A University of Miami professor was fired after students shared a screenshot of his screen, which included a tab with a pornographic heading.
According to the Miami Hurricane student newspaper, business analytics professor John Peng Zhang was busy teaching his class via Zoom when one of his students noticed the bookmarked tab that read “Busty College girls fu…” and said something about it, prompting the entire class to take notice.
Sadly, Zhang was too busy teaching his lesson to notice that one of his students made a comment about the tab, drawing the class’s attention to it. Within moments, students shared screenshots and videos of the professor’s apparent college girl fetish to TikTok and all over social media.
One of the videos begins zoomed in on Zhang teaching his class and then the shot pans over to the bookmark.
Within a few hours, the video was reportedly viewed over 800,000 times.
To further exacerbate the situation, the professor obviously never noticed the open tab and left it up during the following class session later that evening.
It didn’t take long before various blogs and popular Instagram pages caught wind of the video, sharing it with their followers and ultimately further boosting its views.
The next day, the professor issued an apology to his students.
“I don’t know how it happened,” he said. “I didn’t see it, I’m pretty sure everybody else did…My apologies to the class.”
He also sent an email to students urging them not to share the video, saying he was “investigating” the incident.
Though Zhang did appear via Zoom to teach a few other classes after the incident, he disappeared shortly after, providing students with no explanation. His expired tenure as a professor for the university was made clear only after new professors took over his classes and issued their own syllabi.
Apparently, the new classes will be instructed via Blackboard Ultra instead of Zoom.
The university never directly responded to the incident but issued a general statement in its aftermath.
“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,” it read.
Now, according to the school paper, students are having mixed feelings about Zhang’s firing.
“[My] first thought was this is super funny,” Ethan Hartz, a freshman business student at the university, told the paper.
However, those feelings changed upon realizing the dire consequences Zhang faced. His name has since been erased from UM’s website and his email is no longer active. The school also confirmed he is no longer employed as a professor.
“I felt guilty afterward for even sharing it with my close friends,” he added.
“This is someone’s livelihood,” junior Jade Johnson told the paper. “I told my friends, this guy could lose his job.”
“I think firing him is a little extreme,” Johnson added. “He didn’t do anything illegal.”
Other students expressed less forgiving sentiments, especially because the incident involved porn related to college students.
“It was the fact he is a college professor and saved a video to his bookmarks describing college girls,” one of the students told the paper. “A video to watch over and over again.”
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