Woke leftists spot hatred everywhere except in their own minds, where it festers most conspicuously. Notwithstanding their cognitive dissonance and relentless screeching about oppression, they in fact constitute modern society’s most privileged people.
At least now we know, however, that even that kind of privilege has its limits.
According to the New York Post, Shellyne Rodriguez — the “nutty professor” who held a machete to a Post reporter’s neck in May 2023 — has once again lost a teaching job due to reprehensible behavior unworthy of any human being, let alone an educator.
Nutty NYC professor Shellyne Rodriguez, who held machete to Post reporter’s neck, fired from Cooper Union over anti-Israel rants https://t.co/OVdi6fWroM
— Eric Leibman (@eric_leibman) February 4, 2024
In a Jan. 23 email to students, the 47-year-old art professor offered an explanation of her latest sacking.
“Cooper Union has fired me because of a social media post I made about ‘Zionists,’” Rodriguez wrote.
“This is fascism,” she added. “Y’all are learning about it in real time.”
Officials at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art — an elite private school in Manhattan — did not comment on their exact reason for dismissing Rodriguez.
Does Rodriguez belong in a classroom?
In fact, they had plenty of good reasons. And those reasons had existed for a long time.
For instance, the Post story included a screenshot purportedly taken from Rodriguez’s Instagram account. Apparently, the professor had digitally superimposed cockroaches onto a “Pro Israel Action” event flyer that featured five local speakers.
“Look at this dirty f***ing roach former bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr. a Zionist lapdog,” Rodriguez wrote of former Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr., one of the event’s scheduled speakers.
For anyone with a working knowledge of 20th-century history, the roach had clear connotations.
“People are so bothered by the way we’re treating the Jews. They can’t understand it, because [Jews] are God’s creatures. But cockroaches are also God’s creatures, and we destroy them,” one little German girl wrote to the Nazi propaganda paper Der Sturmer.
The problem for Cooper Union? The “Pro Israel Action” event occurred on Oct. 19. That means that Rodriguez kept her teaching job for three months after her Israel-cockroaches post on Instagram.
The New York Post noted, however, that “in January Rodriguez participated in a [City University of New York] for Palestine panel and encouraged protesting landlords and business people with ties to Israel.”
If we can infer anything from the timing of her dismissal, then it would appear — again, based on evidence — that Cooper Union might have fired Rodriguez not for adding Nazi-inspired cockroaches to a pro-Israel flyer but for “protesting landlords and business people with ties to Israel.”
Ironically and predictably, therefore, officials at Cooper Union emerged from this calamity looking almost as bad as Rodriguez. If they fired her for encouraging protests against wealthy people, then they got it wrong. Like it or not, she had a right to do that. Instead, they should have fired her in October.
Or, better yet, they should have never crossed paths with this woman in the first place. She had no business being within a hundred miles of any teaching job.
Thus, Cooper Union officials deserve no credit for their actions.
Jeffrey Lax, a CUNY law professor and co-founder of the Jewish-advocacy group Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY, agreed.
“Normally, I would say I commend the university for taking action against this professor but in this case, how can I possibly say that? She did something far worse before they hired her. I mean, she held a knife to a reporter’s neck,” Lax said, adding that university officials “should be ashamed of themselves.”
Indeed, based on Rodriguez’s recent history, some might find it impossible to believe that she landed another teaching job. But those people do not understand the privilege conferred upon miscreants who scream “fascism!”
In May, a video of Rodriguez holding a machete to the neck of Post reporter Reuven Fenton went viral. Rodriguez made profanity-laced threats against Fenton and his photographer as she chased them outside her apartment building and onto the street while still brandishing the weapon.
Fenton and his photographer had knocked on Rodriguez’s apartment door to ask her about an earlier viral video in which a camera captured her harassing and verbally abusing two pro-life students at Hunter College in New York City, where she taught art.
Hunter College officials immediately condemned and fired the deranged Rodriguez for her machete-wielding antics.
Imagine the surprise, therefore — well, at least among those unfamiliar with leftist academia — when Cooper Union brought her aboard for the fall semester.
On the whole, Rodriguez embodies the miracle of modern wokeness. While accusing others of hatred, she hates with an intensity few could match. Moreover, she leverages that hatred into a privilege that only she and others like her enjoy.
Not even Nazi-inspired cockroaches could deprive her of that privilege. By all appearances, it took annoying the wrong rich people to finally bring her privileged career to an end.
