The Professor Hit List

Earlier this week, Dr. Melissa McCoul, a Professor in the Liberal Arts Department at Texas A&M, was fired because she was teaching a piece of children’s literature1 that didn’t align with right-wing (dogmatic) conceptions of gender.2

One of my personal philosophical heroines, Kate Manne, wrote this week that she is featured on a Professor Hit List compiled by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. This list has ruined a lot of lives. They call it a “watchlist,” but let’s be real - it’s a hit list. It aims to “unmask” us. (LoL maybe they’re confusing us with ICE agents?)

Hitler went for education right away and took charge of the universities. If they couldn’t control you, they hunted you, and thousands of scholars and professors were sent to their deaths, particularly in Poland under Intelligenzaktion. There was a Hit List then, too. 61,000 people were identified as intelligentsia and over 100,000 people were subsequently executed in these operations. The Reich was particularly intent on targeting philosophers and scientists. (Does an attack on science sound a little too familiar right now?) I visited memorials while I was working in Warsaw last year and I’m genuinely crying right now as I write this, thinking about it again.

The Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 also targeted intellectuals, killing over a thousand teachers, journalists, and scholars on 14 December 1971.

And these aren’t the only stories of conservative extremists silencing their enemies.3

So why are Charlie Kirk and the rest of the Right, and everyone historically on the Reich, always so scared of intellectuals?

This brings me to the “free speech” portion of our talk.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, has condemned Kirk’s assassination with cries about how we have a right to free speech in this country and he shouldn’t have been killed for his opinions. The Right, in particular, is using this to say that liberal rhetoric (free speech) has caused this, while Kirk’s “free speech” was just a harmless exercising of his First Amendment right. (Double standard much?)

Look. There is a huuuuuuge difference between free speech and indoctrination. This is what I’ve said elsewhere about J.K. Rowling too. When you have a massive platform and a massive payroll, it isn’t free speech and opinion anymore. It’s influence, coercion, manipulation, bribery, propaganda. It’s tangible, traceable, verifiable harm that manifests through actions, not just words.

And the Right knows this. And it’s why they’re scared of professors.

They pontificate that we’re like them - out there spouting our “opinions”4 in an effort to brainwash people to believe what we believe. It’s their usual projection. “We’re doing it, so we have to make sure the liberals can’t do it.”

Charlie Kirk was not practicing free speech. He was indoctrinating.5

Teachers are not practicing free speech. They are teaching.

What those in power on the Right know (but would never admit and habitually deny) is that professors are not exercising free speech and nor are we performing indoctrination. What we do, at least in our classrooms, is implement relevant sources to share facts and ideas, and we do this in a way that empowers the student with a toolkit of facts and ideas with which to go out into the world and make thoughtful decisions, craft their own informed values, be better members of a society. The goal of teaching isn’t to get people to agree with us, but to get students to figure out what they agree with, and more importantly, why they agree with it.

For example:

Fact: There are transgender people. This is not an opinion.

So let’s talk about it. Let’s discuss how neither gender or sex are binary. (Also not an opinion cuz science.) Let’s discuss the kind of things that people commit to because they want to feel at home in their bodies. Let’s discuss choice when it comes to our bodily autonomy. Let’s discuss whether exposure to people different from you is “grooming.” (Spoiler: It isn’t, and studies actually show the opposite effects - that being around people different from you fosters empathy, expands your mind, and even makes you more creative!)

Classrooms are not a place for opinions. They’re a place for QUESTIONS.

And if people learn to think critically for themselves, instead of just following whatever someone tells them (Right or Left), they become far more dangerous, because they become far more difficult to control. Fascists hate education because it creates intelligent people who ask questions.

(Have you ever heard a conservative ask a question that wasn’t rhetorical?)6

This semester, I’m teaching one of the most wrought subjects possible to teach: religion. And it’s 90 straight minutes of discussion of texts twice a week. But my students haven’t had one single fight with anyone else, including with me. They’ve all had safe space to express themselves, they’ve listened to one another respectfully and thoughtfully, and I, the professor, validate their experience, whether I agree with it or not, and then I ask them questions about it. Because it’s my job to help them to know themselves, to be themselves, not to be me. Mary Parker Follett says, “Each must discover and contribute that which distinguishes [them] from others, [their] difference. The only use for my difference is to join it with other differences. The unifying of opposites is the eternal process.”7

Brief rant: D.E.I. initiatives exist for this exact reason. We need people of all experiences, backgrounds, and values to come together in order to be at our best. If we share who we are, share our stories, we build trust and empathy, and we are better able to cooperate and to solve problems together. (My entire dissertation is dedicated to this proven fact.) D.E.I. is not about viewpoints. D.E.I. is a program that assures that equitable practices are in place to allow everyone to be safe in the space (both physically and emotionally), to express themselves, to see themselves represented, and to learn. D.E.I. is necessary, because white men built this country to exclude any voices except their own, and we are (or should be) in a long, long, lonnnng process of attempting to remedy this. So while white men think we’re trying to erase them, what we’re actually trying to do is level the playing field. While white men are on a level field that’s just been mowed and the sun is shining and their cleats are brand new, some of us are playing in the rain with worn-out equipment, or playing on a field that’s slanted, or a field that has a big chasm in the middle of it that you have to avoid falling into. So making things “equal” doesn’t help those of us who have to approach the field differently, more strategically, due to the way it’s designed. Instead, we need equity to help put a tent over the field to protect from the rain or to provide us with new equipment or to plow the dirt to even the landscape or to fill the big hole in the middle so we stop falling into it. White men don’t need that help. (P.S. This is also the excellent argument for movements like Reparations and Reconciliation.)

/rant

Faculty departmental meetings have become a site for sharing our concerns with one another. We’ve read history books. We’re paying attention. As a professor who regularly teaches Gender, Race, and Class courses, feminist courses, religion courses… all of this concerns me deeply. Of course, I’m afraid for myself, my career, and my safety. But I’m even more afraid for the status of education as an institution.

Texas is my home state. I miss my family. But I can’t ever live there again.

As I apply for full professorships this year, there are only certain states that I will consider, which drastically narrows my options. And I’m especially prioritizing jobs outside of this country. It’s likely that my myriad of knowledge can help more from elsewhere, because intellectuals must feel safe to share what we know.

Not to indoctrinate you, not to exercise our free speech, but to gift you with tools that you can use at your own discretion. We hope that you use them for good.