Adelphi University stated on Aug. 15 that an investigation found “sufficient evidence” that one of the private, Garden City, N.Y. school’s professors “created a hostile environment for Adelphi’s Jewish community” via the professor’s “personal social media posts.”
The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law announced the university’s decision on Thursday and shared a redacted letter from the university. The university didn’t appear to have publicized its finding at press time.
The Brandeis Center had filed a complaint against the professor, whom it named as Sarah Eltabib, an associate teaching professor in the university’s college of arts and sciences.
Bobbie Dell’Aquilo, chief communications officer for Adelphi, told JNS that the school “does not comment on personnel matters.”
Eltabib is a faculty adviser to the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and a member of the university’s bias response team. Adelphia said in its letter that the faculty member had “leadership positions with SJP and the BRT,” which in connection with the professor’s “social media posts, contribute to that hostile environment.” (JNS sought comment from Eltabib).
“Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, Prof. Eltabib waged a campaign of ethnic hatred that encompassed a cornucopia of unlawful antisemitic and national origin discrimination,” the Brandeis Center stated.
The center said the professor denied that Israeli women were raped on Oct. 7, blamed “the Jewish state for crises such as American homeslessness and budget cuts to the L.A. Fire Department that hurt victims of the L.A. wildfires” and promoted “conspiracy theories blaming Israel for the United States’ TikTok ban and describing Israel as the source of ‘all censorship and attacks on free speech.’”
“This is the second time in a month that Adelphi has acknowledged that Jewish students were subjected to a hostile environment, this time by one of their own professors,” said Kenneth Marcus, chairman and CEO of the Brandeis Center and former U.S. assistant secretary of education for civil rights.
“Schools have been far too slow to address faculty abuse on campus, creating a climate of fear for Jewish students,” he stated. “It is high time they realize that ignoring antisemitism will not make it go away.”
The center asked the university to bar the professor from serving as a faculty adviser to any student group and remove her from the bias response team. It also said that Adelphi should monitor the professor’s social media posts.
On Aug. 7, the university placed its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter on disciplinary probation for a year after determining that “it would be reasonable to infer” that Jews who saw the group’s social media posts “may feel targeted or unsafe.”
