For Mass. professors on Charlie Kirk’s watch list, his free speech legacy rings false
Right before Saida Grundy became an assistant professor at Boston University in 2015, she was hit with a firestorm of media coverage over her tweets about white male college students being a "problem population." At the time, the university's president condemned her social media posts, and Grundy later apologized.
However, her photo, name and workplace information quickly landed her on Charlie Kirk's Professor Watchlist, along with other conservative websites. The list, through Kirk's organization Turning Point USA , aims to "expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom," according to its website .
Anyone can submit a tip for new additions to the list. The organization said on its website that the profiles come from published news stories. Turning Point USA didn't respond to a request for comment on MassLive's article.
Kirk, a conservative activist, was assassinated on Sept. 10 during an event on the campus of Utah Valley University. Kirk had a strong following — including President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and many college-aged students — who greatly mourned his death as a leader.
He was remembered by his followers and politicians as someone who was an advocate of free speech. One of the things he was most known for was going to college campuses with a sign that said "Prove Me Wrong," asking students to debate an issue with him.
"It was Charlie who helped bring online censorship, free speech and cancel culture to the fore of our political debate," Trump said during a eulogy.
At the same time, Kirk was a controversial figure and someone professors said negatively impacted their lives from being on his organization's watchlist.
Following being placed on the watchlist, Grundy received hate mail and had to have a detective shadow her around the Boston University campus. Ten years later, she is still on the list and reflects on the experience as the "most stressful situation" she's ever been in, even after surviving stage three breast cancer.
"It was sort of like a hurricane in which I was at the eye of it, but at the eye of the storm, you don't know how wide the storm is," she said.
Grundy is one of hundreds of names across the country searchable on the database. The watchlist assigns professors with at least one category, whether it is "climate alarmist" or "anti-2nd Amendment." Harvard has the largest number of academics out of all the Massachusetts schools listed, with dozens of professors profiled.
MassLive spoke with five Massachusetts professors who are on the list, all of whom spoke to the consequences of the list and being named on it.
Kirk's death has become a heated topic as rhetoric surrounding it led to consequences for people like Jimmy Kimmel being temporarily booted off the air due to his comments on Kirk and some teachers being placed on leave or fired from their jobs.
A group supporting academics who have been targeted by right-wing media outlets and organizations has also seen an "intense spike" in faculty and administrators looking for support , according to its director.
The professors MassLive spoke with emphasized that they don't condone political violence or support Kirk's assassination.
However, many also pointed out contradictions in Kirk's free speech legacy, largely because his organization created the watchlist — which they argued worked to curtail free speech.
People hold candles and sing during a memorial and prayer vigil for Charlie Kirk at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, Sunday, Sept. 14, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)AP
Does the watch list harm free speech?
When Kirk spoke publicly about the Professor Watchlist, he said it wasn't intended to call for harassment.
"It's not 'Professor Blacklist' and it's not 'Professor Hitlist,' it's an awareness tool," Kirk said in a 2018 interview with Comedy Central. "We're not calling for the termination of these professors — let the schools make their own decisions."
However, to some academics, the consequences of being on the list ran counter to that argument.
Kevin Bruyneel, a Babson College professor, landed on the professor watchlist after writing an article in 2022 for HuffPost arguing that the Atlanta Braves baseball team's mascot, the "tomahawk chop," and the team's chants honor genocide and trivialize violence toward Indigenous people.
What ensued were swarms of emails in which he was called names, with some of the authors wishing he were dead.
While his job was secure due to having tenure, meaning an faculty member has a permanent position, he said there was a clear intent from Turning Point USA to get him fired.
That was elucidated at least in part by his watchlist listing writing out the number of his department.
"They're trying to intimidate me, bully me to not speak and potentially get me fired," he said.
Kevin Bruyneel is a professor of politics at Babson College.Kevin Bruyneel
Since Kirk's assassination, Bruyneel said Kirk has become a martyr for free speech, but that is a "myth," he said.
"He was not for free speech. Free speech means an open dialogue where people are listening to each other. Why is ... his organization trying to get me fired for writing about sports team mascots? So that part is a complete mythification generated from the administration utilizing his horrible death to do that," he said.
"They want to eliminate ideas they don't agree with so they can say what they want," he said.
Grundy, who teaches at Boston University, agrees. Just a few weeks before Kirk's death, she was warning her 14-year-old cousin about Kirk because he kept popping up on his social media.
"I think, part of the move that the right has made with these, campus watch[lists] and these Turning Point USAs is to falsely conflate for the public that somehow universities are politically opposed to what they're claiming has a right to be espoused on college campuses," she said. "No, we are not. We have an array of political views on college campuses. What we don't allow is people who are anti-knowledge to have a platform on college campuses. Right? We do not give equal space and equal weight to disinformation because we're places of knowledge."
