Rutgers union defends Antifa-aligned professor against removal petition

A Rutgers University teachers’ union released a statement Tuesday defending Antifa-aligned professor Mark Bray and hitting the school’s Turning Point USA chapter, which launched a petition to have him removed.

“Rutgers Professor and AAUP-AFT member Dr. Mark Bray has come under attack from Turning Point USA’s Rutgers chapter for his public scholarship,” the Rutgers AAUP-AFT Academic Worker Union said in a Tuesday X post.

“As a result of this attack, he has been doxxed and threatened and has had to leave the country to protect himself and his family,” the statement continued. “As members of the Rutgers and New Jersey labor community, and as unions committed to the defense of our coworkers, we stand in strong solidarity with Professor Mark Bray and his partner, Professor Yesenia Barragan. We affirm the principles of academic freedom and support strong First Amendment rights for all workers in higher ed and beyond.”

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The statement follows weeks of controversy surrounding Bray.

Earlier this month, members of Rutgers’ Turning Point USA chapter launched a petition to remove Bray, an assistant teaching professor at Rutgers, citing concerns over his past statements supporting Antifa.

Bray, who recently moved abroad “for safety reasons” and said that he had been doxxed and “received multiple death threats,” has expressed strong support for “antifacism” ​​in previous online posts.

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In an earlier statement posted at the beginning of October supporting Bray, the Rutgers AAUP-AFT called Turning Point USA “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.”

Whitney Strub, associate professor at Rutgers who has taught courses including Introduction to LGBT Studies, Visions of the City in American Cinema, and Gender and Sexuality in American History, among others, is also co-chair of the Joint Academic Freedom Committee at the Rutgers AAUP-AFT.

Strub posted about Kirk’s assassination on X on Sept. 10, writing, “I don’t actually think Charlie Kirk is going to be our Archduke Franz Ferdinand or Reichstag fire, Trump himself got shot last year and everyone forgot about it within a week. We just live in a violent dystopian hell and this is completely normal.”

He added, “Sorry to see Charlie Kirk didn’t make it. I deplore gun violence & find it tacky to speak ill of the dead so tomorrow I’ll pay my respects by protesting in my diapers.”

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Megyn Doyle, a student at Rutgers and the treasurer for the Turning Point USA chapter, who started the petition to remove Bray, told Fox News Digital in a statement that the Rutgers AAUP-AFT statement is “defamatory.”

“The Statement from the union says our petition caused ‘Doxxing and death threats’ and we have deprived students of the ability to exchange ideas in the classroom,” Doyle said.

She added, “This statement is not only defamatory, but it also defends an Antifa Professor who is affiliated with The Black Rosa Anarchist federation that calls for ‘mass civil disobedience,’ ‘militancy,’ ‘Illegal strikes,’ and wants to make sure that in 20 years it’s costly to say you voted for Trump.”

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“This ‘academic freedom’ that the union is suggesting we are destroying is just Mark Bray’s repeated hostility towards conservatives,” Doyle said.

Ava Kwan, the chapter’s outreach coordinator, told Fox News Digital in a statement that “The Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union (Rutgers AAUP-AFT) will not stop with their incessant lies about our TPUSA chapter.”

She added, “Their choice of language, claiming Bray is under ‘attack’ by us is evidence that they are grasping at straws, unsuccessfully attempting to manipulate the narrative about Dr. Antifa’s terrorist activities. Everyone knows that advocating for preemptive violence against so-called fascists and financing a domestic terrorist organization is not protected speech.”

Fox News Digital reached out to Rutgers and Bray for comment.