The Professor Watchlist

[Buster's Uncle]

I’m on the Professor Watchlist—and it’s exposed a radical truth about the future of social justice
Quartz
Written by Matthew Pratt Guterl  Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies, Brown University  2 hours ago



(Reuters/Yuri Gripas)



A little over a week ago, a colleague wrote to me out of the blue to tell me that I had been added to Professor Watchlist. The list, compiled by the conservative group Turning Point USA in the wake of the US election, identifies university faculty who purportedly deserve close scrutiny for their liberal, “un-American” views.

I followed the link and saw my face—a photo a friend had taken in his living room hallway now repurposed into a mugshot of sorts. A brief description followed, highlighting an essay I’d written for Inside Higher Ed in the midst of the national debate over “safe spaces” on college campuses. The essay had gotten me on the list.

The Watchlist’s many critics have already spoken eloquently about the list’s threatening atmospherics. Branding the list “a new species of McCarthyism,” philosopher George Yancey issued a resolute refusal to be silenced. “Yes, I am dangerous,” he concluded, “and what I teach is dangerous.” “I will not shut up,” historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote on her Facebook page, “America is still worth fighting for.” More recently, over 100 faculty at Notre Dame, in a spirt of radical solidarity, have petitioned to be added to the list.

The echoes of McCarthyism are persuasive. But there are deeper, and darker, reasons to be worried about the Watchlist and its creators. I don’t fear the hopelessly bourgeois neo-Nazis and white supremacists, with their slick hair and college degrees, saluting [Sleezebag]’s bland, boring dream of “Make America Great Again.” But I surely mourn what they signify. Their resurgence means that we—those who would make a better world—are lost. It is a confirmation that those who believed progress was inevitable were wrong all along.

The Professor Watchlist is only a few weeks old. It seems to mark the beginning of a new era. It boldfaces the old battle lines of the culture wars between the left and right. But it repurposes them for a political agenda even further to the right, into the realm of white nationalism. And as the first list to be written and publicly released after Americans elected Donald [Sleezebag], the Watchlist also has the feel of brutal possibility. The president-elect himself recently asked the Energy Department to turn over a list of employees who had worked on climate change; he has suggested. In this context, it’s not far-fetched to imagine that the Professor Watchlist could be operationalized and acted upon.

This is a striking idea for progressives to contemplate. Generations of reformers have emphasized the need for patience and for faith when confronting injustice. In the great course of things, as years become decades, what once looked like an impossible challenge can be gradually overcome. Slavery, in this feel-good and faith-based approach, gave way to freedom. Jim Crow, by the same inexorable logic, gave way to a colorblind America. Over time, injustice would slowly unravel because the universe, or the Creator, or the zeitgeist demanded it. The righteous would always prevail.

This brand of optimism has served as an intellectual backbone to many radical social movements. Theodore Parker, writing against slavery in 1853, wrote: “Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.”

Over a century later, Martin Luther King, Jr., deliberately echoed Parker in his 1965 sermon at Temple Israel of Hollywood: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Neither man could see where all this was heading, but both believed in that arc – its length and its curvature.

It seems that we’re at the end of that arc now.

We are in the place that generations of dreamers and believers could not see. And we are confronting the idea that arc bends toward injustice, not the other way around. This means that we are not in the “upside down.” Nor are we in a second “nadir”—a reference to the decades after Plessy v. Ferguson, when race-based lynchings were all too frequent and white mob violence exploded. This isn’t a low point, to be followed inevitably by something better. We are, instead, right where we were headed all along.

Nativism and racism are on the rise globally. Black death goes unpunished and white murderers get mistrials. The gap between rich and poor has dramatically widened, even as populist movements across Europe and America have put exemplars of conspicuous (if not vulgar) consumption into office. Genocide has returned abroad. Xenophobia and scapegoating drift across the land like a fog, masking the vast gaps between the very rich and the masses of the working poor.

Someday, when they write the histories of all that is to come, they will remember how easily progress can be reversed or proven illusory. They will write detailed narratives of how [Sleezebag]’s victory stripped away all remaining restraint from a white electorate conditioned to want a return to a racist dreamscape. And they will recount how, quite suddenly, racial slurs, swastikas, and other markers of prejudice thought to have been shunted from the mainstream for good returned to the status of ordinary, everyday speech and action.

The Professor Watchlist is one such relic of the past, returned to the present—a readily available archive of who should be punished, who should be surveilled, and who should be erased. There may be more to come: Lists of refugees and undocumented immigrants, ready for an official invocation. Lists of enemies of the state, both foreign and domestic. Lists of radicals, lists of community organizers, lists of scientists. Lists that reminded people of dark moments in American history; of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, and the Japanese internment camps in the US during World War II.

