Ep. 93 - Targeted Online? What Every Professor Needs to Know to Protect Themselves (with Dr. Heather Steffen)

What would you do if your inbox filled with threats, your home address was posted online, or your university launched an “investigation” after a viral tweet?
 In this episode, Dr. Heather Steffen, director of Faculty First Responders, joins Leslie to reveal how professors can protect themselves from doxxing, harassment, and politically motivated attacks.

Dr. Steffen shares:

• The anatomy of a smear campaign—and how they spread through right-wing media
• The essential digital safety steps every academic should take now
• Why collective action and peer networks are key to preserving academic freedom
• How to build a campus support system before you need one

If you’ve ever worried about speaking out, teaching controversial topics, or just being too visible online, this conversation will give you the tools—and hope—you need to stay safe, supported, and heard.

🎧 Listen now to learn how to safeguard your digital presence and your career.

Transcript

EP 93 with Dr Heather Steffen from Faculty First Responders

Leslie: Today, I'd like to welcome Dr. Heather Steffen, the director of Faculty First Responders, onto the podcast. Let me tell you a bit about this important organization and about Heather. Faculty First Responders is an organization that supports academic workers who are experiencing politically motivated smear campaigns, doxxing, employment consequences, or other targeted harassment. A partner of the American Association of University Professors, FFR provides peer-to-peer counseling, collections of resources for academic workers in crisis, and webinars and workshops about academic freedom and its defense.

Dr. Heather Steffen is the director of Faculty First Responders. She's also a core faculty member in the Engaged and Public Humanities Program at Georgetown University and an adjunct lecturer in the Georgetown Writing Program. Trained in literary and cultural studies, Heather's research examines how academic workers imagine the labor they do at US Research universities. She considers how the meanings, values, beliefs, and goals they attach to their labor may support or undermine collective action within and beyond the academic labor movement.

So, I first heard about this group about a month ago. They were cited in a New York Times article about the firing of educators over comments they made about Charlie Kirk following his death. And so, I googled Faculty First Responders and was impressed by the resources and hands-on support they provide to targeted faculty members and other academic workers.
And just this morning, two different sociologists I know posted about being targeted online and shared some of the vile, hateful, violent messages being sent to them by complete and total strangers. And I know faculty members who have had to hire private security to protect themselves.

So the work that Faculty First Responders is doing is really important and necessary. Political harassment is not going away anytime soon. So I wanted to spread the word about this organization and have a discussion about what academics and administrators can do to support and protect targeted individuals. So, Heather, thank you so much for being here.

Heather: Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be getting the word out.

Leslie: Absolutely. So, can you first just describe your own journey through academia and then talk about how you got involved with Faculty First Responders? 

Heather: Certainly. I would say my journey through academia is relatively typical of a humanities PhD in the era of contingency and the gig academy. So I came to research about academic labor early on, around 2007 or 08, because I was interested in the working conditions of graduate students and other contingent workers like adjuncts. My undergraduate advisor had been an adjunct instructor, and so I was aware very early on of how contingent labor looks different than our classic image of the tenure-stream professor. 

So after graduate school, I have bounced around between a number of contingent positions, postdocs, consulting gigs, and adjunct positions until I found myself ultimately unemployed during the pandemic, when I just could not locate employment because of the ways that all the human connections were rearranging themselves. I was collaborating with a colleague, Isaac Camola, at that point, who's a professor of political science at Trinity College, and we were collaborating on a couple of other projects related to critical university studies. And he started talking to me about what Faculty First Responders was doing and his hopes to create a longer-term staffing situation for it. Because when Faculty First Responders began, it was just Isaac and two undergraduate research assistants. So he was looking to have someone come on board who would be a bit more of a stable presence within the organization than the undergraduates whom he had been working with. Yeah, so that's how I 

came on board around 2022. And since then, we've really been growing Faculty First Responders in terms of its capabilities. 
 
 So we now offer basically three different types of service to academic workers. So the first is what we refer to as sousveillance, or watching from below. And that is where we monitor the right-wing online news media ecosystem. And we look for attacks on specific academic workers. So those might be faculty, staff members, administrators, or even departments and programs. And when we locate an attack of that sort, we reach out with an email to the affected worker and offer them a whole bunch of resources, as well as mutual aid in the form of coaching from peers, assembling other resources, and networking between ally organizations. And then we also, on top of the monitoring and mutual aid, do a series of webinars and workshops that educate workers about academic freedom issues and how to do collective action to protect academic freedom. 

Leslie: Amazing. Amazing. So, can you talk a little bit about the scope of these attacks right now? 

