The coronavirus-prompted shift to remote teaching was stressful enough for faculty members before Charlie Kirk weaponized online learning. On Sunday the founder of the conservative political-action group Turning Point USA told college students whose professors had switched to online classes to share with Turning Point videos of “blatant indoctrination.”
“Now is the time to document & expose the radicalism that has been infecting our schools,” he tweeted. “Transparency!”
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
The general thrust of Kirk’s call to action was nothing new. Turning Point, Campus Reform, and other groups have created a cottage industry of naming and shaming professors who they say advance what they call the liberal agenda.
Research shows that though faculty members skew left politically, and conservative students can feel marginalized, there’s no evidence of a siege on conservative thought in the classroom. Nevertheless, “indoctrination” is a common right-wing talking point. And the transition to remote learning could mean students have more recorded material than ever to share, should they want to.
Kirk’s tweet was mocked by some faculty members, while others said there’s reason to be worried. A “vast and highly successful” right-wing apparatus is ready to destroy a professor who says the wrong thing, assigns the wrong reading, or submits the wrong grade, tweeted Jeffrey A. Sachs, a lecturer in history and politics at Acadia University, in Canada, who keeps a database of faculty members who have been fired for political speech.
“Faculty are alarmed,” Sachs wrote, “because they are paying attention.”
Defense Strategies
Some scholars say they’re taking precautions. Dylan Bugden, an assistant professor of sociology at Washington State University, said that after his institution announced it would pivot to online instruction, he decided he would not record lectures. To teach, he’d instead post presentation slides, short quizzes, activities, and an exam, and he’d be available for office hours.
“I find it difficult to teach without referring to important events and issues in the world,” Bugden explained in an email. “Doing so is a powerful way to help students see that what we learn in class is not just abstract or a mere intellectual exercise, but matters for the things they and their peers care about.”
Unfortunately, he said, that approach opens faculty members — especially women and people of color — to attack. Bugden teaches about such environmental issues as climate change and population growth, and he says he has received course evaluations in which students tell him to leave politics out of his material. His political views aren’t a secret, and the likelihood of an online campaign against him seems low, Bugden said. “But the risk is so severe that it’s simply not worth it.”
Nobody cares what you actually think, or your actual political views. You are bait to make a point.
Rachel Michelle Gunter, a professor at a community college in North Texas, said she’s also taking protective measures. She teaches American history. Every single lecture, she said, covers controversial topics. For her recorded remote lectures, Gunter said, she will send her students a link to the video that takes them to YouTube. The videos will be “unlisted,” meaning someone can’t find them in a Youtube search or by going to Gunter’s page. She plans to make the videos private after two weeks. The strategy isn’t foolproof, she said, but it limits someone’s ability to capture a snippet and blow it out of context.
Preparation and support should not be left to the faculty member alone, said Jason Stanley. If one of your colleagues “gets hit,” support them, Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale University, said in a Twitter thread. “It is not a time to lecture them about” what “you think they did wrong. … This is an attack on academic freedom, not a time for Schadenfreude.”
The most vulnerable faculty members are adjuncts, lecturers, and faculty members who don’t have tenure, in that order, Stanley said. They are “at very serious risk,” he wrote. Centrist liberals might think they’re safe, he said. “But nobody cares what you actually think, or your actual political views. You are bait to make a point.”
Others are more skeptical that Kirk’s mandate will have much effect.
Kirk’s tweet concerns Adam Shprintzen more as a concept than as a possibility in his own life. He said he’s unsettled by the idea that outside forces are trying to uncover classroom content and intentionally misuse it. But Shprintzen, an assistant professor of history at Marywood University, in Pennsylvania, said he knows his students pretty intimately. There’s an inherent trust, he said, that what happens in a classroom setting is something that they share together.
L.D. Burnett, a professor of history at Collin College, in Texas, said she’s sure there will be some students who take Kirk up on his offer. But Burnett also thinks that Kirk will get fewer takers than he hopes for because, she said, this crisis has laid bare the human aspect of what professors do.
Burnett’s students come from a variety of political backgrounds. Throughout the shift to online learning, they have responded to her with gratitude, encouragement, and mutual support, she said.
Maybe the material that Kirk is searching for will surface later, she said. But for now, “I think both professors and students are focused on giving each other some grace.”
