It's fun to watch the collective knicker-twist of laughably left-leaning academics over Professor Watchlist, a new website devoted to tabulating the names of…laughably left-leaning academics.
Here, for example is University of Pennsylvania religious studies professor Anthea Butler fulminating in the U.K. Guardian over the fact that she made the list:
It is an all-out bid to control not only academic freedom in the university setting, but to create a hostile climate for free speech and academic freedom.
Butler continues:
It also creates an environment of distrust. Students are being trained not only to report on professors, but on student events as well. At the University of Pennsylvania, a campus event the day after the presidential election in a dorm to provide a “breathing space” was reported on by a student who mocked the presence of coloring books, cats and dogs.
Coloring books at an Ivy League college! How dare that student actually report on an official event on the Penn campus?
Naturally, I was curious to find out what got Butler onto the list. And here it is, from a 2015 story in Campus Reform (Professor Watchlist backs up every name with reporting from a news source):
University of Pennsylvania Professor Anthea Butler called Presidential Candidate Ben Carson a "[racially disparaging term]" for claiming that people have the right to display Confederate flags on private property.
“If only there was a ‘[deleted] of the year’ award…” Professor Butler tweeted in response to another tweet linking to a Sports Illustrated article in which Carson was quoted defended the right of NASCAR fans to fly Confederate flags during races.
The Campus Reform story includes a screen-grab of exactly that tweet (since deleted by Butler), which features Butler's Twitter photo. It also includes a link-chain to this 2013 blog post by Butler lamenting the not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman murder case:
God ain’t good all of the time….As a matter of fact, I think he’s a white racist god with a problem. More importantly, he is carrying a gun and stalking young black men.
So you can be forgiven for concluding that Anthea Butler just might be…one laughably left-leaning professor whose classes you might not want to take, considering that at pricey Penn, the annual tuition alone is around $44,000.
It kind of goes like that at Professor Watchlist, whose alternate name might be: All the Crazy-Left Profs in One Place.
There's Columbia Journalism School professor Dale Maharidge, raing during the wee hours at Project Veritas:
Maharidge, who admittedly stayed up through the night wrote an initial post on his Facebook account (he has since attempted to revise and tone down his comments) disparaging Project Veritas and James O’Keefe.
Within Maharidge’s early morning rant, he went on to state, “O’Keefe does his so-called journalism for. He is a toady of the bankers and 1 percent . . . Michael S. Williamson and I have done our work for the 99 percent.”
Maharidge then segued into a rambling macho-flash paragraph that was then deleted in a duplicate post later in the day:
“This is fun because O’Keefe is so stupid. Remember: you have to laugh. Or you cry. And this dude ain’t cryin’. Dude’s from Cleveland. . .a dying steel town. . . I’ve lived the shit. . .lots of shit. . . .I’ve walked through fire and chortled about it, have had guns pulled on me–and a lot worse. I should be dead. Two times over. Nothing scares me.”
Or how about Candis Bond (I picked her name at random), an instructor in the Women and Gender Studies program at St. Louis University? The College Fix reports:
A new course at Saint Louis University will teach students about efforts to make catcalling a crime and how public streets are shaped by white privilege, feminism, imperialism and intersectionality….
“Basically, the idea is that the streets are public space [and] are not neutral. So, they are political constructs in the sense that there are different institutions or social structures that influence the physical shape of our streets,” [Bond] said.
As might be expected, the lefty professoriate is fighting back in its own lefty way.
Inside Higher Education reports that Emory University philosophy professor Noelle McAfee has created a blog, Professor Watchlist Redux (the heavy-handed title says it all) "dedicated to satirizing sites that try to squelch academic freedom through intimidation, innuendo, and other sophomoric methods." One of the names on McAfee's list is Jesus–because, as McAfee told Inside Higher Ed, "Jesus also destroyed a lot of property in his time."
Isn't it fun watching left-wing academics writhe and squirm?