BY HANK REICHMAN

Recently the AAUP and others have been calling attention to the growing phenomenon of targeted online (and direct) harassment of faculty members, which has become a major threat to the academic freedom of everyone in higher education.  In January 2017, the AAUP issued a statement noting how individual faculty members “have been subject to threats of physical violence, including sexual assault, through hundreds of e-mails, calls, and social media postings.”  The statement urged “administrations, governing boards, and faculties, individually and collectively, to speak out clearly and forcefully to defend academic freedom and to condemn targeted harassment and intimidation of faculty members.”  In September 2017, the AAUP was joined by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) to declare that “campaigns of harassment endanger more than the faculty member concerned. They pose a profound and ominous challenge to higher education’s most fundamental values.”  That statement added, “Concessions to the harassers send the message that such odious tactics are effective. They have a chilling effect on the entire academic community.  Academic leaders are therefore obligated to recognize that attacks on the academic freedom of individual instructors pose a risk to the institution as a whole and to the very project of higher education as a public good.”

My forthcoming book, The Future of Academic Freedom, documents dozens of such campaigns, most often facilitated by right-wing websites and organizations and aimed at minority, women, and leftist faculty members.  But outside the higher education press, media coverage of such campaigns has been mostly local.  The national press has tended to pay far greater attention to a supposed “free speech crisis” sparked by a handful of ill-considered efforts by students to silence speakers than to the far more numerous — and I would argue more dangerous — harassment campaigns directed against faculty members and sometimes students.  Now, however, the latest campaign of harassment has profound national implications, although it remains to be seen how the country’s media will portray it.  I am talking about the campaign of harassment being conducted by a phalanx of online trolls and in the media itself against Professor Christine Blasey Ford, the Palo Alto University psychologist who has reluctantly come forward with allegations that President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape her while the two were in high school.

First of all, let me acknowledge that from the beginning I have opposed the Kavanaugh nomination because of his anti-democratic judicial “philosophy” and his history as a political hatchet man.  His evasions and prevarications during testimony — his failure, for example, to recall anything about the widely known sexual emails circulated by Kavanaugh’s mentor and now-disgraced appellate court judge Alex Kozinski to his clerks and others (see here and here) is almost laughably unbelievable — only cemented my views, well before word first leaked of Professor Blasey’s allegation.  But whatever one may think of judge Kavanaugh or of the veracity of Professor Blasey’s claim (personally, I believe her), everyone in academia should be united in support of her academic freedom to speak out. [The professor uses Blasey professionally and it is how she is listed on her university’s website, so that is the name I use in this post.]

According to a letter from her attorneys, Professor Blasey “has been the target of vicious harassment and even death threats.  As a result of these kind of threats, her family was forced to relocate out of their home.  Her email has been hacked, and she has been impersonated online.”  Ford’s neighbors say her sons have also received death threats.  The Washington Post reported,

At 10:28 Tuesday morning, a Twitter account with a white ­nationalist talking point for its handle posted Christine Blasey Ford’s personal address.

The account called for “peaceful protests” at Ford’s home in Northern California over her accusation that Judge Brett M. ­Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party in the early 1980s when they were teenagers. The allegation was a “hoax” orchestrated by the “deranged left,” the account tweeted.

This was at least the third time a Twitter user had “doxed” Ford — posted her personal information online.

Professor Blasey has received a stream of harassing messages and threats.  “No one believes you,” one message said. “Karma is a [expletive] and it will be visiting you very very soon.”  She and her family have moved out of their home as a security precaution, and she and her husband are staying apart from their two children. “She’s spending her time trying to figure out the logistics of her life as it is now and how to keep herself and her family safe,” a person close to her told the Post.

On Monday, the Post reported in a different article, a fringe right-wing site wrote a short and thinly reported story about the fact that Kavanaugh’s mother, a Maryland state judge, was involved in a foreclosure case brought against Ford’s parents.  The story was promoted by Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Twitter and shared on pro-Trump social media sites.  The implication was clear: that Ford was perhaps motivated  by some personal vendetta.  “You literally cannot make this up,” wrote the site America First Media Group.

