White Professor Quits After Impersonating a Woman of Color on Twitter
Written by SOURCE on February 14, 2021
A chemistry professor working at the University of New Hampshire resigned on Friday after being investigated for impersonating an immigrant woman of color on Twitter to post racist and sexist tweets.
We don’t know the name of the offending party, but as the Associated Press reports, his resignation followed the conclusion of a four-month investigation by the school. The investigation was conducted following accusations that the white, male professor created the fake Twitter account to share racist, sexist, and transphobic posts.
While the findings of the investigation have not been publicly released, in a letter regarding the professor’s resignation, University President James Dean Jr. said the university concluded that his conduct was “not consistent” with the university’s values and expectations.
“While we are limited in what we can say in order to protect the privacy of all involved, we can share that the faculty member chose to resign when the university concluded that the conduct exhibited was not consistent with the university’s values and our expectation that every faculty member contribute to a professional academic environment free of intimidation and harassment,” he added.
The professor reportedly used the account to bully and target people aspiring to have more diversity in fields like mathematics, engineering, and technology, while using a fake immigrant background. He also discouraged conversations about racial justice following the murder of George Floyd. Most of his targets were, surprise surprise, women of color.
“Pretending to be a woman on the internet explicitly to bully, shame, harass, and create toxic spaces against POC deserves heavy consequences,” Toby SantaMaria, a graduate student at Michigan State who was attacked online by the professor, told AP. The account was taken down late last year.
“It deserves heavy consequences because it shows a deep seated bias against historically excluded groups,” they added. “If you are a professor, teaching POC, that kind of racism and misogyny is unacceptable.”
