ada Merghani ended up getting way more attention than she had sought.
In August, just before Donald Trump spoke at her campus, the junior at the University of North Carolina Wilmington wrote a Facebook post telling her friends to expect to see her at the event. “Y’all are not prepared for what I’m about to do,” wrote the 19-year-old gay-rights and Muslim activist. “All I can say is pray I make it out of this alive.”
The fallout from her post included a precautionary visit from the U.S. Secret Service, barbed coverage by the conservative publication The College Fix, and a scathing online columnabout her from an unlikely source, one of her institution’s own faculty members.
The op-ed’s author, Michael S. Adams, a professor of criminology and prominent conservative commentator, dismissed Ms. Merghani as a “queer Muslim social justice warrior” in search of victim status and attention. Among the other digs he got in, he said Ms. Merghani “lacks intellectual coherence” and likened her to Gerald Ford’s attempted assassin, Lynette Alice (Squeaky) Fromme, “minus the handgun and resolve.”
Ms. Merghani did not respond to The Chronicle’s requests for comment. In a post on the social-media channel Tumblr, however, she described being barraged with online threats and hateful statements as a result of the column. She complained that the university has done little to protect her from two years’ worth of efforts “to make my life hell,” by Mr. Adams (who has never had her in a class.) She later told local journalists that she plans to transfer at the end of the current semester.