Heather: Yeah. So right now, these attacks have really taken off. It seems that the strategy of targeted harassment through emails or contacts with an employer, through doxxing, and through other means, has become a major strategy for the right and potentially for conservative forces at this point. In the sense that since Charlie Kirk's death, we've seen this movement to, I think at some point someone said, get 50,000 people fired as a result of their speech about that event. And so we have seen just a massive uptick in folks reaching out to us individually, in organizations reaching out looking to prepare their members, and also happily, in folks reaching out to us with resources that they would like to connect workers to. 

Leslie: Amazing. So, for folks who are listening and don't know, can you give a definition 

of what doxxing is and what it looks like?

Heather: Yeah. So doxxing is the posting of someone's personal information, like their address or their phone number, potentially their office address or teaching times– it's the posting of this information maliciously on the internet. So that kind of information is often available from data broker websites, but that is separate from doxxing in the sense that that malicious intent is not present. 

Leslie: Got it, got it. So, can you walk us through what happens when a faculty member is targeted by one of these campaigns? What does it look like? 

Heather: Yeah, so the way it looks in the news media ecosystem is really kind of a bubbling up from below, most of the time in the sense that most of these attacks–and I will pause and say, I think this pattern could be changing as we speak. This whole area is shifting under our feet right now–but typically, an attack will begin with a post on social media. And that could come from a right-wing account like Libs of TikTok. It could come from a legislator or another public figure. It could come from a student organization or simply from an agitated individual who has read about something a professor said online or elsewhere. So once the attack begins on social media, it will tend to gain traction there until it is, in some instances, picked up by a right-wing news outlet like Campus Reform, the College Fix, or the Washington Free Beacon. And at that point, the attack begins to circulate as a media smear campaign as well as a social media event. 
 
Once a story has hit venues like Campus Reform and the College Fix, it's likely, or it's possible that it will be picked up by the mainstream news media - a venue like Fox News or a larger news venue like the New York Post. And at that point, an investigation may be opened by the employer if the employer is paying attention to the complaints being lodged by external parties. And it's that moment when an investigation 

is opened by the employer that seems to be becoming more and more frequent now. So we are seeing universities really respond to the stories on social media and in the news in a way that they always have when it comes to certain topics, but at the same time, they seemed to understand and be willing to overlook some of these smears in the past. So I would say the consequences are beginning to be more dire. 

Leslie: Right, so it sounds like beyond mere intimidation, the end goal is really about getting people fired these days. 

Heather: Yeah, I think the end goal is even bigger than that. So I think the end goal is really a deep chilling of speech and teaching, and research on campuses in the US right now. And a serious attack, not just on individual academics, but on the public's trust in the academic profession and in the whole project of higher education. So I think these attacks really they come at and they crumble the foundation of public trust that needs to exist in order for the academic profession to enjoy academic freedom, for instance. 

Leslie: Mm, mmhm. So you're definitely focusing on right-wing media campaigns. But in my reading about this topic and stuff, there are definitely conservative academics that have said that they've been targeted by left-wing groups or left-wing individuals. And they're saying, why is there all this attention happening now on this when it's been around for a long time, this kind of intimidation? So what are your thoughts on that? 

Heather: So, a couple of things. The first thing I will say is that Faculty First Responders is willing to work with any academic worker across the political spectrum. So we do not actually make distinctions in who we will work with. But I think the real difference between attacks from the right and attacks from the left, when we're talking about politically motivated harassment, is that there is not on the left the same machinery set up to produce these attacks that there is on the far right. So in the sense that the left has yet to produce websites like The Professor Watch List or Canary Missionary that permanently list so-called dangerous or antisemitic professors. And the left does not tend to publish the same kind of smear stories in its publications as does the right. So there's just a lot more money and there are a lot more resources coming from the right behind these attacks than there are on the left. When the left does a doxxing campaign, it tends to be very small-scale, typically initiated by an individual or a small group, rather than a part of a larger campaign that may be spread across media outlets, legislators, the social media ecosystem, all of that. 

Leslie: Right, right. Thanks for clarifying the differences that you see between those two. That makes a lot of sense. What kinds of consequences have you seen these attacks have on targeted individuals, on their professional lives, on their personal lives? 

Heather: Yeah. So these attacks have immense consequences for the individuals who are experiencing them. Those consequences tend to begin with targeted harassment. So receiving a lot of hate mail or threats that can come through emails, through social media, I often hear from people that they have gotten letters to their home address or voicemails on their phone that threaten and harass them. The harassment of the worker 

can also extend to the employer. So often, you see threats being sent to a college or university when a faculty member is experiencing targeted harassment. But essentially, what this causes for the academic worker is, I would say, often a traumatic experience. 

And that comes with feelings of fear, feelings of or real loss of safety at work or at your home, and levels of isolation and embarrassment that are just extraordinary and truly prevent people from reaching out to get the help they need in some cases. Of course, there's a lot of reputational harm that goes along with these attacks. They can ruin your Google search results for a very long time, because, especially, the right-wing media sources like Campus Reform or College Fix, of course, are managed to rise high in the Google results. And I already talked a little about the sort of overall chilling effect that I think this has on the higher education profession. 

