Coordinated effort throughout academia. Update to this previous story.
Via Campus Reform:
The president of Turning Point USA at Santa Clara University believes several professors tried to “intimidate” him with faculty-wide emails demanding that he add them to the “professor watchlist.”
The TPUSA-SCU chapter was initially denied official recognition by student government in a vote taken just one week after a staff advisor delivered a PowerPoint presentation on white supremacist groups that featured a slide about the national TPUSA organization.
Vice Provost Jeanne Rosenberg overturned the decision, however, explaining that the Senate had unfairly used political disagreement as a basis for disapproving the group.
This upset a number of professors, who argued in an open letter that the administration had no right to “second guess a decision reached by the democratically elected representatives of the student body.”
A few professors apparently deemed the letter an insufficient response to the situation, and began emailing the entire faculty email listserv with the president of TPUSA-SCU, Caleb Alleva, copied on the chain.
Six professors sarcastically demanded in the emails that they be added to TPUSA’s Professor Watchlist.
“I recommend adding me to the Faculty Watchlist sooner than later,” wrote John Farnsworth, a professor of environmental studies. “During the spring quarter I will be teaching ENVS 79: Environmental Thought. In this course I attempt to establish a climate of intellectual openness that I fear will make TPUSA members uncomfortable.”
Farnsworth also opted to insult the intelligence of TPUSA members, asserting that “the rigors of the course…will almost certainly present difficulties to any student who subscribes to the TPUSA viewpoint.”