Mick Hartley

From Aaron Bandler at JNS:

A Jewish Israeli researcher faced “discrimination and insidious, malicious conduct intended to permanently tarnish his reputation and career” at Stanford University, including “tampering with his lab results and manufacturing a bogus complaint against him, merely for being Israeli,” according to a federal lawsuit filed on Thursday.

The suit, brought by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the firm Cohen Williams, accuses the private school in Stanford, Calif., of being “complicit in permitting an environment saturated with intimidation and harassment of Jewish and Israeli students to flourish on campus.”

Shay Laps, a postdoctoral researcher, arrived at Stanford roughly six months after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, having been recommended by a Nobel laureate, according to the lawsuit. He aimed to “develop his research of synthetic and ‘smart’ insulin, which would revolutionize treatment for millions of people suffering from diabetes,” the Brandeis Center stated.

He faced extensive discrimination in the lab of Danny Chou, an associate pediatrics professor at Stanford, per the lawsuit, including tampering with his research, a fabricated sexual harassment complaint against him and being locked out of a lab.

“I was just shocked by the set of facts,” Rachel Lerman, vice chair and director of appeals and critical motions at the Brandeis Center, told JNS. “We all think we’ve seen it all, but this guy, he’s really traumatized by what happened.”

On Laps’s first day, Terra Lin, a research assistant in the lab, who “knew nothing about him other than that he was a Jewish scientist from Israel,” told him “never to speak with her in person” and if he needed anything, he must do so in writing, according to the Brandeis Center.

“When Laps tried to join a group of co-workers, including the lab staffer, for lunch, the lab staffer instructed Laps not to sit with her or other lab employees. She also urged other researchers in the lab to shun Laps,” the Brandeis Center stated. (According to the suit, Lin also tried to “frustrate, delay or inhibit” Laps’s requests for research materials and equipment, at one point referring him to a colleague recovering in the hospital from a major car accident.)

According to the Brandeis Center, she tampered with Laps’s research, “producing fraudulent results behind his back that could have ruined his career and encouraging him to discard all evidence of her tampering.” It added that when Laps found out about such sabotage, the lab’s leader and his mentor “refused to address the issue.”

The following month, Chou told Laps that Stanford would launch a Title IX investigation against him over a complaint of sexual harassment from an undergraduate student, urging him to leave the lab to avoid the investigation and to save his reputation.

No complaint had been made. It was a lie.

Laps filed a discrimination complaint with the university about his treatment in Chou’s lab, prompting the university to open an investigation. In response, Chou terminated Laps, deactivated his badge and locked him out of the lab, according to the lawsuit. His access was later restored when Stanford intervened.

Stanford concluded that Laps, who has since resigned from Stanford and left the country, did not face discrimination, nor did Chou retaliate against him. The lawsuit alleges that those conclusions were “predetermined.”

In other words it seems clear enough that this Jewish researcher was subject to the most blatant antisemitic abuse – and Stanford University tried to bury it. 

Lerman told JNS that the Brandeis Center sees “it as part of a trend that we’re seeing lately with universities very badly treating Israeli students and postdocs.”

The state of American academia…