Umaymah Mohammad, perhaps the only student in the US to be suspended from medical school for remarks about Israel and Gaza, has filed a federal lawsuit against Atlanta’s Emory University, alleging discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, as well as additional complaints under state law.
The lawsuit, filed on Monday morning in federal district court on Mohammad’s behalf by the Council on Islamic-American Relations in Georgia (Cair-Ga), centers on Emory’s alleged “intentional discrimination and retaliation” during disciplinary proceedings against the medical-sociology dual degree student last year. It names the university, its board of trustees and John William Eley, a dean at the medical school, as defendants.
It has been filed in pursuit of “accountability and justice … [and] has potential repercussions for how student activists have been treated over the last two years in this country”, said Azka Mahmood, executive director of Cair-Ga.
If successful, the lawsuit could lead to “stopping disciplinary proceedings for protected expression – and that this becomes more of a policy moving forward” – both at Emory and elsewhere, said Keon Grant, one of the Cair-Ga attorneys who filed the complaint.
The school declined to provide comment to the Guardian on pending litigation.
The suit alleges that the school’s disciplinary response to remarks Mohammad made on the news show Democracy Now! in April 2024 showed unequal, discriminatory treatment. On the program, Mohammad spoke about the climate on campus for protesters – including at Emory, where police used tasers on students the day before during a protest against Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza.
She expressed concern about an unnamed Emory medical school professor who returned from volunteering as a medic in the Israeli military and was “now back at Emory so-called ‘teaching’ medical students and residents how to take care of patients”.
The investigation and November hearing were both “plagued by procedural irregularities, such as pressuring Plaintiff to admit guilt, altering charges, manipulating deadlines, disregarding institutional policies, and imposing disproportionate sanctions”, according to Monday’s lawsuit.
Still, Emory found that Mohammad “violated ‘the standards and expectations of the medical profession’”, according to the lawsuit, and suspended her from medical school for one year, pushing her graduation to 2029. Mohammad’s appeal of the suspension was denied.
Both Mahmood and Grant said they knew of no other medical school student suspended for speech on Israel and Gaza.
The lawsuit notes that Emory’s own committee on free expression defended Mohammad’s speech as protected by the school’s own policies, only to be ignored by the medical school.
It also points to a settlement the school entered into with the Department of Education’s office of civil rights in the first few weeks of the Trump administration, in response to a Title VI complaint filed directly with the department last year. Former president Joe Biden’s outgoing civil rights investigators found that Emory “may have contributed to and at a minimum appears to have failed to respond promptly or effectively to a hostile environment based on race and national origin, including shared Palestinian, Muslim, and/or Arab ancestry”.
This shows the school “was aware of systemic issues in how Palestinian and Arab students were treated”, the lawsuit asserts.
Mohammad was recently notified that an additional complaint had been filed about remarks she allegedly made on Israel and Palestine. The school has not clarified the issue, but last year’s disciplinary proceedings also included placing her on probation until graduation – meaning an additional complaint may be grounds for expulsion, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit comes at a time when the current administration is wielding Title VI almost exclusively as a tool to allege antisemitism on high-profile US campuses, as seen in the 30 June announcement finding Harvard guilty of “acting with deliberate indifference towards harassment of Jewish and Israeli students by other students and faculty from October 7, 2023, through the present”.
Though not as high profile as Harvard, Emory has an endowment of $11bn – the 11th-highest in the US, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle.
“I definitely think the new Title VI world we’re living in is much more challenging,” Grant said. “Still, it’s an important tool – not only to seek relief, but if no Title VI complaints were filed, it would lead to a kind of erasure.”
The law, which prohibits a recipient of federal financial assistance from discriminating on the basis of race, color or national origin, “is now being weaponized to target student activism [on behalf of Palestine]”, said Mahmood.
“Still, you have to [have] faith in the federal courts and the constitution – you have to give this fight your all, to get justice – and pull all the levers this great country gives us.”
