I Am a Dangerous Professor

[John Young]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/opinion/i-am-a-dangerous-professor.html


Those familiar with George Orwell's "1984" will recall that "Newspeak 
was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought." I 
recently felt the weight of this Orwellian ethos when many of my 
students sent emails to inform me, and perhaps warn me, that my name 
appears on the Professor Watchlist, a new website created by a 
conservative youth group known as Turning Point USA.

I could sense the gravity in those email messages, a sense of 
relaying what is to come. The Professor Watchlist's mission, among 
other things, is to sound an alarm about those of us within academia 
who "advance leftist propaganda in the classroom." It names and 
includes photographs of some 200 professors.

The Watchlist appears to be consistent with a nostalgic desire "to 
make America great again" and to expose and oppose those voices in 
academia that are anti-Republican or express anti-Republican values. 
For many black people, making America "great again" is especially 
threatening, as it signals a return to a more explicit and 
unapologetic racial dystopia. For us, dreaming of yesterday is not a 
privilege, not a desire, but a nightmare.

The new "watchlist" is essentially a new species of McCarthyism, 
especially in terms of its overtones of "disloyalty" to the American 
republic. And it is reminiscent of Cointelpro, the secret F.B.I. 
program that spied on, infiltrated and discredited American political 
organizations in the '50s and '60s. Its goal of "outing" professors 
for their views helps to create the appearance of something secretly 
subversive. It is a form of exposure designed to mark, shame and silence.

...


So, in my classrooms, I refuse to remain silent in the face of 
racism, its subtle and systemic structure. I refuse to remain silent 
in the face of patriarchal and sexist hegemony and the denigration of 
women's bodies, or about the ways in which women have internalized 
male assumptions of how they should look and what they should feel and desire.

I refuse to be silent about forms of militarism in which innocent 
civilians are murdered in the name of "democracy." I refuse to remain 
silent when it comes to acknowledging the existential and psychic 
dread and chaos experienced by those who are targets of xenophobia 
and homophobia.

I refuse to remain silent when it comes to transgender women and men 
who are beaten to death by those who refuse to create conditions of 
hospitality.

I refuse to remain silent in a world where children become targets of 
sexual violence, and where unarmed black bodies are shot dead by the 
state and its proxies, where those with disabilities are mocked and 
still rendered 
"<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/opinion/mental-illness-is-not-a-horror-show.html>monstrous," 
and where the earth suffers because some of us refuse to hear its 
suffering, where my ideas are marked as "un-American," and apparently 
"dangerous."

Well, if it is dangerous to teach my students to love their 
neighbors, to think and rethink constructively and ethically about 
who their neighbors are, and how they have been taught to see 
themselves as disconnected and neoliberal subjects, then, yes, I am 
dangerous, and what I teach is dangerous.