I’m on the Professor Watchlist—and it’s exposed a radical truth about the future of social justice - by Matthew Pratt Guterl

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 Trump’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.

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