Leslie: Uh-huh. 

Heather: What I'd also point out is that these effects are, while they are, I believe, felt to some degree by everyone who experiences politically motivated harassment, I think they can be compounded for certain workers who come from more vulnerable or marginalized groups within the academy. So as you said a minute ago, these kinds of attacks have been going on for a long time. They have been coming from the right for a long time. And what we see, and this– I do not have data to support this. So this is pure observation from reading the right-wing news almost every day– is that those who are most likely to be smeared in the right-wing media are faculty of color, women, queer and trans faculty, disabled faculty, and faculty from other marginalized groups. So an intersectional analysis is necessary to understand how these attacks land on different people and what kind of reputational and other damage they can cause. Because there is a difference between, for instance, being doxxed versus being maliciously charged with plagiarism. One charge might stick a lot longer in academic circles than the other. 

Leslie: Right, right, right. So what are some tangible steps that every academic can take right now to prepare themselves in case they are targeted?
 
 

Heather: Yeah, so I think the most important basic step to take is to do a good checkup on your digital security hygiene. So, being really careful and mindful and intentional about how we use our devices, what kind of accounts we're using, all the basic advice that we would give about strong passwords, using password managers, and crucially separating the use of your work devices and work accounts from the devices and accounts you use for your personal or organizing or other sensitive activities. So we really advocate for folks to begin separating their work from their personal lives when it comes to how we deal with technology, 

Leslie: Which I think would have some good ripple effects anyway, because telling people to take their work emails off of their phones, I think, is a good thing in general, but here it's actually a security measure. 

Heather: Exactly. I also think that a really good idea is to become very aware of university policies and procedures. So knowing what parts of the university handbook relate to academic freedom and free speech, and also to the disciplinary procedures around those, is really, really important. So that if an attack occurs, you're already knowledgeable about what due process is available and what procedures your university should be following. 
 
And then the last step I would say to take, and I didn't use to really promote this, but I do now, is to join the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP is not only the nation's premier professional organization for thinking about 

academic freedom, it's also doing absolutely crucial work in the fight to save academic freedom as a collective value. And also, the AAUP is now affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. So all AAUP members are also AFT members, which means that a range of benefits are open to them that can be very useful in times of academic freedom crisis. For instance, trauma counseling, professional and occupational liability insurance, a small legal benefit. All of these can be really, really crucial for making it through a crisis in a supported way. 

Leslie: Yeah, so that raises another question that I had. So, looking at your website, it stresses the importance of AAUP chapters, but also things like unions and peer networks. So what role do you think that collective action can play in protecting individuals who are targeted? 

Heather: So I think collective action is truly the only way that academics and the academic profession survive the next few years, or as long as we have to. S,o academic freedom, a lot of the time, people think about it as an individual right in the way that free speech is an individual right that inheres in each citizen or member of the community in the United States. Right. But academic freedom really is a collective right that inheres in our profession and is granted to members based on their expertise, their training, their adherence to particular ethical standards, all of that. So when one person's academic freedom is attacked, it's really an attack on the entire academic profession and its ability to do its job. So I really think we need to be working together to make academic freedom into a lived value rather than an abstract principle that we believe is just there to protect us. So I think without collective action, there never has been in this country or another real academic freedom. And we cannot maintain it without acting together through AAUP chapters, unions, locals, professional organizations, tiny committees formed to support people under attack on a campus. Any way that folks can be working together to coordinate their energies at this moment, I think, is critical. 

Leslie: Yeah, absolutely. And this just makes me realize that we use the term academic freedom all the time, but I don't think anyone has ever given a real definition of what it entails. So what would you say academic freedom is? 

Heather: So academic freedom can be understood as having four dimensions. The first is teaching, which means that you have the freedom to teach all matters that are relevant in the classroom. Relevant is the key term there in that it means we need to stick basically to the course description and what we have explained in the syllabus we'll be covering. But there is wiggle room to discuss things like current events, as long as it doesn't become a persistent intrusion on the course content. So first is teaching. Second is research, which is the sort of most traditional way we understand academic freedom as the freedom to pursue research questions that we find important and that the discipline finds important. And then the freedom to publish the results of our research, which is almost as important as the freedom of what to inquire into. The third dimension of academic freedom is intramural speech, which means the speech that we do as part of our work as citizens of a campus. So it might be our work in governance, our work on committees. Intramural speech would even cover an instance where you write an op ed about your institution for a, ah, public venue, because that speech is still ultimately about growing and evolving the institution. And then the fourth and final dimension is extramural speech, which is the speech that happens off campus or around campus in the community. And this is when professors are speaking in their role as members of the community. And that's a little different. So it's a little different than the First Amendment in the sense that the First Amendment free speech protects us from government intrusion on our speech, whereas the principle of extramural speech as part of academic freedom protects us from institutional and employer intrusion on 

our speech. 

