I beg your pardon sir, but Donald Trump didnt do his homework before the debates, and look where it got him.
"DO MY HOMEWORK?! I beg your pardon, sir, but Donald Trump didn't do his homework before the debates, and look where it got him." dotshock / shutterstock.com

Today in proto-Fascistic gestures that would have been dismissed as the infantile merely three weeks ago, conservative "nonprofit organization" Turning Point USA has launched a website called Professor Watchlist. According to the "About Us" page, the site's mission is "to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom."

They've already loaded up the site with profiles that distort the facts or fail to tell the stories of the professors they seek to smear. Over at Inside Higher Ed, Colleen Flaherty has already done some of the work of clearing up a few names:

Deandre Poole's profile, for example, says that the instructor of communications at Florida Atlantic University told students to "stomp" on a piece of paper on which they'd written "Jesus." Yet Poole has said the 2013 exercise came from a popular textbook manual and that the point was not for students to step on the paper, but to think about why they wouldn't want to.

They posted a profile of Washington State University professor Selena Lester Breikss, who included in her syllabus a grade penalty for the repeated use of speech she deemed offensive, but the site fails to include any information on the administration's prompt response to that situation.

This development wouldn't be particularly worrisome—there have been conservative watchdogs organizations like this before—except for the fact that Turning Point USA might have some money. Founder Charlie Kirk, told the National Journal that he'd raised $1 million in 2014, and that his goal was to raise $5 million. When pressed, though, Turning Point USA failed to produce paperwork showing that they'd raised the money they said they raised, claiming that "the group wanted to maintain Kirk's air of 'mystique.'"

A fun and particularly rich fact from that piece:

Kirk didn't end up going to college in 2012. He's now enrolled part-time at New York's King's College, taking online classes at night after he has finished his executive director duties. He doesn't seem particularly committed, casually saying he'll get his degree "in due time." As he burnishes his conservative credentials through op-eds and cable-news spots, he's laying the groundwork for bigger plans than a diploma.

A confusion at the center of Kirk's mission: If some universities really do maintain a "status quo of liberal orthodoxy" that "targets" conservative students, as Kirk attempts to demonstrate on this vomit-inducing discussion with Sean Hannity and the the two eels from The Little Mermaid, then why not adopt a free market solution and encourage students to attend schools known for upholding conservative values? Hillsdale awaits. Liberty U awaits. Trump U—well.

A confession from a former adjunct professor: I taught writing at the college level for six years. I spent three of those six years in Ohio and Missouri. I told my students that I didn't really care what they thought but that they thought. Directing unexamined racist, sexist, and homophobic language at other students the classroom isn't thinking. In addition to being hurtful and cliche, it's not conducive to fruitful discussions. It's a tactic used to shut people down. That's why I didn't allow it. That's why prohibitions on speech used in that way in the classroom are necessary.

But this Professor Watch nonsense isn't about fostering discussion. It's about fear. It's about trying to capitalize on the very real threat posed by a Trump presidency in order to gain ground in one of the last few (and slowly bleeding) places in this country where people are rewarded for extending their curiosity beyond themselves and for constructing sound, well-reasoned arguments.

But of course, this fear-mongering isn't working. Using the hashtag #trollprofessorwatchlist, profs around the country are being real professorial about this whole thing: