From Camden and Cherry Hill to Trenton and the Jersey Shore, what about life in New Jersey do you want WHYY News to cover? Let us know.
Some students at Rutgers University petitioned the school to fire a history professor, saying he calls for violence against conservatives. The professor has since received threats, including some with his home address, and he will relocate his family for a few months.
Mark Bray, assistant professor of history at Rutgers, studies the history of modern Spain and global movements against fascism, from the past to the present. In 2017, he published “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” which documents the philosophy and tactics of anti-fascist movements in the U.S. and around the world. In the introduction, he writes that it is an “unabashedly partisan call to arms that aims to equip a new generation of anti-fascists with the history and theory necessary to defeat the resurgent Far Right.”
He started teaching at Rutgers in 2019.
Last month, after the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that designated the antifa movement as a “domestic terrorist organization,” despite antifa being more of a loosely affiliated movement than an actual group, and there being no legal mechanism for a president to designate domestic terrorist groups.
After that, some Rutgers students in the local chapter of Turning Point USA, the conservative organization Kirk founded, went through Bray’s books, and said that Bray not only documents antifascist tactics, he endorses them.
Michael Joseph, a senior at Rutgers and member and former president of the Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA, said he feels unsafe with Bray on campus.
“He writes in his book word for word that collective self-defense, direct action, is justified and an ethical and competent tactic against fascism. And he writes in another book that Trump and MAGA are fascists. Like … one plus one … as simple as that,” Joseph said.
He said he denounces anyone who harasses or threatens Bray, though he has reservations about whether that actually happened.
“He claims that he faced a lot of harassment and … threats. The real reason is because Fox News reported him as a terrorist, as Dr. Antifa, and because the Trump administration announced that they’re going to crack down on antifa as a terrorist organization, he’s just merely afraid that he will get caught up in some sort of federal prosecution,” Joseph said. “I just wish he would just denounce his old views … or just for him to not work in a university where he advocates political violence.”
He said that though Bray will leave the U.S., it doesn’t solve the bigger issue.
Joseph said that Bray is not the only faculty member he objects to. As an example, he pointed to another lecturer who he said “cheered” the death of Kirk.
He also said that there are frequently people who protest Rutgers Turning Point USA events and scream death threats to his face, and that those people should all be expelled.
Bray said he has interviewed people in the antifascist movement, but has never been a part of it himself, and he’s not a threat to anybody who disagrees with him.
“I have conservative students in my class. They love me. I love to hear what they have to say. We have good debates and arguments and conversations. It’s no problem whatsoever. I’m not there to indoctrinate. I’m there to teach,” he said.
Bray said that what he is experiencing now is part of a broader conservative effort to shut down discourse on college campuses.
“They’re trying to systematically destroy academic freedom, destroy the university system or rework it in their own image,” he said. “They portray themselves as victims: ‘Oh, the poor conservatives don’t have any space to articulate their ideas.’ Couldn’t be farther from the truth. There are all sorts of opportunities to do this. It’s just that they perceive the presence of countervailing opinions as a threat to what they promote.”