A Rutgers professor wrote a book about antifa in 2017. Some conservative students want him fired

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​​Some students at Rutgers University petitioned the school to fire a history professor, saying he calls for violence against conservatives. The professor has since received threats, including some with his home address, and he will relocate his family for a few months.

Mark Bray, assistant professor of history at Rutgers, studies the history of modern Spain and global movements against fascism, from the past to the present. In 2017, he published “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” which documents the philosophy and tactics of anti-fascist movements in the U.S. and around the world. In the introduction, he writes that it is an “unabashedly partisan call to arms that aims to equip a new generation of anti-fascists with the history and theory necessary to defeat the resurgent Far Right.”

He started teaching at Rutgers in 2019.

Last month, after the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that designated the antifa movement as a “domestic terrorist organization,” despite antifa being more of a loosely affiliated movement than an actual group, and there being no legal mechanism for a president to designate domestic terrorist groups.

After that, some Rutgers students in the local chapter of Turning Point USA, the conservative organization Kirk founded, went through Bray’s books, and said that Bray not only documents antifascist tactics, he endorses them.

Michael Joseph, a senior at Rutgers and member and former president of the Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA, said he feels unsafe with Bray on campus.

“He writes in his book word for word that collective self-defense, direct action, is justified and an ethical and competent tactic against fascism. And he writes in another book that Trump and MAGA are fascists. Like … one plus one … as simple as that,” Joseph said.

He said he denounces anyone who harasses or threatens Bray, though he has reservations about whether that actually happened.

“He claims that he faced a lot of harassment and … threats. The real reason is because Fox News reported him as a terrorist, as Dr. Antifa, and because the Trump administration announced that they’re going to crack down on antifa as a terrorist organization, he’s just merely afraid that he will get caught up in some sort of federal prosecution,” Joseph said. “I just wish he would just denounce his old views … or just for him to not work in a university where he advocates political violence.”

He said that though Bray will leave the U.S., it doesn’t solve the bigger issue.

Joseph said that Bray is not the only faculty member he objects to. As an example, he pointed to another lecturer who he said “cheered” the death of Kirk.

He also said that there are frequently people who protest Rutgers Turning Point USA events and scream death threats to his face, and that those people should all be expelled.

Bray said he has interviewed people in the antifascist movement, but has never been a part of it himself, and he’s not a threat to anybody who disagrees with him.

“I have conservative students in my class. They love me. I love to hear what they have to say. We have good debates and arguments and conversations. It’s no problem whatsoever. I’m not there to indoctrinate. I’m there to teach,” he said.

Bray said that what he is experiencing now is part of a broader conservative effort to shut down discourse on college campuses.

“They’re trying to systematically destroy academic freedom, destroy the university system or rework it in their own image,” he said. “They portray themselves as victims: ‘Oh, the poor conservatives don’t have any space to articulate their ideas.’ Couldn’t be farther from the truth. There are all sorts of opportunities to do this. It’s just that they perceive the presence of countervailing opinions as a threat to what they promote.”

As to Joseph denouncing the threats against Bray, he said, “it’s a little late for that.”

Bray said that he and other professors on Turning Point USA’s “watchlist” have received threats for years.

The faculty union at Rutgers supports Bray, condemning the campaign against him as an attack on academic freedom and an effort to suppress speech that does not conform to far-right politics.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Rutgers said they do not comment on specific personnel and student conduct, but that the school “is committed to providing a secure environment — to learn, teach, work, and research, where all members of our community can share their opinions without fear of intimidation or harassment. Rutgers is committed to upholding the rights of students and faculty to free speech and academic freedom as fundamental to our community.”

The effort to get a professor fired based on what he writes about and teaches is “corrosive to a free speech culture,” said Zach Greenberg, a First Amendment lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an advocacy and legal defense organization that defends free speech. He said that while actual violence is a crime, the First Amendment allows people to abstractly call for or even justify violence.

“Professors obviously can’t commit violence or assault. They can’t issue true threats, serious intent to commit unlawful violence. That would cross the line,” Greenberg said. “But we have the right to discuss violence and call for violence, even justify violence, per our crucial fundamental right to discuss political ideas and viewpoints. And that has to include discussions of antifa and terrorism and the tactics they use because these are important public ideas.”

He added that even if Bray were to say in class that he endorses the tactics of antifa, he is within his rights to do so, as long as it is relevant to what he is teaching.

He gave another example: “a history professor can talk about whether it was justified for the United States of America to drop atomic bombs on Japan during World War II. There’s a difference between that and actually dropping the bombs, right? We have to have at least protection for some form of advocacy, justification for violence in order to have the free exchange of ideas on campus.”

There has since been another petition to disband the Turning Point USA chapter at Rutgers, which has since gotten more signatures than the petition to get Bray fired.

Greenberg said the dueling petitions represent the pressure that universities will always face to “crack down on speech, whether by firing professors, kicking student groups off-campus,” but they should “resist these pressures, even when it’s difficult or unpopular to do so.”