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Drexel Prof Resigns One Year After "White Genocide" Tweet

Drexel Prof Resigns One Year After "White Genocide" Tweet
1/2/2018
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Susan Dutca-Lovell

A Drexel University Professor who tweeted, "All I want for Christmas is white genocide," recently resigned after a year of "enduring unrelenting harassment and death threats for his controversial tweets." According to Professor Ciccariello-Maher, the tweet was meant to be satirical, stating that white genocide is an "imaginary concept" used by the far right to scare white people.

Professor Ciccariello-Maher made headlines again in April after he criticized someone on Twitter for giving up their first-class seat on a plane to a uniformed soldier - citing Mosul, which was an airstrike by U.S. forces and "could potentially rank [as] one of the most devastating attacks on civilians by American forces in more than two decades." In October, he composed a series of tweets that "suggested the Las Vegas shooting, which killed at least 59 people and injured more than 500 others, was brought on by the 'narrative of white victimization.'" His tweet "It's the white supremacist patriarchy, stupid" was another inflammatory comment on the Vegas shooting that may have furthered his ultimate departure from Drexel. The university placed him on administrative leave following the aforementioned and other tweets about the Las Vegas shooting and has sought to distance itself from his positions.

Ciccariello-Maher resigned from Drexel University effective December 31 after receiving countless harassment, death threats and threats of violence directed against him and his family. "Staying at Drexel in the eye of this storm has become detrimental to my own writing, speaking and organizing," he claimed. Ciccariello-Maher, a tenured professor, went on to note the "limits of tenure protections," claiming that "tenure is a crucial buffer against those who would use money to dictate the content of higher education. But in a neoliberal academy, such protections are far from absolute."

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