of mass destruction is neither hyperbole nor merely metaphor. We in the professoriate must, in fact, now become more than vigilant. We must become an organized insurgency. This is not about turf. It\u2019s about the future of one thing no aspiring democracy can survive without\u2014an educated citizenry capable of realizing its commitment to inclusion, diversity, and free speech as a matter of justice.<\/p>\n\n
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