“We must become an institution to each other. Not because that’s how things ought to be, but because that’s where we are… We may not be able to count on our institutions, but we must be able to count on one another.”
L. D. Burnett, Chronicle of Higher Education
Who We Are
Dear Colleagues,
In recent years, many workers in higher education have experienced targeted harassment for statements they have made in their classrooms, through their research, on social media, or in organizing and activist contexts. Much of this harassment originates with articles published by a handful of media platforms or right-wing political organizations, yet these outrage stories can lead to a deluge of hateful messages and threats, doxing, and even workplace retaliation. These attacks can be scary, isolating, and traumatic, and administrations often respond badly.
The right-wing “news” stories that lead to such harassment make outlandish claims about statements by higher education workers. Oftentimes these stories take a Facebook post, Tweet, a research finding, or a class comment out of context, ignoring the academic debates they are situated within. Other times they take passing comments or posts and claim that they constitutes a major transgression. Right-wing media outlets often display little interest in actually understanding the claim being made, and instead merely register outrage over higher education workers who express ideas they disagree with.
Faculty First Responders monitors the websites most responsible for generating the targeted harassment of faculty on a daily basis. When these outlets accuse a higher education worker of some outrage, we reach out to the faculty member with resources and support. It is our hope that if these stories do result in online harassment, we can help workers to feel better supported by their professional community. It is also our hope that administrators cease adopting the right-wing media’s narrative and instead actively and publicly defend their workers from these attacks. Understanding where these attacks come from–and how to effectively respond–is necessary to better support higher education workers, their well-being, and their academic freedom.
In solidarity,
Heather Steffen, Director
Isaac Kamola, Founding Director
Rana Jaleel, Responder
Katie Rodger, Responder
Cal Zimmerman, Responder and Graduate Student Liaison
History and Activities
Isaac Kamola started Faculty First Responders to proactively educate and support faculty and administrators about the causes and consequences of right-wing attacks on faculty, while providing advice about how to effectively respond to targeted harassment.
Isaac writes:
This project hits close to home. On June 20, 2017 Campus Reform published a “news story” falsely accusing my colleague of calling for the death of white people. The story went viral, to Breitbart, Fox, and across the right-wing media ecosystem, resulting in death threats and the campus being shut down due to credible threats of violence. Trinity College’s chapter of the Academic Association of University Professors (AAUP) worked with the national office to develop strategies for protecting our colleague’s academic freedom. I wrote about this experience at the Chronicle of Higher Education and later published an article in the Journal for Academic Freedom (JAF) outlining the dark money funding behind the targeted harassment of faculty. A few months later I learned that a graduate student friend of mine had also been the subject of a Campus Reform story. She experienced death threats, harassment, and an administration that failed to defend her academic freedom. This experience brought home just how pervasive, cruel, isolating, and underreported these attacks are. I began to think that if my JAF article was correct—that websites like Campus Reform seed the right-wing media ecosystem with the material that eventually become viral attacks on faculty—then we could more-or-less predict which faculty will become the targets of full-blown right-wing harassment by carefully monitoring these websites.
Since January 2020, Faculty First Responders has been monitoring the Campus Reform website more-or-less daily. Since January 2022 we have begun monitoring an even wider collection of websites using a customized search engine. We use this search tool to find new posts that include the terms “professor” or “instructor” and “university” or “college” and record the results using a GoogleForm. During this process we have built a number of databases, including one that includes all of the stories written by Campus Reform in 2020. These databases are available to journalists and researchers upon request – please email facultyfirstresponders@gmail.com.
When one of the websites we monitor accuses a higher education worker of some sort of “liberal bias,” we write an email to the attacked worker providing information about how they might respond. It is our hope that this early warning system enables higher education workers and administrators to develop more proactive responses to the targeted harassment that often follows from these stories.
This model of peer-to-peer support and monitoring work is widely replicable to all kinds of sectors that face the threat of disinformation, online trolling, and right-wing culture war backlash (K-12 educators, school boards members, journalists, etc.). We are more than welcome to share our method and resources.
People
Heather Steffen, Director
Isaac Kamola, Founding Director
Rana Jaleel, Responder
Katie Rodger, Responder
Cal Zimmerman, Responder and Graduate Student Liaison
Partners
Faculty First Responders is supported by and a partner of the American Association of University Professors.
Faculty First Responders is grateful to the AAUP Foundation and to AFT (the American Federation of Teachers) for past major support of the project.
Faculty First Responders 