Oh Good, a “Professor Watch List”; Slate, 11/23/16

Rebecca Schuman, Slate; Oh Good, a “Professor Watch List” :

"This Monday, an organization called Turning Point USA launched a website called the Professor Watchlist, which provides the full names, locations, offenses—and sometimes photographs—of liberal academics it has singled out for ignominy. In any other year in recent memory on this continent, these would be two unrelated events. But in the United States in late 2016, as the president-elect’s surrogates cite Japanese internment as a “precedent” for what may come, any “watch list” of any sort is worrying. One that targets outspoken intellectuals with views that oppose a mercurial future president who spent the weekend tweeting petulantly at the cast of a Broadway play? Abjectly terrifying.

The mission of the watch list, according to its website, is to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” The site invites users to nominate candidates, asking that they “submit a tip” about the nefarious pinkos who teach them (that’s S-C-H-U-M-A-N with one n, by the way). Some of the professors on the list have responded thoughtfully to their inclusion; others on social media have trolled the list with complaints about Indiana Jones and Jesus...

Don’t misunderstand me. The answer is not to take the site down altogether, for that would be censorship, and censorship is not the solution, just like it isn’t the solution when the 45th president of the United States gets his fee-fees hurt. But in this time of national reckoning, responsible conservatives need to pay attention to context. Why not, for example, a site that indexes classroom bias by incident and date, instead of by the professor’s name?"

Activists say they have found way round Chinese internet censorship; Guardian, 11/18/13

Jonathan Kaiman, Guardian; Activists say they have found way round Chinese internet censorship: "Cyber-activists have retaliated against Chinese authorities' censorship of foreign media websites by exposing an apparent weakness in the country's vast internet control apparatus. China blocked the Wall Street Journal and Reuters Chinese-language websites on Friday after a New York Times exposé revealed business ties between JP Morgan and the daughter of the former premier Wen Jiabao. Both websites appear to still be blocked on Monday. The New York Times's English and Chinese-language websites have been blocked in China since 2012. Charlie Smith, the co-founder of GreatFire.org, a website which monitors internet censorship in China, says he has helped discover a strategy to make these sites available in mainland China without the aid of firewall-circumventing software."