Shellyne Rodriguez, the machete-wielding former Hunter School professor, has now been fired by the Cooper Union faculty. The varsity beforehand stood with Rodriguez after she trashed a scholar show and held a machete to the neck of a journalist. It seems that Rodriguez’s anti-Israel feedback have been lastly an excessive amount of for Cooper Union.
What’s attention-grabbing is what it takes at each Hunter School and The Cooper Union to be fired.
We beforehand mentioned a videotape of Rodríguez trashing a pro-life scholar show in New York. Earlier than attacking the desk, she instructed the scholars, “You’re not educating s–t […] That is f–king propaganda. What are you going to do, like, anti-trans subsequent? That is bulls–t. That is violent. You’re triggering my college students.”
The videotape revealed one different factor. At Hunter School, and at different schools, plainly trashing a pro-life scholar show and abusing pro-life college students shouldn’t be thought of a firing offense. Hunter School refused to fireside Rodríguez.
The PSC Graduate Middle, the labor group of graduate {and professional} colleges on the Metropolis College of New York, supported that call and mentioned Rodríguez was “justified” in trashing the show, which the group described as “dangerously false propaganda” and “disinformation.”
Rodríguez later put a machete to the neck of a reporter, threatened to cut him up after which chased a information crew down a road with the machete in hand. Someplace between the machete to the neck and chasing the reporters down the road, Hunter School lastly determined that Rodríguez needed to go.
Rodríguez denounced the varsity for having “capitulated” to “racists, white nationalists, and misogynists.” She defined that her firing was only a continuation of “assaults on girls, trans folks, black folks, Latinx folks, migrants, and past.”
The Cooper Union, nevertheless, refused to sever ties with Rodríguez, 47, and determined that she ought to proceed to show her college students. In response to the New York Submit. Rodriguez attributed her firing to her anti-Israeli feedback. She declared
“Cooper Union has fired me due to a social media publish I made about ‘Zionists’… efficient instantly. That is fascism. Ya’ll are studying about it in actual time. Keep robust, [stay] courageous, keep defiant, don’t chew your tongue, and drink loads of water! Pa-lante!”
College students cried foul. One group wrote the dean to object that “this firing represents an intense escalation of McCarthyist repression meant to intimidate and punish these in help of a Free Palestine, and should be resisted to forestall its additional normalization and the continued genocide in Gaza.”
There’s a reliable query over terminations of school for statements made outdoors of a college on social media. Nevertheless, there was ample cause to not have a machete-wielding maniac train college students. Cooper Union, nevertheless, discovered the social media extra menacing than the machete.
Rodriguez participated in a CUNY for Palestine digital panel by which she spoke about the opportunity of a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) motion lease strike in New York involving not making lease funds to Jewish landlords or landlords who help Israel. She is quoted as calling for the concentrating on of pro-Israeli figures, including “[y]ou most likely wait tables the place they go to brunch. Discover them, go to their places of work, don’t allow them to sleep.” She additionally referred to as former Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr. a “roach” and “Zionist lapdog.”
Notably, others on the left have inspired such harassment of these with opposing view, together with Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA. Others have supported harassing conservative justices at their properties and places of work.
What’s ironic in regards to the objection to McCarthyism is that Rodriguez is a part of the “radical stylish” in academia main the mob and silencing others.
The one advantage of this controversy is that it’s lastly confirmed what it takes to be fired by The Cooper Union if you’re on the left. Trashing pro-life shows or threatening journalists are clearly no barrier for employment with the varsity.
