Carnegie Mellon University professor Uju Anya, who has a history of social media controversies, is on a voluntary sabbatical while the school reviews what it referred to as her “hostile and threatening” social media posts.
“Dr. Uju Anya is currently on voluntary professional leave from the university and is not teaching courses on our campus this academic year,” CMU announced in a Friday X post.
“We are deeply concerned by recent hostile and threatening social media posts by Dr. Anya and are reviewing this matter closely,” Carnegie Mellon added.
In a follow-up post, the school said, “To be clear: These posts incorrectly imply our university’s endorsement and are contrary to our community standards and values as well as our commitment to fostering a safe, respectful and welcoming campus community.”
Anya — an associate professor of Second Language Acquisition — is facing backlash after an X user shared screenshots of a 2021 exchange they had, in which the professor purportedly wrote, “Die first, white man.”
The exchange began after the X user, @TheWuhanClan, replied to a February 17, 2021 post in which Anya wrote, “Rush Limbaugh finally did something positive in life by dropping dead. Good Riddance to bad rubbish.”
“Weird how you only celebrate the deaths of white people. Why is that?” the X user replied, to which the professor responded by writing, “Die first, white man, then ask yourself why I’m dancing.”
Recently, Anya also posted on the one-year anniversary of Turning Point USA founder and conservative icon Charlie Kirk’s assassination, ghoulishly referring to his murder as “Kirkmas,” according to a report by TribLIVE.
In 2024, Anya reacted to the assassination attempt against President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, by claiming, “It was staged,” the outlet also noted.
The professor’s X account has since been deactivated or removed from the platform.
Anya is “a scholar of language learning and Black experiences in multilingualism,” who examines linguistics issues “with a focus on how race, gender, sexual and social class identities intersect,” according to the university’s website.
The professor also authored a book, titled, “Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil.”
As Breitbart News reported, Anya is no stranger to controversy stemming from her own behavior on social media.
In 2022, she reacted to the news of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II suffering from poor health shortly before her death by calling her a “wretched woman” and a “genocidal colonizer” who is “the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire,” adding, “May her pain be excruciating.”
“We do not condone the offensive and objectionable messages posted by Uju Anya today on her personal social media account,” a Carnegie Mellon spokesperson told Breitbart News at the time.
Thousands of university professors, however, came out in support of Anya by doubling down on the professor’s comments, bizarrely claiming that Queen Elizabeth II had sat “on a throne of Indigenous and Black blood, embedded in the overall legacy of the British monarchy.”
Alana Mastrangelo-Wrask is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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