Antifa on Campus: University Professors Fuelling Civil Unrest
Universities are the ideological incubators of Antifa in the US. While most US campuses do not have any policies that endorse Antifa explicitly, the group flourishes where administrators employ teaching staff that are increasingly far-left activist educators or actual members of the group, where they are allowed to recruit and host events on campus grounds and where universities offer an over-abundance of courses in the social sciences that have their roots in Marxist and postmodernist theory and which do not offer sufficient evaluation of course content to train students to think critically.
While there have been several high-profile cases of Antifa-connected lecturers in the news in recent years, we wanted to get a sense of how prevalent the issue is by creating a database to track the relationship between Antifa and University Professors on Twitter.
Up until the 1960s, Marxism was the favoured theoretical approach of the leftist intellectual class. After WWII, with the restructuring of Europe, mass migrations and the rise of the Information Age a clique of radical skeptics within academia, chiefly of French origin, gave rise to a nebulous, fragmented movement brought to public consciousness by Jean Francois Lyotard in 1979. He called it postmodernism. Lyotard’s postmodernism is a rejection of the certainty of “grand narratives” that arose out of the Enlightenment — truth, reason, science, objective reality etc. Lyotard rejects the world of grand narratives and promotes subjective and relativistic interpretations of prevailing knowledge. Allied to Lyotard’s skepticism of grand narratives, Jacque Derrida’s deconstruction provided a means to open up commonly held interpretations of language and text to critical analysis by subverting the central meaning of language and text to show how a marginalised interpretation can be just as significant. What emerges in the postmodern period is an intensely skeptical tradition that relentlessly attacks the foundations of modern Western knowledge without care to provide alternatives. Its aim is not to find solutions to societal problems or add to empirical knowledge, rather endlessly critique or interpret.
While postmodernism and Marxism are separate entities with the former rejecting the latter as a model that claimed a grand narrative, the reality is that Marxism never fell out of favour, it was just repackaged by many postmodernists or at the very least, postmodernism became a very useful tool with which Marxists could upend academia for their own ends. Derrida’s deconstruction has become an essential part of modern ethnography, literary criticism and feminist theory in university courses where traditionally privileged voices are displaced and those historically marginalised are given centre stage. This aligns ideally with Marxism, that is the analysis of conventional truths (grand narratives), principally the ongoing struggle surrounding modes of production, through the lenses of class struggle, gender and racial inequality etc.
Similarly, Lyotard’s rejection of grand narratives suited those leftist intellectuals still enamoured with Marxist ideals. While turning a blind eye to the failures of Marxism in the 20th century they were happy to see fault in those other systems that they opposed ideologically such as Capitalism. In more recent years, postmodernism is seen as a bag of tools for actual radical professors to add a glaze of intellectualism to their wholly subjective ideologies which they pass on to their students. And that is perhaps the greatest failure of postmodernism. It’s not that it is simply an obfuscating intellectual exercise that adds little to solving real world problems, it gave below-average academics the ability to pursue radical political agendas with little to no academic rigour, and little to no basis in fact or empirical research. The combination of Marxism and postmodernism has opened the door to a new breed that is damaging US universities and radicalising students — the activist professor.
The proliferation of university courses rooted in Marxist postmodernism such as feminism, critical race theory and social justice since the 90s has played an important role in the rise of both the activist student and the activist professor. In years past where universities were dominated by liberal professors — the majority of whom were still mainstream Democrats — it was acceptable to teach Marxist postmodernism in an abstract, theoretical manner. The teacher introduced her students to revolutionary and critical ideas without necessarily embodying them herself. That has changed. Whereas the traditional academic gains repute through publication, the activist professor gains repute as a frontline activist. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Animal Liberation Front etc. all provide activist professors with the opportunity to show how committed to the marginalised they are.
University administrators are increasingly hiring far-left professors in their campuses. A major and ongoing study by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA found that University professors are now overwhelmingly liberal with an increasing number identifying as far-left. In 1990, 42% of professors identified as liberal or far-left but by 2014 this had risen to 60%. With a significant rise in the number of professors with far-left political beliefs there comes a rise in the number of courses on offer that are based in Marxist postmodernism. A disturbing absence of conservative and increasingly, moderate, professors means that universities, particularly their social science departments, are now ideological echo-chambers.