“Our client had no knowledge of this foreclosure action until the press began reporting on it today,” Ford’s lawyers said in a statement.  “Based on a review of the court records, this was a foreclosure case involving property owned by Ralph and Paula Blasey, which involved at least two judges from the Circuit Court for Montgomery County.  One of those judges, Martha Kavanaugh, granted a motion voluntarily dismissing the foreclosure action, which was a favorable ruling for the Blaseys.  The foreclosure action did not affect the Blaseys’ ownership interest in this property.”

The Gateway Pundit, which is known for promoting conspiracy theories and hoaxes, published stories that seemed to bolster Kavanaugh’s denials and undermine Professor Blasey.  It referred to her in headlines as an “unhinged liberal professor,” as well as the “far-left accuser.”  The site YourNewsWire tried to link Ford to the Christopher Steele dossier, writing that “when the number of ‘coincidences’ in the case of Kavanaugh’s accuser are added up, a picture of enemy action begins to become clear.”

None other than Donald Trump Jr., revealing yet again his pitiful level of maturity, also joined the fray.  The younger Donald posted what appeared to be a meme over the weekend, showing a picture of an apparent schoolboy love note with the caption: “Judge Kavanaugh’s sexual assault letter found by Dems.”  The satirical note shared by Trump Jr. was written in crayon, reading “Hi Cindy will you be my girlfreind.”  It included two boxes, one for “yes” and one for “no,” and it was signed, “Love Bret.”  This was too much for former conservative Republican congressman Joe Walsh, who called the president’s son “an uncaring, narrow-minded idiot.”

Adding fuel to the paranoiac fire, the odious Tucker Carlson told his viewers, “This story doesn’t have anything to do with justice actually, or even with what Brett Kavanaugh may have done in high school, underneath it all, anyone who lives in Washington can tell you, it’s about abortion.”   Well, yeah, I guess so.  Had Kavanaugh succeeded in his rape attempt it is quite possible that Christine Blasey might have needed an abortion.

The harassment even spread to another professor at a different institution.  The Post reports:

A little-known online media outlet, Grabien News, published a story that mistook Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University, for Christine A. Ford, a former professor at California State University at Fullerton. The piece quoted what it said were poor online reviews of Christine A. Ford’s teaching by students between 2010 and 2014.

Before it was retracted on Monday, the story went viral, fueled by tweets from the Drudge Report and conservative media host Laura Ingraham, whose former executive producer runs Grabien News.

Reached by phone, Christine A. Ford acknowledged that the last few days had been difficult for her and said that she had hired a lawyer.  She declined to say whether she had faced any threats.  “I’m not a public figure, and I don’t have that expectation of being run through the press,” she said.

Professor Blasey’s experience is hardly unique. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has described how these attacks typically develop:

The first clue a professor gets that her life is about to change arrives in the most bureaucratic and benign of ways: It is often an email. The email may say that a known right-wing publication is planning to run a story about your research or your teaching, and it offers you a chance to comment.

Next, the architecture of online news media takes over. A story, perhaps about your syllabus or a story you told in a lecture, is posted. A series of outraged tweets goes out. An army of social media accounts, some run by real humans and some by “bots,” is pressed into service. The targeted advertising that Facebook uses to sell you the shoes you thought about buying on Amazon last week also helps the troll armies push stories about a “liberal commie” into the social media feeds of those on the right who are likely to believe and share it.

Within 24 hours, your university email is swarmed with messages from people claiming to be concerned students, concerned parents and concerned donors. Somewhere in the hundreds of emails there may be official communications from students and co-workers, but you don’t have the resources to find them. You cannot do your actual job of teaching and researching because you are drowning in emails, phone calls and messages.

If you are one of the lucky ones, it stops there. Increasingly, it does not stop there. Angry consumers of this kind of culture war red meat do not live just on the internet. They live in your community. They may mail you packages, perhaps with dangerous contents in them. They may send you death threats. They may use the surveillance apparatus we built to sell internet ads and control poor people to find out where your children go to school or where your spouse works. They may threaten them, directly or indirectly.

