A murder trial, a revolutionary and a debunked meme.
BY: ALEXA MCNULTY
WITH ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY URVI GANDHI
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Hofstra mourned the loss of a national queer revolutionary with ties to the university.
The Clocktower honored former dean of the Hofstra Business School, Rusty Mae Moore, who passed away in late February. Moore was the inaugural professor of Hofstra’s first transgender studies class. At age 50, she came out and began her transition while working at Hofstra, where she taught for 33 years.
Moore was also a trailblazer in trans activism, featured in documentaries such as Netflix’s “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson” (2017). She co-founded Transy House, a shelter for homeless queer and trans people. Queer activist and Stonewall veteran Sylvia Rivera lived there until her death in 2002.
Following The Clocktower’s article, Moore’s obituary was printed in The New York Times.
The 1990 murder of a Hofstra football coach continues to unfurl.
Former Hofstra men’s assistant football coach, Joseph Healy, was murdered in September 1990 near Hofstra’s campus. Christopher Ellis was in prison for Healy’s murder for three decades – until August 2021 when acting justice of the New York Supreme Court, Patricia Harrington, released Ellis after overturning his sentence upon deciding that authorities withheld exonerating evidence.
This week, Judge Harrington declined to dismiss a new murder indictment brought by the district attorney, which could put Ellis behind bars once again, Newsday reported. Harrington felt that the new evidence “failed to demonstrate some compelling factor, consideration, or circumstance which renders his prosecution unjust.”
Ellis will have to appear in court again in June, when the date for his trial could be set.
The Hofstra Clocktower debunked a viral post about OnlyFans and a “Hofstra professor.”
A popular Instagram meme account, Barstool Hofstra, posted a photo allegedly showing a professor’s email inbox projected on-screen during a lecture. One such email included a subscription confirmation for OnlyFans, an online service largely used for pornography.
A subsequent photo claims to show an email from that professor stepping down pending “an investigation into possible misconduct.”
PHOTOS: The debunked memes posted by the Barstool Hofstra account.
Without further context, many students in the comments seem to falsely infer the images were from Hofstra. “Gotta love my school,” said one user.
However, the post did not originate on the Barstool Hofstra Instagram. A previous iteration of the post connected the photos to a University of Colorado meme account. Another Reddit post circulated the image without any attribution.
“There is nothing to indicate this is a Hofstra professor or a Hofstra classroom,” a Hofstra spokesperson told The Clocktower. The account owner of Barstool Hofstra did not reply to a request for comment.
Hofstra disabled an online tool used to scam students.
In February, Hofstra students received an email from someone posing as an official Hofstra account with a job offer. When students responded, the sender of these emails requested personal information from them.
However, the job offer was fake and the email was spoofed. Inquiries by The Clocktower revealed scammers abused a tool on Hofstra’s website to send the farce to student inboxes.
The tool has since been disabled. Read more from our investigation here.
