HollyMatkinPhiladelphia, PA – The Drexel University professor who claimed that white people who carry out mass killings do so because of the shooters’ “whiteness,” announced on Thursday that he will be leaving his tenured position at the end of the year.
In a Tweet, George Ciccariello-Maher, an associate professor of politics and global studies, blamed the “racist Right” for his departure, and claimed that his “situation has become unsustainable” after “nearly a year of harassment.”
“We are at war, and academia is a crucial front in that war,” he wrote in his Tuesday statement. “This is why the Right is targeting campuses with thinly veiled provocations disguised as free speech. My case and many others show just how cynical such appeals are, and how little the Right cares about academic freedom.”
Ciccariello-Maher also urged tenured faculty members to “defend the rights of all faculty” in order to build campus solidarity.
“We need to defend our place in academia against assault from the racist Right,” he said. “The forces of resurgent white supremacy have tasted blood and are howling for more.”
He then addressed the university’s students.
“In the face of aggression from the racist Right and impending global catastrophe, we must defend…the most vulnerable among us…by making our campuses unsafe spaces for white supremacists.”
The self-victimizing professor was already banned from the university campus, following a series of offensive and controversial statements he made over the past year, Inside Higher Ed reported.
Ciccariello-Maher was only allowed to teach his class remotely via video conference – a move he claimed was for his own safety, CNN reported.
His offensive views became more widely known after he tweeted, “All I want for Christmas is white genocide,” on Christmas Eve, 2016.
It seemed that he may have been using sarcasm until he tweeted to clarify, saying, “To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the Haitian Revolution, that was a good thing indeed.”
In March, Ciccariello-Maher said that seeing somebody give up their first-class plane seat for a soldier made him want to vomit.
Finally, in October, he blamed “Trumpism,” “whiteness,” and the “narrative of white victimization” for the Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 58 concertgoers and injured 500 others.
“Whiteness is never seen as a cause, in and of itself, of these kinds of massacres, of other forms of violence,” Ciccariello-Maher told Democracy Now!, “Whiteness is a structure of privilege and it’s a structure of power, and a structure that, when it feels threatened, you know, lashes out.”
Ciccariello-Maher’s last day with Drexel will be Dec. 31.
“Associate Professor George Ciccariello-Maher has decided to resign his employment,” the university said in a statement, according to Inside Higher Ed. “Drexel University wishes Professor Ciccariello-Maher well in his future pursuits.”