The college professor fired in May 2023 after cursing out a group students handing out of anti-abortion information at CUNY’s Hunter College, where she was teaching art at the time, then treating a reporter with a machete in hallway of her Bronx apartment now appears to have been fired from Copper Union College in Manhattan.
Cooper Union instructor Shellyne Rodriguez has been ousted amidst the fallout over her social media activity.
Rodriguez’s recent dismissal is said to be linked to anti-Zionist sentiments expressed online.
Rodriguez, 47, told students in an email obtained by the New York Post she was fired last week.
“In real time, this is fascism,” Rodriguez wrote.
The news gained wider attention when posted on Instagram by the Cooper Union Students for Justice in Palestine.
A spokeswoman for the East Village-based institution stopped short of details, citing a policy against discussing personnel specifics. Nonetheless, Rodriguez’s name has indeed vanished from the list of Cooper Union adjuncts.
In January 2021, Rodriguez joined a panel that urged protest actions aimed at those with Israel affiliations, which resulted in allegations of antisemitism.
Photographs and social media screenshots depict Rodriguez using provocative imagery while attacking former Bronx Borough President Rubén Díaz Jr. as a “dirty f—ing roach” and a “Zionist lapdog.”