The following is a statement by the Joint Academic Freedom Committee of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT and the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, published on October 8, 2025.

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. 

As a Turning Point representative told Fox News, “We want to try to draw as much attention to his involvement in antifa to help protect, you know, our academic freedom.” This is a grotesque perversion of the meaning of “academic freedom,” which serves to protect both the scholarly and political work of professors Bray and Barragan, just as it protects Turning Point’s right to critique. At no point in the century-long history of academic freedom’s institutionalization in US universities has it ever meant firing professors in order to “protect” students from exposure to ideas. 

Another Turning Point spokesperson said that the organization does not “condone death threats, harassment, or doxxing.” Yet those outcomes have been a defining feature of Turning Point’s various targeted campaigns, dating back to its creation in 2016 of a “Professor Watchlist,” which included several Rutgers faculty members. The threats against professors Barragan and Bray are a predictable consequence of Turning Point’s campaign to distort Dr. Bray’s views. As a result, the lives of professors Barragan and Bray have been upended, and their students have been deprived of the ability to exchange ideas in the classroom, compromising their education. 

Silence in the face of these assaults will only embolden the far right. With that in mind, the Rutgers faculty unions reject Turning Point USA’s smear campaigns and proudly stand with our colleagues Dr. Mark Bray and Dr. Yesenia Barragan. We call on all members of the Rutgers community—from students to staff to administrators—to join us in publicly expressing this position.

Whitney Strub, Co-Chair, Joint Academic Freedom Committee, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Sean T. Mitchell, Co-Chair, Joint Academic Freedom Committee, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Hank Kalet, Co-Chair, Joint Academic Freedom Committee, Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union
Rebecca Givan, President, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Heather Pierce, President, Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union