The embattled City University of New York president who sparked a backlash by hiring controversial pro-Palestinian professor Marc Lamont Hill is leaving the job.
Robin Garrell, who headed CUNY’s Graduate Center for three years, will step down at the end of September, the school’s chancellor announced this week.
“CUNY will appoint an interim president in the coming weeks and launch a national search for her successor in the near future,” Chancellor Matos Rodriguez said in a statement.
“In the meantime, we congratulate President Garrell on her accomplishments, thank her for her service to the Graduate Center and CUNY, and wish her well in her future endeavors,” Rodriguez wrote.
Garrell came under fire earlier this month when she hired Hill, a 44-year-old educator who ruffled feathers in the past for his verbal attacks on Israel and anti-semitic views — even getting fired by CNN over his fiery rhetoric.
Garrell’s pending ouster came as welcome news to Hill’s critics.
“This is wonderful news,” former state Assemblyman Dov Hikind said. “The ouster of the CUNY Graduate Center president sends a powerful message to CUNY campus officials to stop hiring Jew haters.”
“But this is just a first step,” Hikind said. “Marc Lamont Hill has to go, too.”
City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov (R-Brooklyn) agreed.
“That Marc Lamont Hill was even considered as a professor at CUNY is reprehensible,” Vernikov said in a statement. “While I must credit the CUNY chancellor for quickly making sure the president who made this awful decision RESIGNS, every day that Marc Lamont Hill keeps his job at CUNY is a stain on this institution. He must be next.
“Hill must be relieved from his post immediately. I will work tirelessly to make sure it happens.”
Hill did not immediately respond to an email from The Post seeking comment.
The media professor and former network pundit was booted from CNN after his speech about Israel incensed the Anti-Defamation League and other groups.
The speech, delivered for the United Nation’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinean people, called for other nations to boycott Israel.
“My reference to ‘river to the sea’ was not a call to destroy anything or anyone,” Hill said on X, formerly known as Twitter, after getting the boot by the network.. “It was a call for justice, both in Israel and in the West Bank/Gaza. The speech very clearly and specifically said those things.”
“I support Palestinian freedom. I support Palestinian self-determination,” he said. “I do not support anti-Semitism, killing Jewish people, or any of the other things attributed to my speech. I have spent my life fighting these things.”
The Hill controversy is just the latest to dog the city college and came just three months after CUNY Law School graduate Fatima Mohammed delivered an incendiary commencement speech blasting Israel
Among her fiery remarks to fellow grads, Mohammed accused Israel of encouraging “lynch mobs” and carrying out violence against Palestinians and calling the NYPD fascist.