U of Michigan fires DEI official over purported antisemitic comments

The University of Michigan has fired a director in its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office owing to antisemitic comments she made to Jewish professors at a spring conference. 

The New York Times first reported the firing, which a person with insight into the university’s governing body confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday.

The development comes amid widespread tensions over how Jews fit into DEI programs at universities and other institutions.

The staffer in question, Rachel Dawson, was the director of an office for multicultural initiatives. She was officially fired on Thursday after multiple members of the school’s Board of Regents were angered by the university’s initially lax response to her comments, according to the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the incident.

Dawson had privately remarked in March that “the university is controlled by wealthy Jews”; that “we don’t work with Jews” because “they are wealthy and privileged and take care of themselves”; that “rich donors and Jewish board members control the president” and “silence” students from the Middle East and North Africa; and and that “Jewish people have no genetic DNA that would connect them to the land of Israel,” according to an investigation of her comments viewed by JTA.

The university commissioned the investigation from an outside law firm following a complaint by the Michigan chapter of the Anti-Defamation League. Some of her alleged quotes are paraphrased, the investigation’s report says. The investigation found that “it is not possible to determine with certainty whether Ms. Dawson made the exact remarks attributed to her,” as Dawson denied making several of the comments the ADL charged her with, and there was no recording of them. 

But after reviewing text messages and other documents written by the Jewish professors at the conference who had initiated the conversation, investigators wrote, “we conclude that the weight of available evidence supports ADL Michigan’s report.”

According to The New York Times, the university initially intended to mandate antisemitism training for Dawson. But in a series of emails in October, a Jewish regent urged the university president to fire her instead, saying she had not “been held accountable in any meaningful way,” and needed to be “terminated immediately.”

That regent, Mark Bernstein, is a prominent attorney and Democrat who has served on a range of statewide civil rights efforts as well as on the board of Bend the Arc, a Jewish progressive civil rights group. He did not immediately respond to a JTA request for comment.

But the source with knowledge of the situation told JTA that beyond what the New York Times reported, other regents also wanted Dawson terminated and were unhappy in general with the DEI office’s attitude toward Jews. 

As pro-Palestinian encampments were active on campus in the spring, during which some protesters put up a large sign reading “Long live the intifada,” the regents asked the school’s vice provost and chief diversity officer to grade the DEI office’s performance. She awarded it an “A-,” which horrified the regents, according to the source.

Neither the university, the Michigan ADL, nor an attorney representing Dawson responded to JTA requests for comment. Dawson’s staff page remained active on the school’s website as of Friday. 

Her attorney told the Times that her comments — made to two Jewish professors from other universities who had asked her about DEI protections for Jewish students at Michigan — had been mischaracterized, and that “it’s deeply troubling that they would escalate the situation to termination based on one conversation in somebody’s private capacity.”

Dawson’s firing came to light days after a different Jewish member of the university’s Board of Regents, Jordan Acker, was targeted at his home by pro-Palestinian activists who smashed his windows and vandalized his wife’s car, and soon after the university announced it would scale back some aspects of its DEI initiatives, which have attracted particular criticism in a field of escalating political controversies.

Michigan, which has large numbers of both Jewish and Arab students, has been a site of continued unease since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel that triggered the war in Gaza and a groundswell of campus activism. In addition to the targeting of Acker — the third time he had been targeted — the student government was recently led by activists who vowed to cut off all student activity funding unless the university divested from Israel. A handful of Jewish students at the university have reported being physically assaulted in recent months, though it is unclear if those incidents were connected to Israel.

On Thursday, Crime Stoppers announced it was offering an $8,000 reward to anyone with information leading to the people who vandalized Acker’s home. The vandalism took place in Huntington Woods, a progressive Detroit suburb with a large Jewish population.