New York University canceled a class to be taught by former New Yorker fact-checker Talia Lavin because not enough students seemed interested.
Two students had signed up to take the class when NYU pulled it, according to The Wrap. Lavin was asked to teach the elective, called “Reporting on the Far Right,” because of her experience on the subject.
“Canceling the class had nothing to do with Talia’s writings, tweets, or anything else. We canceled it because too few students enrolled,” NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute director Adam Penenberg said.
NYU appeared to take down Lavin’s biography from the school’s faculty page after canceling the class.
Lavin will likely not be invited to teach another class at NYU because her expertise is focused on the far-right, Penenberg said.
NYU fielded criticism after announcing that it had invited Lavin to teach for the school. Lavin resigned from the New Yorker after falsely claiming that a wheelchair-bound Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent had a Nazi cross tattoo. The tattoo was a Maltese cross commonly worn by veterans. Lavin later apologized for the mistake.
[Opinion: NYU’s journalism school is now hiring from the gutter]
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro criticized Lavin in April for linking his comments on the fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris with the Christchurch shooter accused of killing 51 in an attack on two New Zealand mosques.
“Ben Shapiro called Notre Dame a ‘monument to Western civilization’ and ‘Judeo-Christian heritage.’ Given the already-raging rumors about potential Muslim involvement, these tweets evoked the specter of a war between Islam and the West that is already part of numerous far-right narratives; it was also a central thread in the manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, the alleged Christchurch, New Zealand, shooter,” Lavin wrote in a piece for the Washington Post.
Shapiro called the connection “bullshit” and called for the article to be corrected.
