Adelphi professor violated school's harassment policy with posts about Israel, university investigation finds

An Adelphi University professor who advised the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine violated the school’s discrimination and harassment policy by making social media posts that created a hostile environment for Jewish students and faculty, a university investigation found.

The findings of the inquiry, commissioned by university officials but conducted by an outside law firm, were excerpted in a letter the university’s Office of Community Concerns and Resolution sent to a fellow professor whose complaint triggered the investigation.

The Aug. 15 letter redacts the names of both professors. However, the Brandeis Center, a Washington, D.C.-based Jewish civil rights nonprofit, said it was representing Tuval Foguel, an Adelphi math professor who made the complaint.

The report makes no recommendations on possible sanctions and notes that parties had until Aug. 20 to appeal. It was unclear if an appeal had been filed.

The findings came weeks after Adelphi administrators put Students for Justice in Palestine on a one-year disciplinary probation for the group’s own social media posts, which administrators said also created a hostile environment for Jews on campus. That sanction also stemmed from a complaint by Foguel.

The national Students for Justice in Palestine organization says it's advocating against what it calls Israel's "genocide" against the Palestinian people of Gaza.

Pro-Israel groups say their rhetoric is not just anti-Israel but antisemitic. 

The professor did not respond to emails or a phone call to the office. Students for Justice in Palestine's national organization did not respond to a message sent through its website. The organization’s Adelphi chapter and its student founder did not respond to Instagram messages. The founder could not be reached by phone.

The Adelphi investigation into the professor, carried out by the law firm Venable, cited two of the professor’s social media posts, one of which says, "I’m running on nothing but ... pure hatred for Israel." 

The other post appears to be a screenshot from a video of a man at a lectern, with captioned dialogue: "Are you an Israeli? I don’t debate with Israeli’s (sic)."

The lawyers said that "taken together," the posts "reflect a repetitive series of incidents that ... could be perceived by a reasonable person offensive and/or intimidating to Jewish people."

Adelphi’s harassment policy defines a hostile environment as one created when "harassing conduct on the basis of actual or perceived membership in a protected class has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work or academic experience (including social and residential participation) or creates an intimidating, hostile, offensive or abusive environment."

Brandeis Center senior counsel Rory Lancman said in an email that the lectern post was taken from a 2013 Oxford University debate when George Galloway, a left-wing British politician, walked out after learning his student opponent was Israeli.   

Lancman said the professor was reposting memes, not original content, but that the distinction was irrelevant. The professor "is responsible for what she shares and amplifies," he wrote. 

Foguel, a Jewish Israeli American, told Newsday he complained not because his colleague criticized Israeli policies, but because the professor made posts that he found to be hateful toward Israelis. "If she would have said, I hate the Israeli government’s policies, fine, I would not object," he said.

Newsday is not naming the professor because it could not independently locate the posts.

Allison Vernace, Adelphi’s chief of community concerns and resolution and the author of the Aug. 15 letter, did not respond to an interview request. Adelphi University spokeswoman Bobbie Dell'Aquilo said the university "does not comment on personnel matters."

In a 2024 article, The Delphian, Adelphi's student newspaper, reported that "Muslim and Jewish Adelphi community members have expressed concerns about Islamophobic and antisemitic hate speech." The article described a February talk by an Israeli soldier, hosted by a Jewish student group, that drew a protest by Students for Justice in Palestine.

Sentwali Bakari, the school's vice president for student affairs and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, told the student newspaper that university officials were "responsive" to concerns from the community.

"We recognize members of our community may be dealing with hurtful and insensitive speech, particularly in the face of polarizing views on global and political situations," he said. 

In an Aug. 22 letter to Vernace and Adelphi interim provost Susan Dinan, Lancman, who advised Foguel in his complaints, asked for the professor’s removal from university leadership posts, including faculty advisership of any student group.

The letter also asked for the professor to be required to discuss social media use and the use of credible news sources with members of the university communications team.

According to the university’s discrimination and harassment policy, a finding of "responsibility" can result in sanctions that "range from a warning up to and including termination."

A separate Adelphi policy employs language on academic freedom that is standard for many American institutions. When a university teacher speaks or writes as a citizen, they should "be free from institutional censorship or discipline," but should also "be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others" and make it clear that they do not speak for the university.