Leslie: That is such a useful breakdown. I'm so glad I asked you to define it. That's really, really helpful. So, let's talk a little bit about institutional responses and the role that administrators play. It seems like a lot of administrators don't know how to defend and support their own faculty. Maybe some of them are not even looking to defend and support them. So what would a strong institutional response look like? 

Heather: So there are a couple of really great models for administrators and institutions to work from. The first is UMass Amherst has an academic Freedom crisis toolkit that's accessible. And then the Researcher Support Consortium has a toolkit for institutions. And both of these toolkits, essentially, and especially the Researcher Support Consortium’s, teaches institutions how to create a researcher support team on their campus. And I think we can broaden that to an academic worker support team. And those teams are spaces in which all of the stakeholders and constituencies at a campus who could be relevant to an academic freedom crisis, where they're all brought together. So that might involve networking between faculty, organization, staff and administrators, or, well, it certainly will in the sense that you might have faculty working alongside campus security officers or IT professionals or student affairs, potentially personnel, all sorts of people to really create a team on the campus who is ready to respond before one of these incidents happens on a campus. Of course, when administrators are the threat to academic freedom themselves, that's where collective action on the ground kicks in. 

Leslie: Okay. 

Heather: And we also have a page for administrators on our website that describes 

some better and worse responses that administrators might make after a politically motivated attack has occurred. 

Leslie: Interesting. What's a worse response? 

Heather: So a worse response would litigate what the person has said or done. So it would take seriously claims that are coming from politically biased and potentially racially or gender biased, or any other kinds of biased sources, and attempts to make the situation about the incident that was reported as opposed to standing up for principles of academic freedom when they are relevant. 

Leslie: Got it, got it. Okay, so folks, go to the Faculty First Responders website and find a lot of these different kinds of resources. So I know that in general, academics are feeling really overwhelmed. There are a lot of folks that are feeling really hopeless right now. Are there any words that you can give them that might give them a little more hope? 

Heather: Yes. I was glad to have this question a little ahead of time, so I could think of a good answer to it. And the place that that took me was Mr. Rogers' neighborhood. Because I think that Mr. Rogers' advice– so he tells a story that he claims happened to him when he was little, where his mom told him that in the case of a tragedy or a crisis, what you should do is look for the helpers. There are always people who are helping. And I think that that Mr. Rogers' quote really is a great reminder of three things, and that's, first, that there is always good in humanity somewhere at all times. Second, that there are people there to help you, and people have your back, even when things seem to be at their worst, and even when what those helpers have to offer may be insufficient. At least knowing someone is there can be an incredible comfort in these moments for academic workers. And then third, I think Mr. Rogers reminds us that we can all evolve to become helpers ourselves. And I think that that could happen for many people in the next few years in ways that they have not even imagined yet. So I think thinking creatively about how we can help our colleagues, thinking creatively about modes of collective action that perhaps we haven't used before or we've been putting off trying, I think getting creative in how we evolve into being helpers at this moment is really important. 

Leslie: Yeah. And you're saying that things are shifting all the time. 

Heather: Right. 

Leslie: So strategies also need to be shifting as well. Do you have any thoughts on creative ways that people can become helpers? 

Heather: So I think probably the most important way that you could become a helper would be to begin the process on your campus of forming a small committee that can begin working to create a support team on the model of the Researcher Support Consortium's Institutional Toolkit. You could use an AAUP chapter or a union or a faculty senate, or a number of other formations as a basis for that work. But I think at this point, institutions are. We're seeing them cave to political demands again and again and again. And I think that we need to begin inoculating those institutions against these attacks and demands and creating ways for ourselves to protect ourselves. 

Leslie: Absolutely. And also reminding folks that individuals have agency in this, that individuals come together to create collective action.
 
 

Heather: Exactly. And all you need for a committee is three people. 

Leslie: So, Heather, what are the best ways for people to connect with you in the organization? 

Heather: Yeah, our website is definitely the best way. So that's at 

www.facultyfirstresponders.com, or you should always feel free to reach out to us via email@facultyfirstrespondersmail.com. We are more than happy to talk with anyone who is experiencing an academic freedom crisis or politically or otherwise motivated harassment. And we are beginning to move more into the terrain also of advising organizations on how they can be doing collective action for academic freedom. 

Leslie: Awesome. Thank you so much, Heather, for being here today and for the work that you do. You've definitely given listeners a lot of great tips and strategies and things to think about when it comes to protecting themselves right now, when higher education has become so targeted, so politicized. Everyone, please spread the word about Faculty First Responders, go to their website, download all the resources, and start a support network of your own. Thanks again, Heather. 

Heather: Thank you so much, Leslie.