George Ciccariello-Maher, the nation’s most beloved communist professor who has made such erudite statements as “all I want for Christmas is white genocide” and the Las Vegas massacre “is what happens when [white people] don’t get what they want,” is no longer teaching at Drexel University.
The school placed the tenured politics professor on leave in October after he blamed the Las Vegas massacre on “white supremacist patriarchy,” citing safety concerns and threats the professor had received. Drexel let him continue teaching a couple weeks later, but only remotely.
Just days before the new year, Ciccariello-Maher announced he won’t work at Drexel in 2018. The former professor said “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.”
Wow, this guy’s a spin master. No one condones threats, of course, but right-wing, white supremacist media outlets? What’s funny about Ciccariello’s coverage is that a lot of it was just “professor said X.” There’s no commentary needed for people to see how crazy it is for the former professor to blame mass murder on whiteness.
Anyways, at the end of the day, the former professor is a hypocrite. After Drexel kicked him off campus, he positioned himself as a champion for academic freedom. But when speaking with Tucker Carlson, he suggested that opinions needed the blessing of academic peer review to receive the protections of academic freedom.
While he’s no longer a professor, George kicked off the New Year by announcing that he’d be joining the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University as a visiting scholar. The institute apparently meshes scholarship, politics, and artistic expression together to investigate “embodied practice—performance—as a vehicle for the creation of new meaning and the transmission of cultural values, memory, and identity.” Drexel, meanwhile, praised George for being an “outstanding classroom teacher.”
