Targeted Ohio State professors on the damaging impact of Turning Point’s ‘professor watchlist’

Initially, Treva B. Lindsey didn’t know why she started to see a spike in the harassing emails she received beginning in mid-2020, sharing that these kinds of messages have been a constant presence throughout her career in academia.

“When you’re a public-facing scholar, it can feel like attacks are coming from all sides at all times, especially when you’re writing about things like white supremacy,” said Lindsey, a professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University and the author of books including America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice, from 2022.

But at some point in 2021, Lindsey learned from a friend that her name had been included on Turning Point’s “professor watchlist,” a website the conservative activist group launched in 2016 as a means to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Lindsey is one of four OSU professors included on the site, joining Pranav Jani, Hasan Jeffries, and Scott Leibowitz. (Leibowitz declined to comment, while Jeffries did not reply to an email from Matter News requesting an interview.)

The contents of the emails that flooded Lindsey’s inbox could vary, with some writing to question her expertise or credit her position to affirmative action – a precursor to the current, conservative-driven DEI backlash. Others could be more explicit, steeped in racist language and threats of sexual violence, arriving with such frequency that Lindsey eventually coordinated with administrators to have her work email removed from the Ohio State website. Lindsey attributed the tone and frequency of these kinds of messages to the combined weight of racism and sexism present in this social and political moment. 

“We’re seeing anti-Blackness that allows people to feel comfortable with a certain level of engagement. Misogyny also makes people feel comfortable. And Black women sit at the intersection of both of those and then some, so people feel very safe to make me unsafe, knowing there won’t be consequences,” said Lindsey, who has taken additional measures in an attempt to keep both herself and her family secure, including developing a community-based safety protocol she can adhere to in those times when the threats feel more immediate. “The messages could get incredibly violent, saying, ‘I hope what happened to this person happens to you and your family.’” 

Some of these messages have even extended to her mother, a former longtime educator in the Washington D.C. public school system who shares a name with her daughter and has repeatedly found herself on the receiving end of threats as a result. “I signed up for this,” Lindsey said, “but my mother did not.”

In the days since Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk’s Sept. 10 murder, Lindsey said she had already seen a spike in emails, some of which, at least, have been sent by people either offering support or simply alerting her to her presence on the TPUSA watchlist. These communications have added to the sense of unease she has experienced in attempting to navigate current realities, with Ohio Senate Bill 1 already starting to reshape the landscape of higher education.

“I know as we were creating our syllabi, there was a lot of push and pull about what we can and can’t say [under SB1]. This is banned; this is not banned; this is not banned but it’s not recommended,” Lindsey said. “Then the administration and these other entities are trying to figure out how to be in compliance. And for those of us who are very hesitant about compliance, and who think of the classroom as this dynamic space, we’re trying to figure out what compliance means in regard to our job as educators. And when those two things are in conflict, what is the choice we’re going to make? … There are campuses where professors are being fired for statements made in classes. And there’s this sense of am I being recorded? Are people signing up for classes simply to antagonize? And all of that does feel even more amplified now, especially in the aftermath of this killing.”

Kirk, who in the days since his death has been lauded in conservative circles as a staunch defender of free speech, spent much of his career working to reshape higher education in ways that cut against this image. He often attacked professors by name, and he dismissed college as “a scam” in a 2022 op-ed in which he also describes universities as “indoctrination zones where free speech is crushed.” The establishment of the “professor watchlist” served as an expansion on this mission – a way to target those educators who Kirk and his organization viewed as advancing what they termed “liberal propaganda.”

Pranav Jani, an associate professor of English at Ohio State who appears on the TPUSA watchlist in addition to several other similarly aligned directories, including Canary Mission, said these kinds of lists exist in opposition to academic freedom, which he described as the ability to say “whatever is necessary to teach the material absent political interference,” along with having a corrosive impact on free speech rights.

“For some reason, these [directories] aren’t seen as a censoring of free speech when I think it actually is,” Jani said. “Sometimes it’s an attack on what we say in our capacity as individual citizens, which … Ohio State has supported explicitly. … But what these watchlists do is they say that if you’re a professor who has certain opinions, you’re automatically indoctrinating students. So, it ends up violating freedom of speech while also … implying that I’m not a good teacher, when the reality is they don’t have a clue as to what I do in my classroom.”

Writing in response to a request for comment, Ohio State spokesperson Ben Johnson said that “Ohio State supports the rights of its students, faculty, staff, volunteers, visitors, community partners and program participants to exercise their freedom of speech and expression.”

The impact of these databases can also extend well beyond the email inbox or the classroom, Jani said, pointing to how his Canary Mission listing, which falsely labels him as a terrorist supporter who has “promoted violent protestors,” currently falls near the top of the Google search results for his name, a reality that can have both personal and professional repercussions. “And it’s intended to set you up in that way,” he said, “setting you up as a racist, antisemitic, a terror supporter – all of these things that I’m not.”

If there’s any silver lining to be found in the existence of these types of databases, Jani said, it’s in how they position those named as potential resources for others newly targeted. As one example, he pointed to an instance from this past week in which a colleague reached out to solicit advice after receiving an “ominous” message from a student with Turning Point who called out a social media post they had made in relation to Kirk. 

“And that kind of thing happens all the time,” said Jani, who in these instances will offer everything from common sense advice (“Make sure you don’t respond in an angry way”) to helping gauge what institutional resources might be available. “It’s asking, do you have the support of your chair? Do you have the support of your administrator? And sometimes it’s a conversation about particular campuses, because so many of these campuses are quite different from one another. What’s the climate there? Is there a union? Do you have a union rep you can reach out to?”

Similarly, Lindsey said she will occasionally check on these databases, making note of new additions and reaching out where appropriate to express solidarity and offer a helping hand.

“And we’ll invite them to these informal networks we’ve created, letting them know that even if they don’t feel supported within their institutions, we have created this,” said Lindsey, who described these developing, loose-knit mutual aid networks as essential in a time when bigger, more institutional-based support might not be as readily available. “Care and the ethics of care are so important right now. Whereas the world might be deeply careless with us, it is very important that in this moment we are deeply careful with each other.”