Matthew Guterl

The fall semester has kicked off and the annual tide of speakers now washes over our communities. Not surprisingly, colleges and universities are revisiting last year’s unresolved arguments about whether white supremacist speech deserves equal space and protection. Already, in the aftermath of the bloody white supremacist actions in Charlottesville, Texas A & M has cancelled a “White Lives Matter” event scheduled for early September. A “Free Speech Week” was taking shape in Berkeley, but then it all fell apart, a victim of giant egos with little capacity for event planning. A steady drumbeat of op-eds maintains that college minds are closed, that liberalism is a cult presided over by the professoriate, and that civility is endangered.

On Wednesday (August 2), US president Donald Trump’s White House rolled out the RAISE Act—an immigration bill noteworthy for its barely disguised roots in American racism.

One-hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil War, the thirst for an alternate version of Southern history in the US remains unquenchable. The Confederate flag endures as a symptom of the deeper cancer of racism, eating into the bone of the nation. And now a distinguished team of HBO showrunners, no doubt keen to appeal to the Trumpian electorate, is creating a show set in the alt-right South—in which the Confederacy’s secession was triumphant, and slavery is still legal. The planned show, “Confederate,” will purportedly depict the road to the “Third American Civil War.”

In early February, students, faculty, and staff at Indiana University in Bloomington arrived on campus to find white supremacist flyers papering two buildings. The flyers bore black-and-white photographs of gothic European statuary and taglines that emphasized a coming restoration of white nationalism in the US: “Our destiny is ours” and “Protect your future.” They covered the doors of faculty of color and professors who taught about race and ethnicity in the US. This was a clue that the message was an inside job: the work of current students who know the campus and its professors; who may sit in the classrooms of the very people they threatened.

How should the press cover Donald Trump? Faced with a veritable “blizzard of lies,” inside-the-Beltway journalists are struggling to document the newly-installed Trump administration. The list of facts to check—from the size of inaugural crowds to the numbers of illegal votes cast in the past election—grows longer with each press conference, each indiscretion, and each Trump tweet.

These gems aren’t mine, really. Facebook friends and colleagues have helped me to write this list. But I did rank the first ten.

A little over a week ago, a colleague wrote to me out of the blue to tell me that I had been added to Professor Watchlist. The list, compiled by the conservative group Turning Point USA in the wake of the US election, identifies university faculty who purportedly deserve close scrutiny for their liberal, “un-American” views.