Just as professors are becoming more activist-orientated, so too are their students. According to another HERI study, 50% of students wish to become community leaders upon graduation and their professors increasingly serve as role models. As teaching bodies veer further and further left, the definition of community leader becomes more and more synonymous with extremist activism. Critical thinking and dialogue in the democratic theatre are replaced by fundamentalism and guerrilla tactics on the streets of major US cities.
The Activist Professor
In recent years there have been several high-profile cases of university staff with direct links to Antifa who have not only brought their extremist views into the classroom but who have been defended by their institutions for doing so.
Mark Bray, the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, which is a how-to guide for budding Antifa activists, is a professor at Dartmouth. Despite the innocuous title, time and again the book justifies militant Antifa tactics. Bray argues that for Antifa “self-defence” allows for preemptive violence against fascists by “legitimising offensive tactics in order to forestall the potential need for literal self-defence down the line”. In other words, punch them before they punch you. While discussing a variety of tactics Antifa members should use in demonstrations and to bring about revolutionary change, he explicitly endorses the use of violence stating: “violence represents a small though vital sliver of anti-fascist activity.” He finishes his book by stating that “On its own, militant anti-fascism is necessary but not sufficient to build a new world in the shell of the old”. Despite his open support and leading role as an intellectual leader for Antifa, he was defended by and is still employed as a visiting professor at Dartmouth University’s Gender Research Institute.
Dr. Dwayne Dixon, a prominent figure in the left-wing militia Redneck Revolt, is a “teaching assistant professor” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dixon was an armed and prominent figure at Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally Aug 11–12th, 2017 where he, along with other members of Redneck Revolt organised roadblocks and caused disruptions during the march at which Heather Heyer died. The Durham Herald Sun reported that days after his actions at Charlottesville, on August 18th, he was charged with two misdemeanours for bringing a semi-automatic rifle to a supposed KKK rally in Durham. In 2019 Teal Ruthschild of Roger Williams University in Rhode Island wrote a paper justifying and legitimising the actions of Redneck Revolt.
Dr. Meghan Squire is a professor of computer science at Elon University in North Carolina. In a fawning cover story by Wired entitled “Meet Antifa’s Secret Weapon Against Far-Right Extremists” Squire details how she passes the identifying information of suspected far-right extremists to Antifa and how she condones the group’s use of violence as a last resort in a “diversity of tactics”. Squire enjoys doxing individuals she believes to be far-right extremists even though it may in fact lead to violence against them by Antifa. As the article states “This is just how Squire likes it. Hers is a new, digitally enabled kind of vigilante justice. With no clear-cut rules for just how far a citizen could and should go, Squire has made up her own.”
Some other prominent cases of Antifa-connected university staff who have been removed from their positions include Michael Isaacson,a former professor at John Jay college who called multiple times for the death of police on social media. Jeff Klinzman, an adjunct English professor at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids resigned from his position after FaceBook posts on his personal page and on the page of Iowa Antifa showed him calling for violence against President Trump and Evangelical Christians. Eric Clanton, a former East Bay College philosophy professor was given a three year suspended sentence for attacking demonstrators at a free speech rally in Berkeley on April 15th 2017 using a bike lock. Clanton had been previously arrested for causing “public nuisance” at a Black Lives Matter rally in 2014.
Antifa Cells on Campus
One of the most concerning infiltrations of Antifa into the university system has been the establishment of the “Campus Antifascist Network”. Created by Bill Mullen, an English Professor at Purdue University and David Palumbo-Liu, a Comparative Literature professor at Stanford, the CAN network has established Antifa networks on campuses across the United States. The CAN network currently boasts around 400 members and has chapters at the University of Connecticut, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburg, Swarthmore College, University of Texas. In the Campus Antifascist Network Syllabus available on their website the group provides members with a wide variety of radical literature including a link to articles by Redneck Revolt (Dwayne Dixon above) and links to the effectiveness of black block tactics. The group has issued statements of support for Mark Bray (above) and it routinely offers advice to their chapters on how to deplatform, harass and group stalk those perceived to be far-right on campuses.
