Hundreds of lecturers and college students signed a petition defending a Carnegie Mellon College professor who wished Queen Elizabeth an “excruciating” death hours earlier than she handed away final week.
Prof. Uju Anya, a Nigerian-American language professor, tweeted Thursday that “the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is lastly dying.”
“Could her ache be excruciating,” Anya added, drawing a backlash from critics together with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The petition defending Anya, which had been signed almost 4,000 instances as of Monday afternoon, defends her by saying that Queen Elizabeth II was “actually her colonizer.”
CMU has sought to distance itself from Anya, releasing a press release Thursday calling her tweets “offensive and objectionable.”
“Free expression is core to the mission of upper training, nevertheless, the views she shared completely don’t symbolize the values of the establishment, nor the requirements of discourse we search to foster,” the Pittsburgh college stated.
The Pittsburgh school has not stated whether or not it’ll sever ties with Anya.
The petition defending Anya criticizes CMU’s assertion as “unacceptable,” “dehumanizing” and “deplorable.”
It additionally claims that earlier donations Bezos has made to CMU could have influenced the college’s response to the controversy.
“CMU had a selection and their response was a deliberate betrayal in opposition to one in all their very own extremely regarded and revered students,” the petition reads. “It has additional uncovered her to threats of violence.”
“Professor Anya’s Twitter clearly states: ‘Views are mine,’” the petition provides. “But her establishment took up the cost to admonish a Black girl professor, calling her response to her lived experiences of the actual and tangible impacts of colonialism and white supremacy, ‘offensive and objectionable.’”
“We name on universities to cease being reactive when problems with structural oppression are referred to as to their consideration and take critically its impacts on workers, school, college students and households,” it reads.
Anya and CMU didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
