Carnegie Mellon vows ‘swift action’ against professor over posts

Carnegie Mellon University said Monday it is taking “swift action” against tenured professor Uju Anya after determining that her recent social media posts violated the school’s community standards, with some colleagues reporting they now fear for their safety.

President Farnam Jahanian and Provost James H. Garrett Jr. said Ms. Anya used “expletives, racial slurs and derogatory language that demeaned, dehumanized and intimidated” while invoking her Carnegie Mellon affiliation and implying support from university colleagues.

“Carnegie Mellon University is a place where rigorous inquiry, freedom of expression and mutual respect must coexist,” their statement read, adding that Ms. Anya’s language “distracts from the seriousness and significance” of the school’s scholarship in the humanities.

The university said Ms. Anya is on voluntary professional leave through summer 2027 and is not teaching classes this academic year, though it stopped short of calling the move disciplinary.

Ms. Anya, an associate professor of second-language acquisition, wrote on X as the anniversary of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s assassination approached, “They began already, and it ain’t even Kirkmas kirk mubarak, y’all!” according to screenshots that circulated widely after her account was deleted. On Friday, she responded to a critic with another post that read, “Die first, White man, and then ask yourself why I am dancing.”

Carnegie Mellon’s faculty page describes Ms. Anya as “a scholar of language learning and Black experiences in multilingualism” whose work examines how race, gender and class intersect with language education.

The university’s student newspaper reported that the Department of Languages, Cultures and Applied Linguistics has paused conversation-group meetings and moved at least one class online, and that Dietrich College Dean Cassidy Sugimoto said faculty and staff had been doxxed and had received threatening messages. Campus police told the paper they have not identified any credible threats.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free-speech advocacy group, pushed back on the university’s response; attorney Zach Greenberg told the paper the posts do not amount to “an unprotected true threat, or another form of unprotected speech.”

The Carnegie Mellon College Republicans are demanding Ms. Anya’s termination, writing that her posts “demonstrate a clear pattern of behavior” inconsistent with the conduct expected of a professor, and pointing to a 2022 post in which she said she hoped Queen Elizabeth II’s pain would be “excruciating.”

The controversy comes amid broader debate over campus speech in the year since Kirk’s killing. A recent survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found 30% of college students believe violence is at least rarely acceptable to stop a campus speaker, down from 34% a year earlier.