Obviously, all of the listed colleges where CAN have chapters are complicit in allowing Antifa to gain a foothold in academia and invite mob rule into campus spaces.
An Empirical Analysis of Antifa-Connected Academics on Twitter
Using the same methodology described in this Quillette article and third-party tested by Quillette editors here we created a data set of 58,254 Antifa or Antifa-associated Twitter accounts based on the follows of 16 verified and influential Antifa seed accounts. Using Gephi, an open-source software tool, we narrowed the core group of Twitter users down to 5,838 accounts. This represented the top 10% most connected accounts to our seed 16. Of these 5,838 accounts, 30 were found to be professors or adjunct-professors at US universities.
While there are significantly more professors, PhD students and university teaching staff in the dataset we only used the term “professor” as a Twitter biography search tool. This means that any professor or university employee who did not put “professor” in their Twitter biography would have been missed. As such, the actual number of teaching staff associated with Antifa in US universities is significantly higher. This study is simply exploratory. A good example of this limitation is the omission of Stanislav Vysotsky (Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater). Vysotsky is one of the most highly-connected professors in our dataset. He is one of the leading Antifa intellectuals active in the US today. Like Mark Bray, he uses his position as a professor to legitimise Antifa and he openly supports militant anti-fascism and like Bray he publishes how-to books for Antifa militants under the guise of being legitimate academic critiques of the far-right. He did not make it into our subset because he did not use the term “professor” in his biography.
It is important to stress that there are several reasons that an academic may have close social-media ties with an extremist group and close ties does not, immediately, indicate any wrongdoing.
Many academics follow — and even interact with — all manner of fringe figures online, either out of personal curiosity or for balanced professional research. Therefore the aim in identifying this group of 30 professors was to determine if there was a correlation between the level of their online engagement with Antifa and the manner in which they themselves employ extreme and biased teaching in their university positions.
While the vast majority of the 354 professors in the entire dataset demonstrated some affiliation with the far-left it is important to reduce the dataset so as to more fairly make claims of being Antifa-connected. In the top 10% of connections all professors have a minimum of 4 connections to the seed 16 Antifa accounts. Most have many more. Michael Loadenthal, who is openly anarchist and acts as an activist lecturer, is the most Antifa-connected professor with 11 connections. He openly argues that lecturers need to be activists — see profile below.
Among our top 30 Antifa-connected professors we were unable to find any evidence that these professors gave any critique of left-wing extremism and in many cases, having looked at openly available speaking engagements, research papers, blog posts, Op-Eds etc. it was clear that many are openly far-left extremist and activist professors.
Here I’ll focus on Antifa-connected professors who are openly activist professors and openly support Antifa.
1. @DrlSharp — Ian Sharp
Dr. Ian Sharp is an Assistant Prof. Psychology and Intern Chair of Undergrad Psychology, Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia yet he regularly amplifies and spreads doxes shared by Antifa on his Twitter timeline. For Antifa, the chief aim of doxing those deemed enemies or white supremacists is to inflict psychological stress on them — fear for their personal safety, their job, their family etc. For a Psychology professor to engage in this practice is an egregious abuse of power/vocation.
Dr. Sharp has consistently harassed conservatives such as Andy Ngo, Tucker Carlson and other media figures for several years and he helps people in the Philly area organise for Antifa rallies. Disturbingly, he makes a reference to FLOTUS’ plane landing in a mechanical emergency. Alongside news of the event he posts “Gritty”, the Philadelphia Flyers mascot and Antifa adopted mascot. In a tweet just before he tweeted “Coming for you”, seemingly indicating his and Antifa’s wish to do harm to FLOTUS.
2. @mloadenthal — Dr. Michael Loadenthal
Director: Peace and Justice Studies Association at Georgetown University. Professor of Sociology at University of Miami (2016–2020)
Dr. Michael Loadenthal is openly an Anarchist activist professor. He has been deported from Palestine having trained protestors in non-violent protest actions and for having organised civil disobedience. He was arrested as part of the “J20” group who rioted on Donald Trump’s inauguration day in Washington DC.
