Columbia professor calls Trump supporting student a ‘neo-nazi’
By Jon Levine
New York Post
May 18, 2020
So much for the marketplace of ideas.
A Columbia University professor decided to take the low road during a heated Facebook argument with a student in April. Jeffrey Lax, deputy chair of Columbia’s Political Science department, told the student, who attends a different university, to “drop dead” and called him a “neo-nazi murderer-lover” after he defended President Trump’s handing of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The student, Gabriel Montalvo, shared screenshots of Lax’s Facebook comments on a Twitter post on April 6 that has largely escaped media attention until now.
“I never met Jeffrey Lax in my life. I commented on a political cartoon, where I defended President Trump on how he’s handled the pandemic, that an old high school teacher posted on Facebook,” Montalvo, 21, told The Post. “Mr. Lax then attacked me … He responded very belligerently and at the end of his comment he asked me, “Why don’t you just drop dead, you Neo-Nazi enabler.”
“Professors and higher education establishments should be examples of the exchange of civil discussion, not cyber harassment & perverting a historic tragedy to push an agenda,” Montalvo added in his tweet.
Montalvo, a student at CUNY Queensborough Community College, said he had lodged a formal complaint with the university via email but had not heard back. A rep for Columbia President Lee Bollinger told him they would review the matter.
Lax has been on faculty as a professor at Columbia since 2004 after a stint at University of California, San Diego, according to his resume. Former students have also spoken out anonymously via the website “RateMyProfessor” — where Lax holds a 1.3 out of 5 star average from three reviewers who all rated him as “awful.”
“This was the absolute worst professor that I have ever had,” wrote one reviewer on Sept. 20, 2019. “He digresses constantly and no one could grasp what he was talking about. I would avoid him at all costs.”
Lax did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Post. Reps for Columbia declined to comment.
Some professors substitute being "edgy" (arrogant, stupid and uninformed) for having actual knowledge of the subject and skill at teaching. Sometimes I think that there should be a mechanism for students to remove incompetent instructors by vote. If 85% plus of your actual students believe you are not fit to teach, you are gone.
ReplyDelete