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.
1 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.
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