A video has been circulated by Students for Life of America, showing Shellyne Rodriguez, an assistant art professor at City University of New York's Hunter College, verbally attacking two pro-life students before getting physical.
The pro-life students had staged a modest display at Hunter College on May 2, with permission from the school's office of student affairs, speaking both to the humanity of the unborn and inhumanity of chemical abortion pills. In the video, Rodriguez can be heard telling the students, "You're not educating s***. This is f***ing propaganda."
Rodriguez was of the same mind as the student group CUNY for Abortion Rights, which later claimed the pro-life students were "propagating dangerous propaganda," having included "inaccurate depictions" of abortions from "unscientific sources" and dared to humanize the unborn with the aid of a plastic fetus.
After claiming that the scientific factoids shared by the pro-lifers amounted to propaganda, Rodriguez says in the video, "What are you going to do, like, anti-trans next?" A male student responds, "I mean, no, we are talking about abortion." Rodriguez then says, "This is bull****. This is violent. You're triggering my students."
The assistant professor then presumes the male pro-lifer's gender and claims, "You can't even have a f***ing baby so you don't even know what that is." Rodriguez apparently thought that the answer to hypothetical violence was real violence. In the footage, the leftist professor tosses a metal case into the female student, slams pro-life literature towards both students, then lumbers away, leaving the pro-life activists to calmly clean up her mess.
Legal scholar Jonathan Turley noted that ironically, "Rodriguez describes her work as 'depict[ing] spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.' It appears that she also specializes in erasing the views of others." A spokesman for Hunter College told Fox News Digital that the school is aware of the encounter and is "taking this matter very seriously," adding, "The provost has opened an investigation into the professors actions."
According to CUNY for Abortion Rights, Professional Staff Congress trade union members, the anti-Israeli group Palestine Solidarity Alliance, and others on campus support Rodriguez and her attack on the pro-life students.
The extremist abortion group went so far as to state, "We refuse to allow CUNY to welcome Students for Life and other far-right groups onto our campuses. We will not be persuaded by an ambiguous liberal vision of allowing 'all ideas to gain a hearing,'" adding that "in solidarity with Shellyne, we commit to disrupting, dismantling, and uprooting any of these far-right groups when they attempt to plant seeds of harm at CUNY."
Despite these leftist threats and Rodriguez's apparent antipathy for free speech, a spokesman for the school said, "Hunter College prides itself on maintaining decorum and respect for all, while encouraging the free expression of ideas. ... Students can display one side of a political issue, or more than one side. We consider our campus a vibrant marketplace of ideas."
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