The Fordham professor who dismissed Mollie Tibbetts, who was murdered by a killer whose immigration status is unclear, received her first truly unfavorable rating on the Rate My Professors site after briefly discussing the collegian’s murder on MSNBC. “A guest on MSNBC has apologized for downplaying the murder of Mollie Tibbetts as a ‘girl in Iowa’ that ‘Fox News is talking about,’” the Daily Mail reported on August 22, 2018. “Christina Greer admitted that she made ‘flippant’ remarks on Tuesday’s The Beat about the slain student and the allegations that she was murdered by an illegal immigrant.”
“The Fordham University professor slammed Fox for prioritizing coverage of her death over the guilty verdicts of Trump allies Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen.”
Interestingly, she started receiving truly unfavorable reviews on Rate My Professors (RMP) on August 22:
• “I’m pretty sure that she doesn’t understand the content that she is teaching;” and
• “She’s horrible!!!! Run away from her class don’t walk.”
One other poster on RMP rated her awful, as did the two critics cited above, but was considerably more measured: “Prof. Greer is not a hard professor. Participate and do well.” Prior to that date she racked up 26 favorable ratings that rated her “good,” or, more frequently, “awesome.”
By the way, The Daily Mail also reported that after Greer’s MSNBC appearance, “The clip from the show was immediately circulated online, with NRA life member Alana Mastrangelo sharing it with her 113,000 followers, complaining Greer ‘doesn’t even know her name.’” This exposure indicates that one NRA member may have more of an audience than MSNBC.
We should note that before her Twitter account went down, Greer posted an apology on it, captured by Breitbart News: “Yesterday I said something flippant that was unintended. Mollie Tibbets was a promising young woman who lost her life. My hope is that her family will find peace & justice and that her murder is not used to justify a discriminatory immigration policy.”
The RMP backlash that followed the broadcast and the controversy it engendered is also curious, indicating the students are either jumping on the bandwagon or finally feeling brave enough to come forward about their experience in the classroom when realizing they are not alone.
Professor Greer is hardly an outlier in academe. Indeed, she is considered a go-to source. According to the Women’s Media Center She Source site: “Prof. Greer’s book Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream (Oxford University Press) investigates the increasingly ethnically diverse black populations in the US from Africa and the Caribbean. She finds that both ethnicity and a shared racial identity matter and also affect the policy choices and preferences for black groups. It was the recipient of the WEB du Bois Best Book Award in 2014 given by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. She was also voted City & State’s 2014 Top 40 Under 40 Rising Stars.”
