The watch list is a project of the nonprofit organization Turning Point USA, which, according to its website, is a national movement that seeks to “educate students about the importance of fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets.” The nonprofit’s founder and executive director is 23-year-old Charlie Kirk, who, according to the Daily Herald, graduated from Wheeling High School in Illinois and then turned down an invitation to attend Baylor University and took some education classes at Harper College in Palatine, Ill., while he founded the nonprofit. Kirk spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

There are some 200 professors on the list from schools across the country — public and private. One, for example, is Gary Pellar, a professor of law at Georgetown University, who was put on the list, according to the website, because he wrote that students should not idolize the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia because “he was guilty of bullying and bigotry.” This is what Pellar actually wrote:

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“I imagine many other faculty, students and staff, particularly people of color, women and sexual minorities, cringed at headline and at the unmitigated praise with which the press release described a jurist that many of us believe was a defender of privilege, oppression and bigotry, one whose intellectual positions were not brilliant but simplistic and formalistic.”

Another academic on the list is David Guth, a journalism professor at the University of Kansas who, the Kansas City Star said, was on paid leave for months after he angrily tweeted about the National Rifle Association following the 2013 shootings at the Navy Yard in Washington. And there is Robert Jensen, a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, who researches, writes on and teaches about patriarchy and feminism. (He was one of four at the University of Texas to make the list.)

In this post, he explains why he landed on the list — and why the people who put him there don’t understand his teaching values. This post first appeared on the Waging Nonviolence website, and Jensen gave me permission to republish it.

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By Robert Jensen

From a “critique” of my work on Professor Watchlist, I learned that I’m a threat to my students for contending that we won’t end men’s violence against women “if we do not address the toxic notions about masculinity in patriarchy … rooted in control, conquest, aggression.”

That quote is supposedly “evidence” for why I am one of those college professors who, according to the watchlist’s mission statement], “discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Perhaps such a claim could be taken more seriously were it not coming from a project of conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA, which has its own political agenda — namely educating students “about the importance of fiscal responsibility, free markets and limited government.”

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This rather thin accusation appears to flow from my published work instead of an evaluation of my teaching, which confuses a teacher’s role in public with the classroom. So, I’ll help out the watchlist and describe how I address these issues at the University of Texas at Austin, where I’m finishing my 25th year of teaching. Readers can judge the threat level for themselves.

I just completed a unit on the feminist critique of the contemporary pornography industry in my course “Freedom: Philosophy, History, Law.” We began the semester with “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill (I’ll assume the Professor Watchlist approves of that classic book), examining how various philosophers have conceptualized freedom.

We then studied how the term has been defined and deployed politically throughout U.S. history, ending with questions about how living in a society saturated with sexually explicit material affects our understanding of freedom. I provided context about feminist intellectual and political projects of the past half-century, including the feminist critique of men’s violence and of mass media’s role in the sexual abuse and exploitation of women in a society based on institutionalized male dominance (that is, patriarchy).

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The release of a video on which Donald Trump made vulgar comments about forcing women into sex and the subsequent accusations by numerous women accusing him of sexual assault — which he denied — provided a “teachable moment” that I didn’t think should be ignored. I began that particular lecture, a week after the election, by emphasizing that my job was not to tell students how to act in the world but to help them understand the world in which they make choices.

Toward that goal, I pointed out that we have a president-elect who has bragged about being sexually aggressive and treating women like sexual objects, and that several women have testified about behavior that — depending on one’s evaluation of the evidence — could constitute sexual assault. Does it seem fair, I asked the class, to describe him as a sexual predator? No one disagreed.

Trump sometimes responded by contending that Bill Clinton was even worse. Citing someone else’s bad behavior to avoid accountability is a weak defense (most people learn that as children), and of course Trump wasn’t running against Bill, but we can learn from examining the claim.

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As president, Bill Clinton abused his authority by having sex with a younger woman who was first an intern and then a junior employee. He settled a sexual harassment lawsuit out of court, and he has been accused of rape. Does it seem fair to describe Bill Clinton as a sexual predator? No one disagreed.

So, we live in a world in which a former president, a Democrat, is seen by many as a sexual predator, yet he continues to be treated as a respected statesman and philanthropist. Our next president, a Republican, was elected though many see him as a sexual predator. How can we make sense of this? A feminist critique of toxic conceptions of masculinity and men’s sexual exploitation of women in patriarchy seems like a good place to start.

In that class, I spent considerable time reminding students that I didn’t expect them all to come to the same conclusions but that they all should consider relevant arguments in forming judgments. I repeated often my favorite phrase in teaching: “Reasonable people can disagree.” Student reactions to this unit of the class varied, but no one suggested that the feminist critique offered nothing of value in understanding our society.

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Is presenting a feminist framework to analyze a violent and pornographic culture politicizing the classroom, as the watchlist implies? If that’s the case, then the decision not to present a feminist framework also politicizes the classroom, in a different direction. The question isn’t whether professors will make such choices — that’s inevitable, given the nature of university teaching — but how we defend our intellectual work (with evidence and reasoned argument, I hope) and how we present the material to students (encouraging critical reflection).

It would be easier to dismiss this rather silly project if the United States had not just elected a president who shouts over attempts at rational discourse and reactionary majorities in both houses of Congress. I’m a tenured full professor (and white, male, and a U.S. citizen by birth) and am not worried. But, even though the group behind the watchlist has no formal power over me or my university, the attempt at bullying professors — no matter how weakly supported — may well inhibit professors without my security and privilege.