The City University of New York Graduate Center is offering an English course titled “Global Antifa” that focuses on students taking an active role in the sometimes violent far-left movement to fight conservatives in the name of anti-fascism.
The course focuses on “militant co-research,” which is a collaborative methodology in which researchers become active participants in a political movement while doing research.
The required coursework, which was obtained under the state’s public information law by Defending Education, includes completion of “research projects that contribute to the work of global movements fighting fascism.”
“The syllabus reveals an insidious side of academia where professors use the time-honored tradition of academic freedom as cover to indoctrinate students into the far-left anti-fascist ideology,” said Rhyen Staley, director of research for Defending Education, a national organization that says it fights “indoctrination” in classrooms and works to reestablish a quality, non-political education for students.
Mr. Staley said that more concerning was that the course also appears to function as “strategy sessions” for street activism for Antifa’s black-clad protesters.
“Courses such as this have no place in American institutions of higher education,” he said, adding that similar “militant co-research” is popping up in K-12 education, too.
The course offered by CUNY has learning goals that include familiarizing “students with contemporary theories of fascism and antifascism, as well as related critical theories concerning racial capitalism, gender & sexuality, imperialism, etcetera,” according to a report by Defending Education.
The syllabus states, “Given the topic of the seminar, the class will be explicitly interdisciplinary. It will also be oriented towards militant co-research, and students will be encouraged to develop research projects that contribute to the work of global movements fighting fascism.”
The course explores “ways in which the realm of aesthetics in general, and, more specifically, particular domains such as literature and visual culture, relate to fascism and antifascism,” and discusses “various research methodologies, with a focus on histories and examples of militant co-research.”
Mr. Staley, a former teacher, compares the course to training at a war college.
“This [professor] is pretty deep into the Antifa world, so to speculate based on data, he’s using his course to develop strategies to then hand off to Antifa,” he said. “What they’re really doing is training these young people, whether college age or high school age, they’re training them to be these street radicals.”
Professor Ashley Dawson instructs the Global Antifa class. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and he works in the fields of environmental humanities and postcolonial ecocriticism, according to the CUNY website.
Mr. Dawson is the author of three recent books: People’s Power, Extreme Cities and Extinction.
He did not respond to an inquiry about his Global Antifa course.
The Washington Times also reached out to CUNY for comment.
The modern Antifa movement in the U.S. emerged in the 1980s to counter punk skinheads and other neo-Nazis. It has morphed into broader anti-conservative activism, often staging violent confrontations with police and federal law enforcement.
Until recently, the FBI downplayed the threat of Antifa and dismissed the left-wing activists as a loosely organized collection of like-minded protesters.
However, President Trump last month signed an executive order designating Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.”
The order states that Antifa is a “terrorist threat” and “uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide to accomplish these goals.”
The president warned that Antifa recruits, trains and radicalizes young Americans to engage in violence against federal law enforcement officers, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In the CUNY course, students are required to get involved in Antifa.
According to the course requirements, students are given space to do “alternative forms of research, including collaborative/collective work, militant research, and methodologies that combine analysis and imagination.”
Students are called on to “produce discursive forms aimed at diverse audiences, and to think about the most efficacious ways to mobilize and disseminate knowledge around the crises of contemporary capitalism, liberal democracy, authoritarian populism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and eco-fascism, among other issues.”
Students are also asked to use the Militant Research Handbook and other publications by CrimethInc., a decentralized anarchist collective of autonomous cells.
The groups of three to four students are to “develop knowledge useful to Antifa campaigns” on topics such as immigrant defense, disaster communism and anti-imperialism.
“This work should result in a five-to-seven-page pamphlet that introduces the topic, surveys key terms and developments and provides a brief annotated bibliography,” the syllabus says.
Course texts include a set of leftist readings on “Colonial Fascisms,” “Black Marxist Antifascism,” “Queer Antifa,” and “Eco-Fascism and Border Abolition.”
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.