New York University just made the controversial decision to add Professor George Ciccariello-Maher to their staff. This is after Ciccariello-Maher dismissed the Vegas Shooting as a “Narrative of White Victimization.”
The liberal professor, who is most famous for tweeting “All I want for Christmas is white genocide” was previously suspended and investigated for linking the Las Vegas mass shootings with “the narrative of white victimization” has resigned from the Drexel University and has joined the New York University.
He finished his tenure last week as the associate professor for politics and global studies and has started his work at the NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics as a visiting scholarship, as per his announcement on his social media accounts.
On his Facebook account, he went on to write, “After nearly a year of harassment by right-wing, white supremacist media outlets and internet mobs, after death threats and threats of violence directed against me and my family, my situation has become unsustainable. Staying at Drexel in the eye of this storm has become detrimental to my own writing, speaking, and organizing.”
The professor of politics further wrote a warning, saying, “We are at war, and academia is a crucial front in that war. Right is targeting campuses with thinly veiled provocations disguised as free speech. My case and many others show just how cynical such appeals are, and how little the Right cares about academic freedom.”
“In the past year, the forces of resurgent white supremacy have tasted blood and are howling for more,” Ciccariello-Maher continued. “Given the pressure they will continue to apply, university communities must form a common front against the most reprehensible forces in society and refuse to bow to their pressure, intimidation, and threats. Only then will universities stand any chance of survival.”
Similarly, the Drexel University also gave a statement with a farewell message on the same day as Ciccariello-Maher’s resignation, calling him “an outstanding classroom teacher with significant scholarly contributions… to the field of political thoughts.”
The politics professor had been tweeting since October 2nd and had blamed the ‘white’ for the Las Vegas Shootings, which had left 58 dead and 546 injured in what is to be the worst shooting incident in America’s history.
“White people and men are told that they are entitled to everything,” he had tweeted at the time. “This is what happens when they don’t get what they want.”
The University of Drexel had also launched a detailed investigation into the tweets as they went forth to put him on administrative leave. However, it had then claimed that the university has banned the professor from the campus for his safety, on accounts of the death threats he was receiving. The suspension, however, was severely criticized by American Association of University Professors, who said that the suspension was ‘problematic.’
Professor’s tweet became the center of media’s attention in winters of 2016, as he said that “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.”
Earlier in 2017, he again became the center of attention and criticism as he tweeted that he was disgusted to see a passenger on the plane to give up his seat for a soldier. He wrote, “Some guy gave up his first class seat for a uniformed soldier. People are thanking him. I’m trying not to vomit or yell about Mosul.”
Hemispheric Institute – the university, where Cicariello-Maher is now working, is an established institute for past 20 years and is a “collaborative, multilingual, and interdisciplinary consortium…working at the intersection of scholarship, artistic expression, and politics,” its Facebook page reads. The organization further “explores embodied practice—performance—as a vehicle for the creation of new meaning and the transmission of cultural values, memory, and identity.”
