by Frank Holmes, reporter
Everyone has to bow to reality at some point — even university professors and administrators, whose Ivory Tower usually keeps them far away from inconvenient things like facts and reality.
But even a far-Left, private arts college in New York City has had a close shave with the truth after they hired a professor with a history of violently threatening people with a machete.
Shellyne Rodriguez has gotten the axe once again — this time for hate speech, she complained.
“Cooper Union has fired me because of a social media post I made about ‘Zionists,'” she said in an Instagram post. While some use the word “Zionist” to criticize Israeli expansionism, anti-Semites apply the term to all Jews.
It’s not totally clear which hate-filled, Jew-bashing screed got Rodriguez fired. But she recently posted an edited flier of a campus pro-Israel rally covered with cockroaches.
“Look at this dirty f***ing roach former bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr. a Zionist lapdog,” she wrote of the Born Again, conservative, pro-life, pro-family Democrat.
“Curious how Rodriguez was hired in the 1st place after being fired from (Hunter College) and (CUNY’s School of Arts) after threatening, then chasing a reporter with a machete,” wrote Canary Mission, a group dedicated to exposing anti-Semitism on campus.
It’s not surprising she would make cutting comments about her political opponents; she has a long history of words, and deeds, that threaten conservatives.
The Horn told you about Rodriguez’s machete-wielding meltdown last May.
On May 2, Rodriguez threw a tantrum after she saw pro-life students expressing their free-speech rights at Hunter College, a part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system. “You’re not educating s**t. This is f**king propaganda,” she said.
Then she yelled, “F**k this sh**t!” and tossed the students’ pro-life materials and literature, twice.
PROFESSOR GONE WILD: Pro-abortion professor Shellyne Rodriquez curses at pro-life students and vandalizes table at Hunter College. pic.twitter.com/QNspuXB4KK
— Students for Life of America | Pro-Life Gen (@StudentsforLife) May 17, 2023
Rodriguez’s small-but-violent outburst got her placed on watch but not fired.
That didn’t happen until a New York Post reporter showed up at her apartment for a follow-up story.
“Get the f**k away from my door, or I’m gonna chop you up with this machete!” Rodriguez screamed at him.
Then she opened the door and held a machete to his neck and said, “Get the f**k away from my door! Get the f**k away from my door!”
The two people who showed up at her door left, but Rodriguez followed them down to their vehicle and chased him around the block!
“If I see you on this block one more f**king time, you’re gonna—” she said, stopping just before she verbally threatened him…but threatening to behead him by holding a machete to his throat already counts.
She reportedly stopped chasing the reporter only after kicking him in the legs.
Shellyne Rodriguez claims she was dumped as an instructor @cooperunion for a post about "Zionists." Curious how Rodriguez was hired in the 1st place after being fired from @Hunter_College & @SVA_News after threatening, then chasing a reporter with a machete.… pic.twitter.com/0xhvFNuimb
— Canary Mission (@canarymission) January 30, 2024
Hunter College fired her immediately…but the School of Visual Arts in Chelsea launched a formal investigation before booting the bellicose, self-described “black Marxist.”
Somehow, she got hired by The Cooper Union, a private arts-focused college in Manhattan.
Then she got fired, again.
On her way out the door, she gave a bizarre encouragement for her students to follow in her currently unemployed footsteps: “Don’t bite your tongue, and drink plenty of water!” she wrote.
She concluded the email with the slang term “Pa’lante!”—a contraction of the Spanish phrase “para adelante,” which means roughly “onward!” or “go for it.” It’s a slang term that reportedly makes Spanish teachers “cringe.”
Onward to the unemployment line!
Her words excited the pro-Palestinian student group, Students for Justice in Palestine, which said the school “wrongfully terminated a valued educator who is indispensable to the community and the academic livelihood of students,” because she speaks out against “genocide and settler-colonial violence.”
Firing her represented an “intense escalation of McCarthyist repression,” said the chapter of SJP.
Jewish students, who wanted her fired, couldn’t muster the strength to praise the administrators, since they were too perplexed how she ever got hired in the first place.
“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! She held a knife to a reporter’s neck,” said Jeff Lax of Students Alumni and Faculty for Equality at CUNY (S.A.F.E. CUNY).
“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! She held a knife to a reporter’s neck.”
—@_SAFECAMPUS's Jeff Lax
https://t.co/49YYh8Q3DI— SAFE CUNY (@SAFECUNY) February 4, 2024
Professor Rodriguez “is an example of what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion really means,” outspoken conservative commentator Michael Savage told Newsmax.
She’s a radical, Marxism-spouting, DEI-embracing, CRT-loving woman who apparently threatened to behead people online, hates free speech and life at all stages, and used the crudest anti-Semitic slurs ever dreamt up by the Nazis.
She has no business teaching young people. Thankfully, for the moment, she’s not in the teaching business. But how long will it be before she fails upward again?
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”