This attitude is typical of the overwhelming majority of instructors. From fully tenured scholars to precarious adjuncts the well-being of our students is priority number one.

Not so, apparently, for the always repulsive Charlie Kirk, head of the notorious Turning Point, USA, sponsor of the infamous Professor Watchlist. Here’s what he tweeted on Sunday:

For faculty and students everywhere moving online in response to a deadly pandemic poses a daunting challenge to be met with hard work and humility. Our goals are to try as best we can to continue teaching and learning under strained circumstances, keeping always in mind the variety of conditions in which our students live and the many and varied obstacles, foreseen and unforeseen, we and our students face. But for Kirk and his merry band of ignoramuses this is nothing less than a golden opportunity. Not for “transparency” but for destructive disruption and mean-spirited censorship.

Here are just a few facts about Turning Point:

• Turning Point maintains the Professor Watchlist. It claims that the purpose of the watchlist is to identify professors who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom,” but most entries are not about instances of discrimination or propagandizing in the classroom. Many entries on the Professor Watchlist concern faculty members’ social media posts or scholarly publications. In a number of instances, listings have led to campaigns of online harassment against faculty members.
• Turning Point’s budget of over eight million dollars is funded by donors, many of whom prefer to remain anonymous. However, Kirk admits that donors include those “in the fossil-fuel space”—perhaps why Turning Point has organized campus opposition to calls for schools to divest from fossil-fuel companies.
• Turning Point may have violated federal rules prohibiting 501(c)(3) charities from engaging in political activity by aiding Republican political campaigns, according to reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New Yorker.

But don’t just take it from me. Even conservatives are troubled by the activities of Kirk and his minions. In 2018, John Hardin, director of university relations for the Charles Koch Foundation, warned his group’s annual donor conclave about TPUSA’s activities. “Instead of supporting groups that put professors that they disagree with on watch lists,” Hardin told the Washington Post, “we support folks who take those professors to lunch, who co-teach with those professors and who collaborate with those professors.” Sarah Ruger, director of Free Speech Initiatives for the Charles Koch Institute, called Professor Watchlist an example of something that “keeps [her] up at night. It’s truly McCarthyism 2.0,” she said.

As the AAUP first stated in the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, “Discussions in the classroom ought not to be supposed to be utterances for the public at large. They are often designed to provoke opposition or arouse debate.” In the 1980s, in response to the activities of Accuracy in Academia, a group whose approach prefigured that of Turning Point, the AAUP, along with twelve other higher education associations, declared, “The classroom is a place of learning where the professor serves as intellectual guide, and all are encouraged to seek and express the truth as they see it. The presence in the classroom of monitors for an outside organization will have a chilling effect on the academic freedom of both students and faculty members. Students may be discouraged from testing their ideas, and professors may hesitate before presenting new or possibly controversial theories that would stimulate robust intellectual discussion.” This is as applicable in the online or remote classroom as it is in the traditional one.

So let me, in my capacity as chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, issue a challenge to Mr. Kirk: If he or anyone associated with his group threatens the academic freedom of any faculty member teaching online by posting or distributing without permission content from a course taken out of the context of that instructor’s electronic classroom the AAUP will come to that faculty member’s defense. And let me also issue a challenge to college and university administrators: if you accede to the demands of Kirk and his like and attempt to discipline a faculty member for exercising professional academic freedom in the classroom during this trying time, the AAUP will hold you accountable.

Academic freedom is as critical to teaching and learning in a pandemic as it is in ordinary times.