A 55-year-old professor from North Carolina has been found dead only a week before he was scheduled to take early retirement.
The University of North Carolina-Wilmington professor, Mike Adams, recently announced his retirement amid backlash over his tweets, in which he called the governor of the state ‘Massa Cooper’ and compared Covid-19 restrictions to living in a ‘slave state.’
Police officers performing a wellness check at his home found his lifeless body but did not release further details about his death.
The professor had a history of making racist and misogynistic remarks on social media. His death comes after the university announced his early retirement.
Adams, who reached more than $500K settlement with UNCW for lost retirement benefits and salary, once mocked students who accused him of harassing them as ‘weak pansies’ and referred to transgender as ‘mentally ill.’
The tenured criminology professor sparked outrage among faculty and students after he shared controversial posts on Twitter.
“Don’t shut down the universities. Shut down the non essential majors. Like Women’s Studies,” he wrote on May 28.
On May 29, he tweeted: “This evening I ate pizza and drank beer with six guys at a six seat table top. I almost felt like a free man who was not living in the slave state of North Carolina. Massa Cooper, let my people go!”
UNCW denounced his remarks as ‘inexcusable’ and ‘vile.’
The professor had tried to defend his tweets to WECT and explained that the analogy he used was to do with the state governor’s oppression during the shutdown. But his remarks prompted two petitions to have him fired from his job.
On June 1, the university released a statement, which read: “We are listening to the outrage being expressed regarding the vile and inexcusable comments made by a UNCW faculty member.
“However, we are not just listening; we can confirm we are very carefully and assertively reviewing our options in terms of how to proceed. We are not able to comment further at this time, as this is a personnel matte.”
In 2016, Adams also became a target of another petition after he said that gay marriage was bad as rape and a Muslim student was a terrorist. The Change.org petition claimed the professor had a ‘spewing misogynistic, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic, racist rhetoric.’
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Replaced!