Weaver burst into tears when reporters asked her about her claim that ‘homeownership is racist’—and the fact that her mom owns a $1.6 million house
New York University has taken down the page for a class taught by New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D.) housing czar, Cea Weaver, after Weaver’s anti-white social media posts and communist views resurfaced this month. An NYU professor who has worked with Weaver told the Washington Free Beacon the school deleted Weaver’s information to protect her from “harassment.”
Gianpaolo Baiocchi, a professor of sociology who founded the university’s Urban Democracy Lab, said NYU “took her page down to protect her privacy” upon learning “of the harassment she was facing.” Baiocchi, who like Weaver was named to Mamdani’s transition team late last year, was arrested for participating in a pro-Hamas encampment at the university in the spring of 2024.
Baiocchi did not specify the content of the “harassment” Weaver faced, but he may have had in mind an incident last week when reporters confronted Weaver about her past statements that included denouncing private property as a “weapon of white supremacy,” calling to “impoverish the *white* middle class,” and arguing that “homeownership is racist.” Weaver burst into tears when reporters asked how she could square her attacks against homeowners with the fact that her own mother owns a $1.6 million property in Nashville.
Weaver taught “Community Organizing + Advocacy Skills,” a one-credit class offered through the university’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, during the fall of 2025. NYU wiped the course page from its website last week as Weaver’s radical views came to light, though archived versions remain available.
“No one can make change alone!” the course description states. “This skills course provides students with the tools they need to get started building power in their own local context. We’ll review community organizing as a theory of change and discuss how it fits into a larger vision of civic engagement and urban democracy.”
The goals of the class included teaching students to “practice the hard skills that community organizing requires—community outreach, leadership identification and assessment, campaign strategy, and powerful tactics that move your targets.” The course had no public syllabus or reading materials and only met over two Saturdays in November.
An NYU spokesman told the Free Beacon that Weaver will not teach a class at the university this year.
“She is not employed at NYU, and she is not teaching at NYU now,” the university’s senior director of executive communications, Joseph Tirella (he/him/himself), wrote. Baiocchi said in his email to the Free Beacon that Weaver “paused her teaching at NYU for the immediate future” to work in Mamdani’s administration.
As a tenants’ rights activist, Weaver has publicly stated her desire to “have the housing actually be worth less” and to “municipalize” more of New York City’s housing stock, the Free Beacon reported last week. Before joining the Mamdani administration, Weaver spent years as executive director of Housing Justice For All, an openly communist nonprofit funded by George Soros.
Mamdani has stood by Weaver in the face of criticism, telling reporters last week that he expects Weaver “to build on the work that she has done to protect tenants across the city.”
NYU celebrated Weaver as late as November with a press release that noted her involvement in Mamdani’s transition team. The Mamdani adviser graduated from NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service in 2016 and has partnered with Baiocchi’s Urban Democracy Lab, which focuses on efforts like “social housing” and “dismantling racial capitalism.” The Wagner School named Weaver one of its “Trailblazers in Building & Real Estate” last year.
An NYU insider told the Free Beacon that “it’s very odd that it was offered in the first place.”
“It’s even more strange that NYU, a school with extensive donors who are part of the New York real estate community, would offer a course taught by someone whose whole project is to drive real estate values to zero,” the insider continued.
Weaver has also taught similar courses at Fordham University as well, records show.
Weaver did not respond to a request for comment.
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