I Am a Dangerous Professor

"The Watchlist appears to be consistent with a nostalgic desire 'to make America great again' and to expose and oppose those voices in academia that are anti-Republican or express anti-Republican values. For many black people, making America 'great again' is especially threatening, as it signals a return to a more explicit and unapologetic racial dystopia. For us, dreaming of yesterday is not a privilege, not a desire, but a nightmare...Its devotees would rather I become numb, afraid and silent. However, it is the anger that I feel that functions as a saving grace, a place of being...If we are not careful, a watchlist like this can have the impact of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon — a theoretical prison designed to create a form of self-censorship among those imprisoned. The list is not simply designed to get others to spy on us, to out us, but to install forms of psychological self-policing to eliminate thoughts, pedagogical approaches and theoretical orientations that it defines as subversive...

 But now I feel the multiple markings; I am now 'un-American' because of my ideas, my desires and passion to undo injustice where I see it, my engagement in a form of pedagogy that can cause my students to become angry or resistant in their newfound awareness of the magnitude of suffering that exists in the world. Yet I reject this marking. I refuse to be philosophically and pedagogically adjusted.

 To be 'philosophically adjusted' is to belie what I see as one major aim of philosophy — to speak to the multiple ways in which we suffer, to be a voice through which suffering might speak and be heard, and to offer a gift to my students that will leave them maladjusted and profoundly unhappy with the world as it is."

--"I Am a Dangerous Professor" The New York Times, by George Yancy

(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/opinion/i-am-a-dangerous-professor.html?_r=0)