A Florida professor has reportedly been fired after students noticed a "college" porn bookmark during a Zoom call.
According to the student newspaper The Miami Hurricane, Professor Zhang did not realize what he'd done at the time, but addressed the incident in another seminar, saying: "I don't know how it happened. I didn't see it, I'm pretty sure everybody else did… My apologies to the class."
The professor then stated that he was "investigating" the incident, and asked students not to share screenshots and videos of it online, but by this point, it had been widely circulated.
He went onto teach a few more classes before he stopped turning up to teach.
This politician was forced to resign after throwing a cat during a Zoom call:In a statement, the University of Miami confirmed that the professor was no longer employed by them: "The University of Miami aggressively investigates all complaints of inappropriate behavior or sexual harassment."
"After receiving a complaint through the University's ethics hotline, the incident was investigated by the Office of the Provost, Title IX investigator and Miami Herbert Business School."
A now-deleted TikTok of the incident was posted, and the student who uploaded it has since expressed regret that her professor has lost his position, saying: "I felt bad about the attention it was getting. I didn't want him to lose his job. I thought he would be fine. I felt really bad for him."
Freshman student Ethan Hartz, who saw the bookmark of the adult content, said: "I had friends sharing it with me from other schools who saw it. [My] first thought was this is super funny. I felt guilty afterwards for even sharing it with my close friends."
However, a petition on Change.org has now been created to have the professor reinstated, and at the time of writing, it has garnered 1,164 signatures.
It reads: "People make mistakes, are sexual beings, and should not be fired when no true porn was shared. We no longer live in the 18th century and individuals are allowed to have a personal, sexual life. This was obviously a mistake."
"It is a double standard to protect the atrocities that happen in the student body (esp Greek life) and cover them while a professor who has bills to pay as an ‘actual adult’. Firing from the position was not the appropriate action and should have been taken with less dramatic disciplinary action. It is also against current state laws to record lectures without the permission of professors."
According to NBC, as per Professor Zhang's online CV, prior to working at the University of Miami, he was a business school lecturer at the Coral Gables, Florida since August 2019, having previously worked at both the University of Oregon and Florida International University.
