Cooper Union students on Thursday said they’re shocked the school hired a controversial professor who once threatened to “chop” a Post reporter with a machete.
“Oh s–t! That’s scary,” a student at the Manhattan college told The Post. “I don’t think it’s ok. When you are a student you’d want to feel safe. I would not feel safe with that person being my professor.”
Another student, a 19-year-old art major, called professor Shellyne Rodriguez’s new gig “crazy.”
“I’m wondering how they interview new professors,” the student said. “Do they look at their background? No. I don’t think such a person should be here.”
A second-year architecture student at Cooper Union said she wasn’t giving a reporter her name because “I don’t want her coming after me.”
Rodriguez, 46, was fired from her job as an adjunct professor at Hunter College and the School of Visual Arts after she was caught on video threatening veteran Post reporter Reuven Fenton on May 23.
Fenton knocked on the door of the unhinged educator’s Bronx apartment to ask her about an earlier video that showed her flipping out on students at Hunter who were displaying anti-abortion materials.
Rodriguez lunged out of the apartment with a machete, putting it to Fenton’s neck and threatening to “chop you up with this machete” before retreating back inside.
She then followed the reporter and a photographer out onto the street, where she is seen on video chasing the news crew while still wildly waving the weapon.
Rodriguez was fired from her teaching gig and charged with harassment — before getting a new job to teach a sculpture class at Cooper Union for the fall semester.
One student at the East Village school said some on campus thought hiring Rodriguez was “kind of cool” and that the embattled professor was “a badass.”
“I don’t think it poses a problem here and people are not talking about it that much,” she said. “I think it’s the outside obsession.”
But classmates weren’t so sure.
“I think that someone who acts irrational like that would have the same mentality in class,” an art major at the college said. “I will definitely be worried.”
Officials at Cooper Union did not respond to requests for comment.
