The Potentially Chilling Effect Of The Professor Watchlist

In a nice follow-up to the white supremacists’ victory celebration hosted by alt-right leader Richard Spencer a few days ago, the super-PAC Turning Point USA has begun a “Professor Watchlist” that attempts to catalogue university professors who exhibit “liberal bias”. Specifically, the mission of this watchlist is to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Appropriately, the list is being effectively trolled by liberals with Indiana Jones and Jesus being added. But the fact that it includes names, institutions, and photos is disturbing. At the meeting of white supremacists, Richard Spencer declared, “America was until this past generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.” To follow that rhetoric with something called a “watchlist” just adds to the fear that pervades much of the country at this time. Any censorship of the watchlist would be probably be a violation of free speech, unless, of course, Trump decides to restrict free speech by “opening up” the current libel laws as he had threatened to do in the campaign. But I know the chilling and, yes, deadly effects a prior list like this has had. In the 1990s, the American Coalition of Life Activists began to compile a list of abortion doctors, accusing them of “crimes against humanity”, and offered a monetary reward for any information that would lead to an “arrest, conviction, and revocation of license to practice medicine”. The group then would cross out the names of those abortion providers who were subsequently wounded or killed. Seven people were subsequently murdered in attacks on abortion doctors and/or clinics in the next few years. The amount of fear and intimidation created by these attacks is impossible to underestimate. I know, because a close relative appeared on one of those lists. Eventually, the list was ruled an incitement to violence by the courts in 2002. This new Professor Watchlist is, for now, not directly inciting violence. But it is just a small step to get there.