In this November 2016 photo, Bill Mullen, an American studies professor at Purdue, talks about a collection of white supremacist posters found plastered across Purdue University. Mullen among a handful of faculty members across the country who created the Campus Antifascist Network to help academics respond when similar incidents happen on their campuses. The Campus Antifascist Network now has 450 members.(Photo: J&C file photo)
After a group then called American Vanguard littered Purdue University with fliers one night in November 2016, there was more than a sense it wasn’t a matter of if, but of when the group’s white nationalist group’s propaganda or something similar would turn up on campus again.
The Purdue students and faculty who gathered that next day predicted it. The white nationalist group that claimed the recruiting effort promised as much.
“When” came Monday, as promotional fliers for Identity Evropa – a group that, like the group now called Vanguard America, played rolls in the “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in August – were scattered at Purdue. The group called the fliers “the beginning of a long-term culture war” aimed at academia.
That “when, not if” assumption is at the heart of a new coalition of academics, starting with two professors at Purdue University, who are bracing to resist white supremacists’ look at universities as either fertile ground for new recruits or a place where they can carve out space for their message.
The Campus Antifascist Network formed in the spring of 2017 with a couple of dozen professors across the country. But it has mushroomed to more than 400 in the month since Charlottesville.
Bill Mullen, an American studies professor at Purdue, was among the organizers of Campus Antifascist Network, which has been profiled in The Chronicle of Higher Education and called out on Breitbart.
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