After a doctor who is the daughter of a senior Iranian government official departed from Emory University’s medical school, the professor who serves as head of Emory’s faculty leadership council criticized the school for letting her go, Jewish Insider has learned. 

Noelle McAfee, a professor in Emory’s philosophy department, sent a scathing e-mail to the university and School of Medicine faculty expressing concern that the school’s dismissal of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, the daughter of the secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council for National Security, was a politically motivated firing. 

McAfee, who was arrested in April 2024 for her participation in a campus anti-Israel encampment, said faculty members have expressed to her that Ardeshir-Larijani’s departure is “an act of unbecoming of our tolerant, free, academic community.”

“It’s extremely disappointing to see that our leadership here at Emory are consistently caving to political pressure and never taking the side of faculty,” McAfee wrote, quoting an anonymous faculty member, expressing concern that Ardeshir-Larijani, whose father is responsible for the Islamic Republic’s national security, didn’t receive due process. 

On Jan. 19, demonstrators gathered outside Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute to protest the university’s employment of Ardeshir-Larijani. 

But McAfee claimed that many faculty members were outraged over the loss of Ardeshir-Larijani to the medical school staff. (In an email to medical school faculty, Emory School of Medicine Dean Sandra Wong did not specify whether Ardeshir-Larijani, who was an assistant professor in the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology at the medical school, was fired or quit.)

McAfee wrote that faculty also told her, “This is creating an actively hostile work environment here at Emory… motivated by a desire to minimize political pressure on Emory to ensure continuance of federal funding” and “it’s extremely disappointing to see that our leadership here at Emory are consistently caving to political political pressure and never taking the side of faculty.” 

In a statement to JI, McAfee said her email was “not weighing in on an employment matter one way or another.” 

In 2024, Emory School of Medicine fired another oncologist, Professor Abeer AbouYabis, due to her social media posts glorifying Hamas in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks. The school’s University Senate Committee for Open Expression submitted an investigation report at the time, stating that “AbouYabis’s Open Expression rights likely were violated.” 

Emory University did not respond to a request for comment from JI inquiring whether the school was aware of Ardeshir-Larijani’s familial ties when it hired her. 

A University of California, San Francisco, medical school professor whom Jewish colleagues allege has routinely posted antisemitic content on social media during the Gaza war has been fired by the university, more than a year after concerns about her behavior first surfaced. 

Dr. Rupa Marya worked at UCSF for 23 years, beginning as a resident before becoming a professor of internal medicine and a regular lecturer on social justice topics. With an active social media presence, Marya began posting about Israel’s war against Hamas soon after the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks. Her posts included attacks targeting Jewish and Israeli colleagues and students. 

In a federal lawsuit filed against UCSF this week, Marya alleged that the university violated her constitutional free speech protections by firing her in a retaliatory fashion over posts published on her personal account, which Marya claimed the university wilfully misconstrued. She asserted that “neither her views nor her posts are antisemitic.” 

In January 2024, Marya published a blog post attacking by name a Jewish colleague who had urged a hospital antiracism task force not to issue a statement calling for a ceasefire, saying it would empower Hamas. She had been criticizing him on social media for weeks. (Marya’s account on X, once a very active home for her commentary, has since been disabled.) 

Marya also published a thread on X arguing that Zionism should not be present in medicine, calling it a “structural impediment to health equity.” 

“There are so many Jewish doctors who don’t espouse an ideology of supremacism and justification of land theft, apartheid and genocide. They are not the issue here,” she wrote in January 2024. “The issue is Zionist doctors who will sit in an ‘antiracism task force’ meeting” — a clear reference to the doctor she later named in her blog — “and try to stop brown doctors who want to issue a Ceasefire statement by saying that a ceasefire would be a bad thing (read: let’s keep killing brown people in Gaza).” 

This post from Marya earned a rebuke by the university — UCSF posted on social media soon after about a “tired and familiar racist conspiracy theory … stating that ‘Zionist’ doctors are a threat to Arab, Palestinian, South Asian, Muslim and Black patients, as well as the U.S. health system.” The university called it a “sweeping, baseless and racist generalization” that “must be condemned,” and identified the trope as antisemitism. 

In September 2024, Marya announced that she had been suspended from her faculty position. The news came after she had raised concerns about an Israeli student attending the medical school. Students are “asking if he participated in the genocide of Palestinians in the IDF before matriculating into medical school in CA,” she wrote. “How do we address this in our professional ranks?” She was fired in May, nine months after her suspension. 

A UCSF spokesperson declined to comment.