It was 11 p.m. in 2022 when a driver whose headlights were turned off parked outside the home of Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua.
Cha-Jua is an African American Studies and History professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He had just been listed on the Professor Watchlist run by conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
“I came down and as soon as I stepped on the deck, the person backed out and then drove away – but didn’t turn their lights on until they were a block and a half away,” Cha-Jua said.
At the same time, he was getting email and phone threats. Cha-Jua said his department received an email saying the sender would send a cyber-attack if he wasn’t fired. He was used to being called the N-word in response to a regular column he writes in the News-Gazette, but the new threats felt more intense.
“I had a police officer come out, and he said that they never crossed a line. None of them were straight-up death threats, but they felt like that,” Cha-Jua said.
The car incident, combined with three months of email and phone threats, spooked Cha-Jua. His wife even relented and let him buy a gun to keep at home.
Kirk maintained the list before his death this month to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom,” according to the watch list website.
Professors across Illinois report receiving threats after being listed on the site.
Finn McIntosh is a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign sophomore and a Charlie Kirk supporter. He agrees with the intent of keeping track of those influencing future leaders – but not the outcome.
“I’m sure there are things that Charlie Kirk identified that I would agree should be known,” McIntosh said. “I think the trouble that it has caused professors solely on the basis of them having a differing political opinion, I cannot get behind that.”
IPM News reached out to the four UIUC professors on the Professor Watchlist. One declined to be interviewed about “this unfortunate part of my life.”
Charles Roseman is a professor of evolution, ecology and behavior at UIUC. He believes he received the lightest level of harassment out of the four after his name was added to the list.
“I was still on Twitter at the time, and I got a brief uptick in the ordinary level of hostility I was getting. But this time, it was for a slightly different topic,” Roseman said.
He also remembers receiving letters and random phone calls from unknown numbers at odd hours.
Turning Point USA added Roseman to the list in 2023 for an opinion piece he co-wrote with a University of Notre Dame anthropologist in Scientific American about the importance of scientific humility and not being too wedded to a belief that there are two sexes before doing scientific research.
He didn’t learn about the cause of the new hostility, though, until students working at a food bank with him mentioned it.
“If the whole point is to start difficult conversations, then Turning Point USA was an utter failure at that, because they just don’t let you know,” Roseman said.
Roseman’s research covers a wide range of biology and evolution topics. He checks the math of those in think tanks and academia, like Charles Murray, who advance the belief that there are deep genetic differences between races that cannot be overcome by social factors.
“We’re looking at what these race scientists and eugenicists are doing, and we’re breaking down their algebra, and we’re checking their math, and they would have difficulty with an eighth grade algebra exam,” Roseman said.
He also looks at the effects of genes on what makes a good cow, the genetic variation in baboons and how quickly are animals like mice expected to evolve.
Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua was added in 2022 for an opinion series in the News-Gazette about politicians who he believes are white supremacists, based on their support for barriers to voting, opposition to reparations and more. His last book focused on reparations and his upcoming work narrates a theory of African American history based on Black thinkers.
Cha-Jua is happy with the way the University of Illinois supported him in 2022. U of I assigned a detective to help him, and the detective advised him to get security cameras, stay aware of his surroundings and vary his daily routes.
“I was pleasantly surprised. I got full support from the university,” Cha-Jua added. “My hope is that they’re not going to move off of that in the current environment.”
U of I spokesperson Pat Wade says university police are still available to help investigate criminal violations and safety risks.
“The main thing we want students, faculty and staff to know is that the university does have resources available and is ready to provide guidance when this occurs, and we will prioritize their safety and well-being within the full scope of our ability to do so,” Wade wrote in an emailed statement.
“Exploring challenging and important questions is exactly what scholars in a world-class university should be doing.”
After Kirk’s recent killing, some professors in Illinois have received new threats to their safety.