Support for the watchlist
To others, the creation of the professor watchlist has been "constructive" when faculty and institutions of higher education are dismissive of troubling behavior, according to Frederick Hess, senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.
While he believes that academics can be harmed by the list or that it can be uncomfortable, he said there have been similar left-wing measures intending to weed academics from higher education, such as "Me Too" lists of those accused of sexual harassment and misconduct.
"If campuses had decided to take that as a wake up call and respond constructively, we could be in a very different place," he said.
Ultimately, lists like these are intended to allow people to raise concerns or point out problematic behavior to incite change, he said.
"I can't think of anything that's more consistent with an ethos of free speech," he said.
'This is not the first time'
The emphasis from the Trump administration and Kirk's Turning Point USA to place pressure on college campuses is a "cyclical" pattern in American history, according to Eddie R. Cole, a professor of education and history at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"This is not the first time that Congress or the White House has been hostile to our colleges and universities. What we see today is the latest chapter in a long history of political tensions in higher education. This is truly an American tale," Cole said.
In the 1930s and '40s in the South, during Jim Crow segregation, if speech wasn't in support of desegregation, academics lost their jobs, he said. The firing of academics can also be seen in Sen. Joseph McCarthy's career of rooting out accused communists — leading to a culture of repression in the Cold War known as the "Red Scare."
President Richard Nixon created an "enemies list" to compile political opponents, such as professors and others, echoing similar tactics that organizations like Turning Point USA have done with the Professor Watchlist, Cole said.
"I could almost predict the future that two years from now, another issue will be on the table and there will still be debates around speech and free speech and who can and can't speak on campuses. History reminds us that it just simply has not ever been fairly distributed on campuses," he said.
Richard Wolff is a retired professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.Den Porvatkin for Video Photo Studio
Richard Wolff, a retired UMass Amherst professor, said he remembers throughout his 35 years at the institution periodically being put on watchlists such as Kirk's.
"This type of thing has been a part of the academic landscape here in the United States from the beginning for me," said Wolff, who is now a visiting professor at the New School in New York.
Turning Point USA's watchlist describes Wolff as an "activist for Marxist economic policy" as the reason why he is on the list — one that Wolff said he didn't know he was on.
Throughout being placed on various watchlists, one thing has been consistent: none of the organizations creating the lists has ever attempted to engage with him about his beliefs.
"No time in all the years that this has gone on and off have I ever had a conversation. And I've had people in my office who disagree with me and argue that. And that's fine. That's part of the learning process," Wolff said. "I welcome that. But never did I have one of these folks come to talk to me and then tell me or show me that they were going to put me on a list. I don't think they would have had the courage to do that."
Moving forward
Even if history may be repeating itself, James Alan Fox, a professor at Northeastern University, said he has seen a ramping up of division on campuses — especially due to federal influence.
He pointed to the arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk , the Tufts doctoral student detained by ICE in Somerville earlier this year over an editorial she wrote for the student newspaper.
"I think that I'm concerned that things aren't going to get better for a while because colleges are under attack," Fox said.
Kirk's professor watchlist and pressure from the Trump administration on academia forces people to be worried about and be more careful with what they say — antithetical to the mission of higher education, wherein people can speak freely and play with ideas, Fox said.
"Charlie Kirk claimed to promote lively debate and discussion. But the watchlist is not a vehicle to help conservatives identify leftists with whom they would like to sit and talk over a beer. Rather, it lists professors who may be targets for criticism or worse," Fox said.
James Alan Fox is a professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University.Harriet Rovniak
Others have a more cautious optimism about the ways the professor watchlist could propel change.
Speaking publicly about Kirk's death and its aftermath was something Chris Bobel, a University of Massachusetts Boston professor, went back and forth on for fear of becoming the "next casualty who's being criticized for comments."
However, she said she wanted to speak up about being on the watchlist for her work on menstrual equity in order to defend the right to academic freedom.
"I think any kind of foreclosing or censoring of speech really leads us down a very dangerous road. The universities were built to be separate from that, right? To be a space where we can take risks and where we can talk across difference and we can explore complicated ideas and debate them and refine them," Bobel said. "And they're not spaces where external actors, including political leaders, political movements, should dictate the boundaries of what's acceptable to discuss."
Bobel said she is worried that the watchlist moves forward an era of "policing speech," but she hopes Kirk's assassination will force academia to "renew us in our mission as educators," where students can play in a "sandbox of ideas" and speak across beliefs.
"It reminds us about how important it is to be able to discuss across difference — that assassinations are literally silencing an opposition. To say I don't want to hear anything more from you, that's not the solution to conflict. The solution is more conversation, more active listening, more open-mindedness," she said.
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