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Olga Perez Stable Cox, the professor of psychology who was secretly recorded telling her students that Donald Trump’s election was an “act of terrorism,” will accept Orange Coast College’s faculty member of the year award, but she won’t deliver the commencement speech that customarily comes with the nod, The Orange County Register reported. A spokesperson for the college originally stated that Cox would not accept her colleagues’ nomination because she didn’t want to pull attention away from students at graduation, according to the Register, but the same spokesperson said Friday that she would accept the award.
Cox has become polarizing on campus and off since the video hit the internet last fall -- as has the college, which first said it would suspend the student who recorded Cox and then backtracked. A committee of 10 faculty members and administrators selected Cox as 2017’s full-time colleague of the year. Rob Schneiderman, president of Orange Coast’s American Federation of Teachers-affiliated faculty union, told the Register that Cox won’t be a commencement speaker because “she did not want to distract from the students” and that the choice was “consistent with her nature as a faculty member.” Joshua Recalde-Martinez, a leader with the campus College Republicans, which posted the video, said the decision “only serves to resurrect past tensions against both her and the College Republicans.”
