Nearly 50 instructors from public and private colleges across Illinois are named in an online database dubbed “Professor Watchlist” that was created by a group affiliated with slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk to unmask “radical professors,” WBEZ has found.
Since landing on the list, some professors have gotten hateful emails, online messages and letters threatening rape or death, and in some instances they have seen that activity intensify since Kirk’s death.
WBEZ reached out to all of the roughly four dozen Illinois-based instructors on the nonprofit Turning Point USA list. All those who responded said the allegations lodged against them were distortions of their work.
The site includes the professors’ names, head shots, a brief description on what they did to land on the list and, in some cases, contact information for their department.
One nationally recognized expert on political violence tells WBEZ that having all of that information presented in one place and through a politicized lens poses a potential danger to the people listed.
The site sorts the professors into categories, or “tags,” ranging from anti-Judeo-Christian values and climate alarmist to racial ideology and LGBTQ.
For Northwestern University sociology professor Laura Beth Nielsen, her tag is “anti-First Amendment.”
She landed on the list a short time after writing an op-ed on hate speech for the Los Angeles Times in 2017. She argued that hate speech could lead to adverse physical and mental health outcomes such as high blood pressure and low self-esteem. She even made the case for it on former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show afterward.
What followed was weeks of hateful emails and mailed letters. Sometimes, Nielsen said, she would get up to 15 a day. Some would label her un-American or anti-men. One person, who included his return address, called Nielsen the kind of woman he warns his sons about.
But others explicitly threatened violence against her.
“‘I’m going to rape you in front of your children,’ that’s my least favorite hate mail,” Nielsen said. “For a while, I [told] my husband, ‘I need you to read my emails, and just put them somewhere.’ And then my husband could not do it.”
New threats arise after Kirk slaying
University of Chicago political science professor Robert Pape, who is not on the list himself, said the rise in online vitriol and threats can be a direct result of being on sites like Professor Watchlist.
“When there’s information that’s put on the web that is identifying somebody as a particular political danger to a group, and it can be really to any group, this carries a greater degree of seriousness than it did just a few months ago,” Pape said.
He cited the murder of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and shooting of state senator John Hoffman in June. Pape, who has been studying political violence since the 1990s, said perpetrators of these attacks are now getting more sophisticated in their planning and are turning to websites that target specific individuals with differing political ideologies.
“There’s a new list that a group has started about … people who were celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death,” Pape said. “These [lists] are growing.”
Kirk was shot and killed Sept. 10 while speaking to students at Utah Valley University. Tyler Robinson, 22, has been charged with Kirk’s murder. Prosecutors allege Robinson shot Kirk in his neck with a bolt-action rifle from the roof of a nearby building.
After Kirk’s slaying, President Donald Trump ordered all American flags on public buildings to be flown at half-staff. At the same time, he and Vice President JD Vance have called for people who speak negatively about Kirk online to be fired from their jobs.
Nielsen said it has felt alienating seeing the death of someone who “had it out for” her elicit this sort of reaction.
“I was on [Kirk’s] list of people that he wanted to — I don’t know what the verb is at the end of that sentence — destroy, have murdered, ruin their life … lose their job?” Nielsen said. “He wanted us watched.”
Professor says list miscasts work
Professor Watchlist was launched in 2016 by Kirk’s nonprofit that advocates for conservative politics on high school and college campuses across the country.
For the Illinois professors on the list, their disciplines and experience varied. Some were tenured, while others were visiting lecturers. Some taught chemistry and physics, and others researched history and gender studies.
The highest number of instructors from a single institution came from Northwestern. The site flagged several faculty members who are also medical practitioners offering gender-affirming care at Lurie Children’s Hospital. There were even three professors from the private evangelical Christian school Wheaton College.
WBEZ reached out to every Illinois professor on the list. Several of them said the site grossly mischaracterizes and reduces their work.
Robert Hironimus-Wendt, a sociology professor at Western Illinois University, said his community presentation on how white people can understand racism was canceled by his school after he was put on the list. The Turning Point USA site tagged him for promoting “racial ideology.”
“I thought this was an accomplishment: I have caught the attention of conservatives who want to question me. I didn’t see it as threatening or anything bad at all. I thought it was actually kind of interesting. But it did upset the university to the point where they canceled my talk,” he said.
Western Illinois University did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Thursday.
Charles Roseman, a biology professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, landed on the list for an article he wrote about novel, genotypic combinations in sexually reproducing organisms.
“All of a sudden, I’m a radical gender ideologue, which is just kind of interesting, because I don’t know that I have profoundly strong opinions,” Roseman said.
Professor on list prepares will
A Chicago professor said the watch list’s mischaracterizations are intentionally inciting anger and “inherently suggesting violence.”
The professor agreed to speak with WBEZ but wished to keep his name and school anonymous for fear of being targeted again. He’s on the list for researching racial inequities in academia.
He said he received emails and social media messages telling him to die.
“It’s kind of is disappointing to see that there’s no sense of baseline humanity that’s granted to people with differing perspectives,” he said.
He’s had to have conversations with family members and friends on what being in closer proximity may mean for them. He said his family and colleagues have also received social media messages from people who describe how the professor should be harmed.
“I have to constantly update my family and my students, and have them sort of keep their head on the swivel because of the heightened intensity around the hate rhetoric that has come out of this space,” he said.
Turning Point USA did not respond to WBEZ queries about how some professors on the watch list have gotten death threats.
University of Chicago professor Eman Abdelhadi has been subject to anonymous death threats for much of her academic career. She studies human development across cultures and demographics. Abdelhadi is outspoken in her advocacy for Palestinian self-determination.
In 2023, Turning Point USA put her on the Professor Watchlist, and she has gotten what she regards as hateful emails, letters, social media messages and even phone calls.
After Kirk’s death, she said she’s received a new wave of hate.
“An email I got [on Monday] literally said, ‘I hope you die in front of your family,’” Abdelhadi said.
The University of Chicago does offer professors a mechanism for reporting threats to the school’s police department, as well as mental health counseling. In a statement, the university said it takes potential threats against its community “extremely seriously.”
Abdelhadi said she has taken additional safety measures, such as paying a company to scrub her personal information off the internet, getting the school to remove her office phone number and email address from the university’s website, and locking her social media accounts. She’s also made plans to stay with family members in case her home address gets leaked.
Still, Abdelhadi said she’s not going to stop speaking out about her beliefs. As a Palestinian American, she said it’s in her tradition to do so.
“I just don’t think that I would be living up to my values if I relented in the face of this harassment,” Abdelhadi said. “I try really hard not to let the fear stop me from saying what I think is right.”
Abdelhadi acknowledged she fears for her life, and even though she’s only 36 years old, has written a will.
She said in the event that she’s harmed, she wants “to make sure that my affairs are in order.”
Mawa Iqbal covers state government and politics for WBEZ and Illinois Public Radio from Springfield.