By Rutgers AAUP-AFT
This week, our colleague Dr. Mark Bray has come under attack by Turning Point USA’s Rutgers chapter for his public scholarship. Their campaign to have Dr. Bray fired has resulted in doxxing and death threats that extended to his partner, Dr. Yesenia Barragan, also our colleague, forcing Drs. Barragan and Bray to leave their home for their safety and that of their children. Rutgers AAUP-AFT and the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union condemn this campaign and stand in solidarity with our valued colleagues.
Dr. Bray, an assistant teaching professor in the History Department at Rutgers-New Brunswick, was targeted because of his extensive work as a historian of anti-fascist movements, including his widely read Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (2017). Dr. Barragan, an associate professor in the History Department, is an award-winning scholar of slavery in the Americas whose work includes Freedom’s Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific (2021).
Turning Point’s attack is part of an escalating effort by the far right to suppress the speech, teaching, and scholarship of faculty who do not conform to their movement’s politics. Turning Point is part of a larger network of groups and elected officials who have targeted faculty at Rutgers and around the country. The bad-faith effort to frame Dr. Bray as a threat to students and to get him fired is an affront to Rutgers’ values of academic freedom, as well as to Turning Point’s self-proclaimed commitment to a culture of open debate.