Loadenthal is a strong advocate of the idea that professors must be activists and embrace militancy. He actively engages Antifa and far-left accounts on Twitter and encourages his students to engage in non-cooperation with government bodies and law enforcement as well as promoting militancy as a primary means of achieving one’s goals. He prioritises the use of a feminist perspective and research methods and is an advocate for an intersectional approach to activist education and research.
3. @will_potter — Will Potter
Senior Academic Innovation Fellow and Professor at Dept. English, University of Michigan
Will Potter’s research focuses on how environmental and animal rights movements have been labelled as terrorist in post-9/11 USA. His book Green is the New Red is an account of his experience as an environmental extremist. The book is enthusiastically praised by Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers who said:
“Part history, part action thriller and courtroom drama, part memoir, Green Is the New Red plunges us into the wild, unruly, and entirely inspirational world of extreme environmental activism… Green Is the New Red is an indispensable book that will change the way we think about commitment, the limits of protest, and the possibility of radical change.”
Potter is currently overseeing his students as they engage in a massive FOI project on state surveillance of activists.
On Twitter Potter is openly supportive of Antifa. He is tagged in tweets by NYC Antifa and he uses #Antifa to self-identify as a part of the group. In a recent tweet he displays an image of himself punching anti-nazi badges at home — with a play on the term “Punch a Nazi” indicating support for militant Antifa tactics. In the tweet, he uses #Antifa to self-identify as Antifa. Potter also uses the #Antifa hashtag to help mobilise Antifa groups to confront alleged far-extremists and he routinely uses alarmist terms such as “this is not a drill” to inflame tensions and encourage civil disobedience.
4. @LilBillHaywood — Michael Mark Cohen
Professor of American Studies at UC Berkeley
Michael Mark Cohen is a professor of American Studies at UC Berkeley. He was also the driving force and one of the co-authors of a letter calling for a boycott of classes and campus activities during the 2017 “Free Speech Week” on campus — an event which was to be spearheaded by conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. While Yiannopoulos’ event seems to have been poorly organised and destined to flop for this reason, Cohen’s attempt to deplatform Yiannopoulos and the other speakers at the event indicate a concerning aversion to free speech at the university, and particularly perhaps, in Cohen’s classrooms.
A focus of Cohen’s studies has been dismantling “whiteness” and in this Medium post he outlined how he likes to open his lessons each year on race by asking his students to shout out any anti-white slurs they can think of. “Disappointed”, he usually helps his students by offering “cracker” and “redneck”. The point of the exercise is to show that he — as a white man — cannot be hurt because he is secure in his status as an individual — what he identifies as white privilege. From a pedagogical point of view the exercise certainly has merit — offer your students a “hook”, an engaging, attention-grabbing way into a topic. However, Cohen never gets past the hook. He spends the rest of the class attempting to find the perfect racial slur for whites before settling on “douchebag”. The hook is the point. We need a good racial slur so whites can feel just as bad as historically oppressed groups with the added bonus of having the power (allegedly) “to name white ruling class power and white sexist privilege as noxious, selfish, toxic, foolish and above all, dangerous”.
Since the death of George Floyd Cohen has been vocal in calling for the removal of statues of Confederate generals, of Christopher Columbus and even Mount Rushmore. He has repeatedly called for the defunding of police and one of his favourite refrains is “it is no longer up for debate. This is fascism” responding to various federal responses to protests.
5. @CasMudde — Cas Mudde
Professor, University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs
Cas Mudde is a professor at the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs. He is an award-winning and widely published expert on populism and the far-right. He is a leading voice in the counter violent extremism community and he exerts influence on governments and policy makers. His research is overwhelmingly focused on the far-right but he has written about Populism from a balanced perspective. This makes him different from those others who appeared in our data. Mudde cannot be classified as an activist professor like the others spoken about here as he is capable of demonstrating balance in his research and public discussions. However, said balance does not appear when speaking about Antifa.
