The George Washington University (GWU) has reportedly failed to protect its students from religious, racial, and ethnic discrimination, actively suppressed the free speech of students protesting against genocide, and itself carried out an apparently years-long campaign of anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, making it among the most hostile campuses for anti-genocide voices, particularly those of Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab heritage.
GWU has claimed that “diversity is crucial to an educational institution’s pursuit of excellence in learning, research and service.” Its administrators have proudly taken credit for GW students’ involvement in protests against South African apartheid in the 1980s – even as GWU was reportedly the “only school in the Washington D.C.-area to remain invested in South Africa during this time.” GWU’s apparent past failures to support its students in their calls against apartheid are once again repeated today, as the institution has persistently met students of diverse backgrounds with discrimination, harassment, and even police violence after protesting against Israeli apartheid, occupation, and now genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
In late 2023, Muslim and Palestinian students called on GWU to provide protection to students amid a rise in Islamophobic attacks on campus. They reported having their hijabs ripped off, being spat on, and being confronted by other students. As a result, Muslim and Palestinian students reported feeling unsafe on campus, leading them to refrain from attending events, posting online, or wearing clothing that expresses their Muslim and/or Palestinian identity. While these students called on university administrators to protect them, University President Ellen Granberg reportedly continued to make public statements in October that largely focused on condemning the October 7 attacks while refusing to acknowledge the Israeli government’s subsequent attacks on Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the impact on her Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students.
Rather than defend their own students against anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, university administrators apparently turned their attention to targeting anti-genocide student protesters. In one October statement, President Granberg seemingly suggested that there was a “celebration of terrorism” on campus, which was believed by student activists to be a reference to a vigil held by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) to mourn the lives of Palestinians in Gaza. In November 2023, the student group was disciplined after projecting statements on a campus library, although the students maintain that their action did not violate any specific university policy banning projections. GW suspended the student group and placed its president, Lance Lokas, an Arab American student organizer, on disciplinary probation. Months later, Lokas was reportedly targeted again by the university following allegations that he failed to comply with the sanctions placed on him. In April, the university was reportedly forced to drop all charges against Lokas and the vast majority of those against the SJP chapter.
However, GWU seemed to continue its targeted harassment of Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and other anti-genocide student organizers after the establishment of a student sit-in, or ‘protest encampment,’ on April 25, which was raided and destroyed by local police two weeks later. Police officers reportedly pepper-sprayed and brutalized protesters, forcing them to set up an impromptu medical area to treat those injured. As the police were clearing the encampment, students’ prayer mats, English translations of the Qur’an, and other Islamic materials were visibly destroyed and thrown into a garbage truck, before being crushed and taken to a landfill to be disposed of. Administrators not only authorized police violence against their own students but even reportedly attacked them. According to GWU parents, Provost Chris Bracey had visited the encampment before it was destroyed and reportedly physically assaulted a student, knocking down the camera of a woman filming an interaction with him.
GWU’s blatant anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim racism is, however, not novel; it appears to be a part of a long history of hostility and discrimination toward Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students and affiliates. In 2015, GWU reportedly threatened disciplinary action against a Palestinian student after he hung a Palestinian flag from his dorm window; the university later apologized and claimed that it had been acting in compliance with a university policy, even though others had reportedly hung other flags outside their windows without issue. In 2022, GW’s SJP chapter and Lance Lokas were wrongfully charged with damaging the property of GW Hillel. It was reported that GW’s own Diversity, Equity and Community Engagement leadership had called the police on student activists. In 2023, GWU came under federal investigation after a complaint filed by Palestine Legal alleged that “Palestinian students and students perceived to be Palestinians had been denied access to mental health services, disproportionately investigated by campus police… and subjected to racist anti-Palestinian comments in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
GWU administrators’ anti-Palestinian activities are only part of an apparently embedded institutional culture where Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism are permitted. In March 2024, a class action lawsuit was filed against GWU by Dr. Farid Hafez, an Austrian Muslim scholar and professor, who charged GWU’s Program on Extremism and its director Dr. Lorenzo Vidino with carrying out a malicious smear campaign “constructing and disseminating false narratives linking [Hafez and others] to the Muslim Brotherhood.” A report authored by Dr. Vidino had reportedly formed the basis for a search warrant legitimizing Operation Luxor, a 2020 police operation in Austria that targeted dozens of organizations and individuals like Dr. Hafez with raids and asset seizures and was later deemed unlawful by Austrian courts. GWU’s continued employment of Dr. Vidino, who has been identified for years by researchers at Georgetown University as “connected to numerous anti-Muslim think tanks in the United States and Europe,” could be interpreted as either tacit approval or institutional apathy regarding his reportedly Islamophobic activities.
As an institution of higher education, GWU appears to have failed to live up to its own standards of free speech and failed to meet its obligations to protect all its students from discrimination.