The distance between these trolls and their targets is shrinking; increasingly, the perpetrators of this harassment have a real-life presence on campus. They organize sophisticated armies of student “journalists” to surveil and trap professors and students into being “liberal.” They record and remix footage, circulating it on a vast web of social media, blogs, content farms and even in mainstream media. They capture the public’s imagination, feed conservative media’s obsession with the liberal academia, and they make it seem safe to hordes of on-the-ground soldiers fighting an imaginary race war to come to a campus near you to recruit.

So far Republicans on the Judiciary Committee have rejected Professor Blasey’s legitimate request that any testimony she may give be preceded by the usual FBI background investigation, so that an independent review can, to the extent possible, determine the facts.  To be sure, such a review may be unlikely to unearth convincing evidence one way or the other, but it would establish a baseline for questioning by the senators.  And while they are at it, mightn’t the FBI also investigate the sources of harassment and threats that Professor Blasey and her family have received?  Whatever may have happened between her and Kavanaugh years ago, she is right now a victim of illegal harassment.  Those who have threatened her and her family and forced them to go into hiding should be uncovered and charged with crimes, including, perhaps, federal witness tampering.

If the FBI won’t defend this harassment victim, there are fortunately others that will.  A group of her “fellow moms in and around Palo Alto” wrote to say “that we are here, and we have your back.  Most of us don’t know you personally, but we all are thinking of you and holding you tight in our hearts. . . . If there is anything that we, your neighbors, can do to help or support you or your family, please know that we are here.  We will bake you cookies, bring over dinner, lend a hand with your kids, help with your pets, protest in front of City Hall, sign petitions, run for office, write to the media and to lawmakers, form a human chain to protect your house, your workplace, your kids’ schools — just let us know if we can ever help.”

Nearly 600 women from Professor Blasey’s high school signed an open letter saying that they support her and believe her account that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in high school.  “Dr. Blasey Ford’s experience is all too consistent with stories we heard and lived while attending Holton.  Many of us are survivors ourselves,” the letter reads.

The administration of Palo Alto University, where Professor Blasey teaches, has also been appropriately supportive.  Her contact information has been removed from the school’s faculty directory.  And yesterday President Maureen O’Connor issued a statement to the university community, which read,

Palo Alto University (PAU) professor Christine Blasey Ford is a valued and highly respected member of the Palo Alto University community.  She is passionate about her work, dedicated to her students, and a wonderful colleague and contributor to the field of psychology.  As a university dedicated to the study and practice of psychology and counseling, we are especially attuned to the challenges and consequences of experiencing trauma, and the courage it requires to speak publicly about that experience.  And, as an institution of higher learning, we understand the importance of providing service to society and participating actively in civic life.

Professor Blasey Ford has exercised her right to engage in public discourse by discussing a traumatic experience that has affected her life.  We acknowledge that her decision to come forward is courageous, especially in the context of the political discussions around the appointment of leaders to our country’s highest court.  Professor Blasey is surrounded by a strong support network, and is appreciative of the care and concern shown by members of our community.

We also recognize that public discussions of these challenging issues can cause re-traumatization and distress for those who have experienced trauma or have friends or loved ones who have.  Our greatest concern is for the health and well-being of our university community, so in that spirit, we are sharing some additional resources below, compiled by the Office of Student Services and the Association of Traumatic Stress Studies, that might be of assistance in addition to reaching out to your faculty, peers, or our student services office.

Together, we are strong and resilient.  The work you are all doing in your classrooms and in the community to address trauma, anxiety, and the mental health needs of so many is making a real difference in our world.

There is an AAUP chapter at Palo Alto University.  Both the chapter and the national AAUP have communicated to Professor Blasey our willingness to help defend her academic freedom should that prove necessary.

The hypocrisy of those who repeatedly bemoan a virtually non-existent “free speech crisis” and repeatedly propose ill-conceived, even draconian, legislation designed to silence protest in the name of freedom of speech while remaining silent about the treatment of Professor Blasey and all other faculty members and students subject to this sort of disgusting and terrifying treatment would be astonishing, were it not all too predictable.  Again, whatever one may think of Judge Kavanaugh, President Trump, or of Professor Blasey’s allegations, this targeted professor deserves to be heard with respect and, even more important, to live her life and conduct her work in safety.