Julio Pino, an associate professor at Kent State University, is among the academics listed on the new website. Photo: Twitter.

JNS.org – A new website that aims to expose university faculty who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom” has amassed more than half a million views in its first month, a spokesperson has confirmed.

Professorwatchlist.org, a project of conservative nonprofit activist organization Turning Point USA, is appreciated by “many of our students and supporters,” Turning Point spokesman Matt Lamb told JNS.org.

The site, which provides a directory of professors, listing each by name and place of employment, together with a summary of each individual’s views and links to news stories documenting them, has been criticized as a McCarthy-like blacklist by many academics, something Lamb proudly noted.

“As you can expect, the academia groups are not happy,” Lamb said. “Many of the organizations, such as the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) and groups of professors at different universities, have yet to decide if this website harms their academic freedom or if it’s a good idea to be put on the list as an ‘act of solidarity.’ Their contradictory position is astonishing.”

One entry, given a prominent place on the website’s homepage, is for Julio Cesar Pino, an associate professor of history at Kent State University who has called Israel the “spiritual heir to Nazism,” interrupted an Israeli diplomat’s lecture on campus in 2011 with chants of “Death to Israel!” and wrote a eulogy in a student newspaper for a Palestinian female suicide bomber.

Lamb said that, “As a conservative organization, (Turning Point USA) students are going to tend to be pro-Israel,” which made identifying anti-Israel professors a priority of the watchlist.

Lamb told JNS.org that work on the watchlist started “over the summer after hearing from students, donors, parents, etc. that there was a need for a central database of all these radical professors we regularly hear about in the news.”

This is not the first project to document professors’ political views. In September 2014, the AMCHA Initiative, a campus watchdog group dedicated to investigating and combating antisemitism at American universities, released a list of more than 200 faculty it identified as scholars of the Middle East who support an academic boycott of Israel.