Those tweets, her court papers say, include one in which she was “contributing to a trending discussion on Twitter about the song ‘WAP’ by Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion by suggesting lyrics for a possible remix.”
Her suggestion — “He ain’t my pops but I call him DAD” because he is good in bed (her wording was less polite) — was “well within the normal bounds of discussion on social media,” her complaint says.
It was the second time in a year that someone had reported Ms. Diei for her social media posts; the first time, the university ordered her to write a letter of reflection. This time, she got a letter on Sept. 2 saying that her “conduct is a serious breach of the norms and expectations of the profession.” One of her public posts, it said, included an image identifying her as a pharmacy student at the school; Ms. Diei disputes that.
The letter referred her to the student handbook, which says that university staff “may monitor social networking sites on occasion and egregious unprofessional postings could lead to disciplinary actions.” But it left her to extrapolate what was egregious, she said.
The pharmacy dean overruled her expulsion three weeks later, after a telephone conversation in which, Ms. Diei said, the dean asked her to try to block people affiliated with the school from her accounts, and to minimize her affiliation with the university. “It’s hard for me to do when I have so many followers,” she said.
Ms. Diei says she crafted her posts for an audience of Black women like herself, and hoped she might become popular enough to make money promoting products.
“I use words and phrases common amongst our community,” she said.
Her Instagram name, kimmykasi, was supposed to be “cute and simple,” she said, a compound of the diminutive for Kimberly and a word she found in an Igbo dictionary defined as “be greatest,” as a tribute to her Nigerian immigrant father.
