Trump-Supporting Student Claims Columbia Prof Told Him to Drop Dead

Trump-Supporting Student Claims Columbia Prof Told Him to Drop Dead

This exchange allegedly took place on social media.

Campus Reform reports:

Trump-supporting student says Columbia prof told him to ‘drop dead’

Columbia University is facing backlash after a professor told a student to “drop dead” in a heated Facebook exchange.

The student, Gabriel Montalvo, attends a different university but sent an email Tuesday to Columbia with screenshots of expletives the professor directed at him on the social media site.

Jeffrey Lax, deputy chair of Columbia’s political science department, sought out Montalvo in the comments section of a cartoon that criticized President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. He accused the president of “murdering his own people,” calling Montalvo a “neo-Nazi enabler” and a “neo-Nazi murderer lover” for defending Trump’s actions during the pandemic.

In another comment, the professor claimed that supporters of the president “always strut around with neo-Nazi armbands.”

“How stupid or racist or evil do you have to be to defend POTUS at this point…” Lax added.

When Montalvo objected to his accusations, Lax told him to “drop dead.”

“Rather than having a discussion, you would rather let me die?” Montalvo wrote. He called it “ironic” that Lax is the “most educated person” on the Facebook thread, yet resorts to “playground insults.” But Lax responded that he is “too educated” to think that Montalvo is “honest” in his pro-Trump convictions, thus ending their debate.

In its Rules of University Conduct, Columbia affirms its support for the First Amendment, recognizing “only two kinds of limitations on the right of freedom of expression.” This includes speech that “constitutes a genuine threat of harassment, that unjustifiably invades an individual’s privacy, or that falsely defames a specific individual.”

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