A chemistry professor agreed to resign after allegations that he posed as an immigrant woman of color on Twitter, reports WKRG.
The professor, who was not identified in the current statement from the school, was accused of posing as an immigrant woman on Twitter last year. His own colleagues started making connections between his posts and the ones posted by Science Femme who was supposedly an immigrant woman of color.
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“While we are limited in what we can say in order to protect the privacy of all involved, we can share that the faculty member chose to resign when the university concluded that the conduct exhibited was not consistent with the university’s values and our expectation that every faculty member contribute to a professional academic environment free of intimidation and harassment,” University of New Hampshire president James Dean, Jr. wrote in a statement.
Observers of the fake Twitter account say that the professor used his fraudulent identity to attack women of color who disagreed with posts that were critical of BLM and efforts to make the university and the STEM field more diverse.
For those impacted by the fake account, the resignation meant that someone else has learned that racism can be costly.
“Pretending to be a woman on the internet explicitly to bully, shame, harass and create toxic spaces against POC deserves heavy consequences,” Michigan State plant biology grad student Toby SantaMaria, who was harassed online by the fake immigrant woman’s followers, told WKRG. “It deserves heavy consequences because it shows a deep-seated bias against historically excluded groups. If you are a professor, teaching POC, that kind of racism and misogyny is unacceptable.”
As reported by theGrio, the professor was initially identified as Craig Champman and was exposed via a Reddit thread by his own colleagues who posted the tweets from the alleged immigrant with the tweets from his personal account.
In October, Glen Miller, the head of the chemistry department at the University of New Hampshire confirmed that Chapman acknowledged his ownership of both accounts.
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“The fake Twitter account was in fact set up and run by (the professor,” Miller said in an email to faculty. “There were a large number of things written by (the professor) that ranged from unfortunate to hurtful to deeply offensive.”
Miller concluded:
“As I mentioned, I spoke to (the professor), twice actually. (The professor) is embarrassed and overwhelmed and shell shocked. He fears that this could be the end of his academic year.”
Instead, it appears to be the end of his academic career, at least at the University of New Hampshire.
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