Professor accused of antisemitism leaves U.S. for job in Qatar
A professor facing a federal antisemitism complaint reportedly plans to leave her post at a D.C. university for a job in Qatar.
Lara Sheehi, assistant professor of clinical psychology at George Washington University (GWU), left her job after she faced allegations of mistreatment toward her Jewish and Israeli students in a mandatory diversity graduate course she taught, the College Fix reported.
Sheehi reportedly took a new job as an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in the capital of Qatar, according to a statement she released.
"I am writing to let you know that I have been offered a job at another university and I have made the difficult decision not to return to GW at the end of this year," Sheehi wrote in an email sent to the university’s psychology department.
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"As you can imagine, while this is an aligned professional and personal choice, I have mixed emotions, especially as GW has been my professional home since I was a graduate student," she added.
Sheehi no longer has a faculty bio on GWU's website and could not be reached for comment, but according to her faculty bio on the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies website, her "work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South."
Qatar is close to Hamas and "has pumped an estimated $1.8 billion dollars into Hamas-run Gaza" since 2007, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The middle eastern nation also released a statement on October 7 holding "Israel alone responsible" for Hamas’s terrorist attack that left at least 1,200 Jewish people dead.
In January 2022, the international pro-Israel group. StandWithUs, filed a Title VI complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against Sheehi to address antisemitism students said they experienced in her mandatory diversity course.
In one incident, when a Jewish Israeli student introduced herself to the class on the first day of class and explained that she was from Israel, Professor Sheehi’s response was, "It’s not your fault you were born in Israel," which the complaint said implied "the student’s Israeli national identity is something of which she should be ashamed."
"A professor singling out and targeting Jewish and Israeli students for adverse treatment because of their identity is textbook antisemitic discriminatory conduct," said Roz Rothstein, StandWithUs CEO and Co-Founder said in a press release.
Sheehi also invited guest speaker, Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, to a lecture where she allegedly "demonized" Israeli and Jewish people, referring to "white Israeli racism" in her presentation and "suggested that one of the correct responses to this activity of Jews and Israelis is violent resistance."
"In a class designed to educate future therapists about different identities and sensitize the students to bias experienced by those identities, Dr. Sheehi singled out the Jewish students and deprived only them of an opportunity she afforded all other students — defining their own identity and what it means to experience discrimination based on that identity," the complaint said.
"In this way, Dr. Sheehi engaged in ‘erasive antisemitism,’ a form of antisemitism that denies the uniqueness of Jewish identity and erases Jewish history and the Jews’ lived experience," the complaint added. "Not surprisingly, other students in the class quickly followed the professor’s lead and began disparaging and denying Jewish identity in a similar discriminatory fashion."
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GWU launched its own investigation into Sheehi, which cleared her of the allegations, stating they were "significantly decontextualized," "inaccurate," and "misrepresented." In November 2022, the Jewish students who had been the most outspoken in their complaints about Sheehi learned that she started allegedly making false claims about them during faculty meetings.
For example, Sheehi alleged that the students had called guest speaker, Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a "terrorist," that the students’ journal entries were "combative" and that they were racist.
She also used these claims to initiate disciplinary action against the students, who were informed that "faculty voted to initiate disciplinary proceedings against them" and "asked the students to describe to the faculty what they did wrong and what harm they caused," according to the complaint. Failure to do so could "result in further disciplinary action and a permanent disciplinary notation on the students’ academic records.'
Yael Lerman, founding director of the StandWithUs legal department, said the university "has failed to provide adequate protection for the Jewish and Israeli students seeking redress from Professor Sheehi’s persistent antisemitic bigotry in and out of the classroom."
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"Instead, George Washington administrators disregarded the students’ allegations and enabled a professor to retaliate against those students after they sought the administration’s help in fighting discrimination," she added.
Rothstein told the College Fix in a statement that Sheehi's departure from GWU does not address all the issues raised in the Title VI complaint, adding "it does not by itself provide a full remedy for the hostile antisemitic environment at GW."