On Twitter, Mudde has been a reliable defender of Antifa for several years. He criticises those he deems “anti-antifascist”, he downplays Antifa violence and seems to rely on Antifa-connected journalists (see Antifa-connected journalists article) such as Christopher Mathias and Mark Bray for his understanding of Antifa in the USA.
In a recent tweet, Mudde stated “Antifa is not an organisation and its broader goal, anti-fascism, is shared by all (real) democrats. Hence, this could be the perfect tool for the US far-right (i.e. Trump and the GOP) to legally repress any valid opposition to its politics.
The first issue is that Mudde refers to the President of the USA and the entire Republican Party as “far-right”. This automatically disqualifies his opinion as an extremism “expert”. Donald Trump may be many things — a populist (as Mudde should know) seemingly the best fit — but to declare him and the entire GOP far-right is an important indication of bias.
A second issue is that Mudde claims that Antifa is not an organisation. This is a favoured argument of Antifa themselves who like to conceal and downplay their activities. While Mudde is correct that all real democrats are anti-fascist, those who designate themselves Antifa are self-identifying as members of a group. And that group has insignias, organisational organs (chiefly on Twitter), literature on ideology — notably Mark Bray’s handbook (or how-to book on Antifa which Mudde himself has praised). Indeed the group has a long history and was initiated by the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1932 and from its inception the group had a dual focus on anti-fascism and anti-capitalism.
Importantly, the vast majority of those today in the US who self-identify as Antifa are Anarchist or Communist meaning that the group is a decentralised organisation with a clear and radical political ideology and while Antifa’s best known action is anti-racism work, their primary goals extend to bringing down capitalism and democracy through violent and non-violent means.
Mudde stating that they are simply “real democrats” is laughable.
Activist Professors and the Rise of Civil Unrest
Our method of examining the composition of the top 10% of Antifa-connected accounts on Twitter hoped to determine if there was a correlation between one’s proximity to Antifa on social media and their support of radical politics and ideas themselves. Of all 30 of the professors who appeared in this top 10% not one provided any criticism of Antifa. Indeed it was quite the opposite. This study, much like our study of journalists, shows that those professors with a high number of connections within the Antifa social network demonstrate affinity with Antifa and are more likely to hold extreme political beliefs themselves.
As shown in these five case studies, the activist professor is now an established phenomenon in US universities and teaching from these explicitly activist positions is now the norm in many US classrooms. As university teaching bodies continue to veer further left, we can expect to see an increase in such educators. This study is in no way exhaustive but it illustrates a worrying rise in the US university system of radical activist professors who are using their positions of power to radicalise impressionable minds. I would call it an infiltration of the university system except that university administrators are openly complicit by hiring activists and by sanctioning more and more courses that are taught from an explicitly Marxist postmodernist perspective, i.e. courses that give students no practical training for life after university, rather, instead, train them to deconstruct, divide and destabilise. It has long been assumed that our university systems are creating generations of radical activist students, social justice enforcers who are currently setting fire to buildings, assaulting police and others they have political disagreements with on the streets of major US cities such as Portland, Philadelphia, New York, Berkeley, Minneapolis etc. This study provides some much needed empirical evidence to support the claim. So long as US universities keep hiring activist professors, we can expect the violence on US streets to increase and destabilisation of the state to grow.
Here are the Twitter handles of all 30 professors who appeared in our top 10% of Antifa-connected individuals with a special mention to Devin Zane Shaw (@devinzshaw) of Douglas College in Vancouver, British Columbia who proudly tweeted: “Before I head off to class, a ringing endorsement from a student” with an attached review that reads “Every Devin Shaw class is just Punching Nazis 101”.
@BenSiegel
@AnarchistGeog
@dcrockett17
@AnetteBickford
@JeffSharlet
@CarwilBJ
@ciccmaher
@AVourvoulais
@michael_lundell
@mayxx150
@rmanfredini
@clr_valentine
@DrMichaelKenney
@chrisjudetaylor
@PhDComMom
@crimemann
@devinzshaw
@NativConscience
@DrTippyD
@LaylaBombshell
@jwbuel
@arielmaelambe
@jimifitz138 — Possibly not an academic. Professor used incorrectly in bio.
@IanAlanPaul — Suspended
@staunchest