A far-left activist professor has been fired from her third teaching gig in less than a year after a pattern of extreme behavior — this time for making Jewish students uncomfortable with comments about “Zionists.”
Shellyne Rodriguez first made headlines in May 2023 when she hurled expletives at pro-life students and vandalized their anti-abortion display at Manhattan’s Hunter College, where she worked as an adjunct professor at the time.
The 47-year-old educator was reprimanded by the taxpayer-funded CUNY (City University of New York) institution, but wasn’t fired until she threatened a reporter with a machete when questioned about the incident.
Shocking video captured by the New York Post shows Rodriguez holding a large blade to the throat of one of their reporters who showed up to her New York City apartment to ask about her pro-abortion freakout.
“Get the fuck away from my door, or I’m gonna chop you up with this machete!” she yelled.
Dashboard camera footage further shows the disgraced professor chasing the Post‘s reporter and cameraman even after they had left her building, leading to her running after the men with the machete and kicking one of them.
Rodriguez was then finally fired by Hunter College, as well as CUNY’s School of Visual Arts.
She pleaded guilty to harassment and menacing, according to the Bronx District Attorney’s Office.
“Under the terms of a conditional plea agreement, she must complete a therapy program and, if successful, can withdraw the misdemeanor plea and will be sentenced on the violation to a conditional discharge,” the Post reported.
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However, that didn’t stop her from soon obtaining another job at Cooper Union, a private art and science college in Lower Manhattan.
Cooper Union Students for Justice in Palestine shared a January 23 email from Rodriguez soon after her spring semester sculpture class kicked off, sharing the news that she had been fired once again.
“Cooper Union has fired me because of a social media post I made about ‘Zionists,’” the troubled educator wrote in a memo to students.
“This is fascism,” she added. “Y’all are learning about it in real time.”
A Cooper Union spokeswoman told the Post she was unable to comment on personnel matters, but the outlet confirmed Rodriguez had been removed from the college’s faculty page.
It is unclear which specific comments made by Rodriguez got her fired, but a representative for Jewish CUNY students called them “despicable.”
“Jewish students at Cooper Union are very relieved that they fired her,” said Jeffrey Lax, a CUNY law professor and cofounder of Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY, an organization that advocates “against the systemic exclusion and discrimination against Zionist, Observant, and outward Jews.”
“Her comments were really despicable,” he said, referring to a January CUNY for Palestine panel during which Rodriguez encouraged the use of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against landlords and businesses with ties to Israel.
Critics said she was spewing antisemitic tropes with her inflammatory statements.
“Normally, I would say I commend the university for taking action against this professor but in this case, how can I possibly say that?” Lax continued. “She did something far worse before they hired her. I mean, she held a knife to a reporter’s neck. They’re not to be commended, they should be ashamed of themselves.”
The school’s pro-Palestinian student group slammed the professor’s termination as “an intense escalation of repression” that “must be resisted.”
Rodriguez’s latest firing comes just a few months after Jewish Cooper Union students were forced to barricade themselves in the elite college’s library to escape pro-Palestinian protesters.