American man mocks Indian professor’s IIT degree, gets schooled by social media

An American man’s racist attempt to mock an IIT-educated professor backfired when thousands of social media users rose up to praise her academic credentials.

An American man’s racist attempt to mock an IIT-educated professor backfired when thousands of social media users rose up to praise her academic credentials.

The IIT Bombay-educated professor teaches at Montana State University.

The whole thing began when the man, who goes by the pseudonym “Oilfield Rando” on X, began to share a list of Indian or Indian-origin professors at Montana State University. Among the several names on this list, he included Dr Shivali Banerjee. Dr Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Agricultural Process Engineering at Montana State University. She holds a PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay.

Racist mocking backfires

“Montana State University Professor Shivali Banerjee is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay,” the X user posted on the social media platform.

He was trying to criticise the supposedly high number of Indian faculty members in an American university, but his attempt backfired.

“IIT is one of the most difficult colleges in THE WORLD to get into. Montana being able to recruit her is a HUGE win for them!” wrote data scientist Armand Domalewski.

“Incredible win for America that an IIT grad is delighted to work at Montana State,” X user Dan Waterfield commented.

“Oh no a professor is from one of the most prestigious universities in Asia how will we ever recover,” an X user wrote sarcastically while reacting to the racist post.

“The overall acceptance rate for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) is approximately 0.5% to 1%, making it one of the most selective higher education systems in the world,” another person highlighted. “In comparison to Harvard, in terms of pure statistical competition and the sheer volume of applicants being ruthlessly filtered out by a test, the IITs are tougher to get into.”

American man responds

“It is genuinely insane that some of the brightest scholars on Earth , people coming out of institutions like IIT Bombay, with acceptance rates lower than MIT and Harvard choose to build their careers in America, only to be mocked by diaper groypers sitting in their basements with room-temperature IQs,” an X user said in response to the post.

Groypers are an informal, far-right group of online activists and followers supporting white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes.

Responding to this particular point of criticism, Oilfield Rando wrote: “It’s genuinely insane how a country can claim to produce the brightest scholars on earth while the country itself is a dystopian hellscape that is single-handedly destroying swaths of the Pacific.”