Prof accused of discriminating against Jewish students leaves for new gig in Qatar
George Washington Professor Lara Sheehi had allegedly told a student, 'It's not your fault you were born in Israel.'
Sheehi is said to have invited a speaker who said ‘good deeds done by Jews and Israelis are done to mask sinister activity.’
A psychology professor left George Washington University following accusations of anti-Semitic acts against students.
Earlier this month, Lara Sheehi left her position as assistant professor of clinical psychology at George Washington University (GWU), located in Washington, D.C., following an investigation of what some claim was her anti-Semitic conduct against students, as reported in The GW Hatchet.
Sheehi went to take up a new teaching position at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar, the student newspaper notes.
In January 2023, StandWithUs filed a Title VI complaint against GWU accusing Sheehi of anti-Semitic behavior. The complaint states that Sheehi told one student: “It’s not your fault you were born in Israel,” as reported in The Algemeiner.
According to the complaint, Sheehi also invited a speaker who allegedly said that “good deeds done by Jews and Israelis are done to mask sinister activity,” and later accused students who opposed her conduct of being racists, The Algemeiner writes.
GWU subsequently hired the law firm Crowell and Moring LLP to look into the accusations against Sheehi. The firm “found no evidence substantiating the allegations of discriminatory and retaliatory conduct alleged in the complaint. Many of the statements the complaint alleges were made by Dr. Sheehi were, according to those who heard them, either inaccurate or taken out of context and misrepresented,” according to a summary of the findings posted by GWU’s Office of the President on March 27, 2023.
“Underlying much of the discourse that arose in the class is the issue of what is appropriately defined as antisemitism – that is, whether structural critiques of the State of Israel, including actions by the Israeli government, constitute antisemitism,” the summary continued.
”This issue is being debated in college campuses across the country, and in many other arenas. [StandWithUs] and a few of the students in the class, advocated for an expansive view of the definition of antisemitism, which, if accepted in the university environment, could infringe on free speech principles and academic freedom,” the office stated.
Mark S. Wrighton, then president of GWU, stated that while some “will find this result unexpected or even surprising,” the university still “strongly condemns antisemitism, Islamophobia, discrimination, and all forms of hate” in a letter published the same day as the summary.
“While Professor Sheehi leaving GWU addresses one of the issues raised in our Title VI complaint by ensuring Jewish students in the Professional Psychology Program will not be subjected to further discriminatory treatment by her, it does not by itself provide a full remedy for the hostile antisemitic environment at GW,” Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs, told Campus Reform.
The statement continued: “The purpose of our complaint is to ensure correction of the institutional failures that allowed for—and exacerbated—that environment so that Jewish students are afforded the opportunity for full and equal participation in the program, free from attacks against their identity and retaliatory punishment for having the courage to stand up for themselves in the face of that hostility.”
Sheehi’s case is not the only time a university professor was caught in a controversy related to anti-Semitism.
Campus Reform recently reported on a self-described “DEI Evangelist” professor at Northwestern University who downplayed the rise of anti-Semitism at elite universities. In an interview with The New York Times, Alvin Tillery, the director at the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, said that, despite a few exceptions, “no Jewish students have really been subjected to violence on most of these campuses.”
He added that “Republicans who support Jewish students ‘all serve a master in Donald Trump’” who “quot[es] Hitler in his stump speeches.”
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At the University of California, San Francisco, Professor Rupa Marya claimed that “[t]he presence of Zionism in US medicine should be examined as a structural impediment to health equity” in a post on X. “Zionism is a supremacist, racist ideology and we see Zionist doctors justifying the genocide of Palestinians,” according to a Jan. 8 Campus Reform report.
In a previous X post from November, she also wrote: “People acting like you can remove the Zionist from Zionism and sanitize it from its violent colonial ideological roots. You can’t take the Nazi out of Nazism either. Learn history. Read about Zionism in their own words.”
Marya’s work “sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice,” and she is the founder of an organization “committed to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story, restoration and learning,” according to to her faculty profile.
