Dean of Students at U. of Alabama Resigns After Breitbart Resurfaces Old Tweets

Jamie R. Riley, assistant vice president and dean of students at the University of Alabama, resigned on Thursday, the day after Breitbart, a right-wing news outlet, published an article quoting some of his old tweets.

In the three tweets noted by the Breitbart article, Riley, who is black, wrote that the American flag “represents a systemic history of racism for my people” and that white people cannot experience racism. The most recent of the tweets was posted in October 2017. He began working at Alabama last February.

Chris Bryant, a university spokesman, confirmed Riley’s resignation by email on Thursday, saying it was “mutual agreement” and offering no further comments. Attempts to contact Riley were unsuccessful.

Alabama’s employee handbook does not specify guidelines for social media.

The Alabama dean is far from the first college official to resign following the publication of old tweets in recent months. The Twitter account of Students for Trump reposted several tweets from Mike Mullen, at the time a vice chancellor at North Carolina State University. In one he called Republicans the party of “neo-Nazis.” Mullen resigned his administrative post within the day.

Faculty members, too, have been affected. Jeffrey A. Sachs, a professor of political science at Acadia University, in Nova Scotia, has studied faculty terminations and says professors are dismissed more often for liberal comments than for conservative ones.

Before going to Alabama seven months ago, Riley had worked in student affairs at the Johns Hopkins University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Morehouse College.

Wesley Jenkins is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @_wesjenks, or email him at wjenkins@chronicle.com.