Carnegie Mellon University has disowned Professor Uju Anya over comments on Twitter showing bitterness to Queen Elizabeth.
Before the passing of the Queen was announced on Thursday, Anya, who teaches Modern Languages in the US University, claimed that the British Monarch supervised colonisation and endorsed genoside.
Anya in her tweet wished the Queen “an agonizingly painful death like the one she caused for millions of people.”
“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”
Twitter took down the tweet saying that “wishing or hoping someone experiences physical harm,” violated its rules.
But it continued to generate an avalanche of criticisms, including from Carnegie Mellon University, where Anya teaches applied linguistics.
“We do not condone the offensive and objectionable messages posted by Uju Anya today on her personal social media account. Freedom of expression is core to the mission of higher education, however, the views she shared absolutely do not represent the values of the institution, nor the standards of discourse we seek to foster,” Carnegie Mellon University tweeted Thursday.
Anya’s attack on Queen Elizabeth was part of her deep seated and often expressed resentment over the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970). An estimated two million people were believed killed by the Nigerian troops during an attempt by Anya’s Igbo ethnic group to secede from Nigeria barely seven years after independence.
The professor, who is of Igbo origin in eastern Nigeria, has gained Twitter notoriety for whipping up ethnic sentiment, especially against the Hausa and Yoruba population.