If we want to fight this fate, we must give up faith in the inevitability of liberal progress. We must stop hoping that [Sleezebag]’s election is an aberration, and understand that he is the logical end point of American history thus far. When we stop believing in the arc of the moral universe, as Jelani Cobb notes, we are forced to reject American exceptionalism, open our eyes to the global rise of right-wing populism, and see ourselves caught up in it.

Only then can we begin to envision better futures outside of the logos of American nationalism, outside of what is currently legally, philosophically, and constitutionally possible in the United States. Better futures, that is, than those long predicted by the liberal tradition that stretches back to the nation’s founding.

Walking away from the mythic “arc of history” means seeing the world as a realist—and seeing history realistically. This is the worldview that can steel us for the long decades to come; for the hard, oppositional work of organizing and community building on the ground; and for the extraordinary amount of serious thinking and dreaming required to move forward when forward movement is itself marked as willful disobedience.

That is why the Watchlist matters. It is a reminder that progressives were wrong about a lot of things, including the arc of history. It bends in the other direction. If we want to fix it, we will have to break it, and make something new.

http://qz.com/868513/im-on-the-professor-watchlist-and-its-woken-me-up-to-the-radical-truth-about-america-and-social-progress

[Bearu]

The situation with the hatred directed towards the non-"democratic" left, i.e. the non-democrats, would cause most decent people to cringe in fear of the plethora of insults against the group. How can a decent person support the concept of infringement and harassment when the majority of the cooperative socialists desire to end the oppression from the corporate and government elite?

[Buster's Uncle]

Man, I just don't know, lately - the article above makes me want to mention Nazis, and shooting same...

[Elok]

Article is more than a little alarmist.  The PW, from what I understand, consists of a website, run by a non-government group of conservatives, to list professors they consider to be cranks, so other conservatives will take note and not send their kids to the schools in question.  This is little different from any number of similar listings run by conservatives in the past which have had little effect; capalert.com spent years "reviewing" movies for immorality and AFAIK has had no significant effect on Hollywood's behavior.  Comparisons to McCarthyism--which brought the power of the Feds to bear on individual people or small groups--is absurd.

Which isn't to say that "social justice" in its current form isn't in trouble, but it's going to die from largely self-inflicted wounds, not from some website.

[Buster's Uncle]

Depends on how it catches on, doesn't it?  Much that should be ashamed walking about loud and proud, these days.

[Elok]

I am concerned that the liveliest segments of both the Left and the Right have, in their respective ways, apparently abandoned what was classically known as liberalism--that is, an abiding concern with individual liberty.  You have the "Alt-Right" hating on freedom of religion and arguing for the suspensions of various civil liberties, while the SJW types seem to be angling for some sort of quasi-religious race war, and also try to pathologize and muzzle offensive speech.  Both are mercifully fringe movements--the former confined to idiots and teens on the internet for the most part, while the latter are mostly spoiled college kids and their professors suckling at the tax dollar teat--but they seem to wield disproportionate influence over the sane and moderate within their respective parties.

As the PW may have a chance of embarrassing or bothering the SJW types to some limited extent, I don't worry about it.  The Alt-Right isn't behind it; they prefer cruder tactics.  Watchlists are for "cuckservatives," I'm sure.

[Elok]

Looked up the article's author on PW.  His entry: "Matthew Pratt Guterl is an American Studies professor at Brown University. He criticized University of Chicago for opposing safe spaces and for allowing controversial speakers, calling it a "cold, Darwinian approach". "It is not our job to make intellectual noise -- a raucous debate, a clashing set of ideas, a hurtful back-and-forth -- just because we can" he wrote."

It then cites the website, insidehighered.com, it got the quotes from.  You can click to get the original context.  I did.  They have not mischaracterized his views, and in fact have left out a good many choice snippets in the interests of brevity.  I'm okay with this.  Opposition by a non-government group based on aggregating reports from established third-party sources is not even remotely similar to the HUAC, blacklisting, or what-have-you.

[Bearu]

I am concerned that the liveliest segments of both the Left and the Right have, in their respective ways, apparently abandoned what was classically known as liberalism--that is, an abiding concern with individual liberty.  You have the "Alt-Right" hating on freedom of religion and arguing for the suspensions of various civil liberties, while the SJW types seem to be angling for some sort of quasi-religious race war, and also try to pathologize and muzzle offensive speech.  Both are mercifully fringe movements--the former confined to idiots and teens on the internet for the most part, while the latter are mostly spoiled college kids and their professors suckling at the tax dollar teat--but they seem to wield disproportionate influence over the sane and moderate within their respective parties.

