In lieu of the usual blog post today I thought it would be useful to provide you some links to what I am reading – and writing – about right-wing dark-money groups that target professors to gin up public outrage and persuade people that higher education doesn’t deserve the already-reduced public funding that it receives.
In this round, I was one of the targeted professors, because what a community college history professor tweets about the Vice President – he of the bleeding eye and fawning fly – is big news in the anti-higher-ed faux-news ecosystem. Most recently, the same scandalmaking sweatshop that targeted me has now gone after one of my colleagues. As you read the linked items below, you will notice that between Monday of this week and Friday of this week my publicly-funded college developed a different strategy for responding to public outcry about the legally-protected extramural utterances of its faculty. The FIRE news release, including a 9-page legal memo sent to my college earlier this week, doubtless explains the change in content and tone coming from my college’s leadership.
This has not been a pleasant couple of weeks. And I am in for round two of vile and threatening harassment, it seems, if the well-established pattern of Fox News picking up “reporting” from tweet-aggregating culture warriorlets holds. But I will be okay. My concern is for my colleagues all over the country who become the targets of this absolutely malevolent and cynical operation, and for finding a way to collectively diminish the effectiveness of this long-practiced anti-intellectual anti-education tactic.
I have much more to say (naturally!), and I will be posting links to my articles in other media outlets as they are published.
In the meantime, I strongly encourage you: when you see a faculty member of any college being targeted or attacked for protected speech, for their area of research, or for anything related to their – and our – academic freedom, please send a letter in their support to the president of their college and maybe the provost and their dean as well. If you see them being harassed on Twitter, don’t reply to the harassers – that just blows up the victim’s twitter mentions. Instead, report any tweets that violate Twitter’s terms of service.
The links below are posted in chronological order. “This is my story, this is my song, living my research, all the day long…”
https://campusreform.org/?ID=15900
https://www.foxnews.com/us/college-professors-expletive-criticism-vp-debate
http://www.collincollegenews.com/2020/10/12/collin-college-statement-october-12-2020/
https://www.chronicle.com/article/right-wing-trolls-attacked-me-my-administration-buckled
http://savedbyhistory.blogspot.com/2020/10/heres-what-i-said.html
2 Thoughts on this Post
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Please accept this as my personal show of support for you. I know that this will not end in two weeks no matter what happens. I know that no matter how brave you are, the mere fact that this happened will chill your ability to speak you mind. There is perhaps nothing worse than the thought of losing your livelihood because of something you said (unless of course you have independent means).
I get it in a way. The institution needs donors/government money to survive. So if they get “upset” well the institution “needs” to respond to them. Even though what it is supposedly selling is an ability to be educated which requires freedom of thought. But really this “freedom” becomes just another commodity. We are better than this and this is not what we deserve.
Thank you for all the time and effort you put into this blog.
Thank you so much, George. When all this was happening I let my editorial colleagues know that I would be lying low around here for a few weeks because I didn’t want to draw fire from trolls to our pages here. The worst of the harassment has passed, it seems, and the result of being targeted by CR/F*X has been a vast increase in the audience for my own writing and a regular writing gig (that pays!) for Arc Digital.
I have also been joined by a number of colleagues at my employer who are pushing back against a problem I wasn’t aware of when I started my job there last year: official reprimands added to employees’ personnel files because of things they say on social media. It is chilling and infuriating to know that a government agency / public employer has been monitoring and policing its employees’ protected speech. When I clapped back at the college president for imagining he was going to shame me as a way of chilling the free speech of my colleagues, professors and staff started coming out of the woodwork, reaching out to me to say “This happened to me too. I’ve been afraid to say anything. Thank you for speaking out. We are all counting on you to win this” and similar things. So now I’m settling back into the saddle of culture warrior wielding the weapon of words on behalf of a just cause, and I must say that even after 30 years I have not forgotten how to ride. When it’s all over but the crying I will post an update. But for now, so far, so good.