Dartmouth Faculty Rally Around Controversial Pro-Antifa Professor

A group of Dartmouth professors is requesting that the college’s president retract his criticism of Dartmouth Professor Mark Bray who recently appeared on Meet the Press to defend antifa violence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ctiU4MvIOM

Dartmouth College Professor Mark Bray made a controversial appearance on Meet the Press last week in which he defended the violence committed by Antifa groups around the country. Sitting on the opposite end of the debate, Richard Cohen, the President of The Southern Poverty Law Center, aggressively fired back at Bray, arguing that the “answer to bad speech is more speech.”

Since Bray’s endorsement of political violence, Dartmouth has attempted to distance itself, writing in a statement that ““supporting violent protests do not represent the views of Dartmouth.”

“As an institution, we condemn anything but civil discourse in the exchange of opinions and ideas,” the statement continued.

But several Dartmouth professors are now upset that the administration moved to distance itself from Bray’s comments. A group of 17 professors is now asking the president of the college to retract the criticism of Bray.

“Since the violent neo-Nazi attack in Charlottesville, we have watched with gratitude as our junior colleague Mark Bray, on the strength of his historical scholarship, has become the national expert on a subject that is suddenly, terribly urgent: the twentieth-century history of fascism and anti-fascism, in Europe and, more recently, the United States,” the letter begins.

The letter suggests that Bray was disavowed at the request of Campus Reform, an online student-led watchdog site for campus issues. “In this case, Professor Bray has been disavowed by Dartmouth at the request of a right-wing organization, Campus Reform, whose goal is to ‘smash left-wing scum’ and which offers bounty prizes to students who will turn in professors’ names for a campaign of harassment,” the letter reads.

The professors then directly blamed Breitbart News for Dartmouth’s criticism of Bray. “The tone and content of Dartmouth’s statement takes at face value the distortions presented as truth by Farkas, Breitbart, and Daily Caller reporters, as though they were somehow more credible sources than Professor Bray himself—had anyone contacted him—or the transcripts and published pieces widely available for the College’s representatives to check for themselves,” the letter continues.

The letter concludes with a request that the administration rescind their criticism of Bray’s endorsement of political violence and establish new institutional procedures for responding to controversial opinions expressed by professors. “We urge you to consider the lasting damage to Dartmouth’s reputation that follows from such actions as well as the personal danger in which Professor Bray now finds himself,” the letter finishes. “We request that Dartmouth remove the statement on Professor Bray; apologize to him for exposing him to the entirely predictable possibility of physical harm; and a [sic] initiate a review of peer-institution norms and recommended procedures on how to react when such a situation arises again—as it most certainly will.”