A professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, says the university violated her freedom of speech rights by suspending her for her online comments about Israel’s war in Gaza in a new lawsuit.
The suit was filed by Rupa Marya, an internal medicine physician and professor at UCSF, identified as an expert in decolonial theory. Marya was placed on leave in September 2024 and had her clinical privileges briefly suspended by the UCSF executive medical board following comments she made on X that questioned the impacts of Zionism as “a supremacist, racist ideology” on healthcare.
Without naming Marya directly, the university subsequently published a statement across its social media accounts that said such comments were a “tired and racist conspiracy theory” that “Zionist doctors were a threat to Arab, Palestinian, South Asian, Muslin and Black patients, as well as the US healthcare system” and should be condemned.
A storied US agency, one that began under President Kennedy in 1961 with the aim of...