As the PW may have a chance of embarrassing or bothering the SJW types to some limited extent, I don't worry about it.  The Alt-Right isn't behind it; they prefer cruder tactics.  Watchlists are for "cuckservatives," I'm sure.

The assessment of Elok appears fairly accurate, but the topic requires a thorough knowledge of the subject. The positions of the parties change with the time, and the beliefs of the members do not comprise a monolithic entity. The beliefs of a few do not comprise the beliefs of the entire group, and the hasty generalizations or Guilt through association sophistry towards the groups tends to polarize the population who lack the analytical ability to recognize the divisive nature of the histrionic speech. A favorite statement of my originates from a speech by Eugene Debs who, in a paraphrase, states he could not lead the people from the jungle of capitalism because another person would tend to coerce or to manipulate the person from the refuge unless the person finds his or her own path into the sanctuary. The truth remains no person can lead another from the embrace of an authoritarian entity, and the person can only provide the skills necessary for the person to produce a decision for his or herself.

[Elok]

CF https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview (possibly NSFW).  It does nothing more than share screenshots of publicly available social science "research papers" the account manager finds idiotic, tendentious, or both.  Naturally he manages a dozen or so frequently hilarious posts per day on such subjects as why taking your kids to the zoo teaches them unacceptably patriarchal beliefs (a little girl called a monkey cute and a little boy was excited by the alligator's violent tendencies).  It's called "the NEW real peer review" because the original got shut down by the people it was making fun of.

[Elok]

Bearu, I'm not following you.  I don't claim that either the alt-right or SJWs are a strictly defined or formally circumscribed group.  Only a loose collection of people with common beliefs and (in some cases) worrisome tendencies.  You could argue about who does or does not deserve to be included under either umbrella (the latter, at least, was a term invented by the movement's enemies).  And the website in question does not practice guilt by association; it spotlights specific academics for specific things they said, and cites the exact place they said it from (AFAICT) reputable third-party sources.

[Bearu]

Bearu, I'm not following you.  I don't claim that either the alt-right or SJWs are a strictly defined or formally circumscribed group.  Only a loose collection of people with common beliefs and (in some cases) worrisome tendencies.  You could argue about who does or does not deserve to be included under either umbrella (the latter, at least, was a term invented by the movement's enemies).  And the website in question does not practice guilt by association; it spotlights specific academics for specific things they said, and cites the exact place they said it from (AFAICT) reputable third-party sources.

I would not question the validity of the analysis on the article. I also do not want to derail the topic with a discussion of politics because the article represents a piece on the criticism against the professors rather than a discussion about political identities in a group. I intend to start my own thread about the evils of individual liberties as a product of the bourgeoisie.

[Elok]

Recently on both PW and NRPR: a professor from Drexel University (George Ciccariello-Maher, who appears to be of at least partially European ancestry) straight-up, no-exaggeration said he wanted "white genocide" for Christmas on Twitter.  Not sure if meant as joke, but he clarified that he approved of white people being killed in Haiti during their Revolution.  Apparently he's in kind of hot water for this, if you can imagine.  I'm not terribly scared that a bunch of prissy sociologists are going to drag me and mine to the killing fields, but I think it's fair to say that the public deserves to know this kind of thing is going on.

http://www.professorwatchlist.org/index.php/watch-list-directory/search-by-name/242-george-ciccariello-maher

[Bearu]

Recently on both PW and NRPR: a professor from Drexel University (George Ciccariello-Maher, who appears to be of at least partially European ancestry) straight-up, no-exaggeration said he wanted "white genocide" for Christmas on Twitter.  Not sure if meant as joke, but he clarified that he approved of white people being killed in Haiti during their Revolution.  Apparently he's in kind of hot water for this, if you can imagine.  I'm not terribly scared that a bunch of prissy sociologists are going to drag me and mine to the killing fields, but I think it's fair to say that the public deserves to know this kind of thing is going on.

http://www.professorwatchlist.org/index.php/watch-list-directory/search-by-name/242-george-ciccariello-maher

I could agree with the concept the minority in a country would tend to eradicate the substitute for the enthralled hatred of a population. The people of a country with a suppressed hatred will tend to direct the hatred towards a particular minority or vulnerable group.

[E_T]

So, we hate someone for our economic oppression, so then we thereby lash out with that hatred at some other, convinient target, instead of the actual oppressors?

No matter what, it's hate and destructive passions at work.  I'm more for turning that hate around and grounding it out in favor for love, tolerance and positive passionate energies...