JNS
“Why would BU, which has an honorable reputation otherwise, allow someone who publishes violent social media posts about Jews to be held out as an anti-bigotry fellow,” Douglas Hauer-Gilad told JNS.
Even after Douglas Hauer-Gilad had resigned from his adjunct law professorship at Boston University, the private school told him in January that it still intended to launch an investigation against him for allegedly cyberstalking a professor, who he says has no current ties to the school and whom he accused of making antisemitic statements.
The retired lawyer, who is Israeli and is studying to become a rabbi, said that he resigned from the school in January after more than seven years of teaching because he was afraid to show up on campus.
“You had high-level university officials finagling a process to overcharge somebody who’s Jewish and Israeli for protesting antisemitism,” he told JNS.
The episode began, as Hauer-Gilad tells it, when he saw anti-Israel social media posts by Sahar Aziz, distinguished law professor and chancellor’s social justice scholar at Rutgers Law School and a former BU visiting fellow. Shortly after Oct. 7, Aziz retweeted a post from a Gazan writer stating that “there were no rapes or ‘beheaded babies,’” a screenshot, which JNS viewed, suggested.
On Jan. 18, 2024, she wrote that three Palestinian American college students were shot in Vermont, “because Zionists are inflaming Islamophobia by accusing Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians of supporting terrorism. Blood is on their hands.” (The shooter was later determined not to have targeted them as Palestinians.)
Hauer-Gilad told JNS that he felt he had to speak out after seeing Aziz’s posts, since Boston University listed her as an “anti-bigotry fellow” on its website and that she had been a visiting fellow at BU’s now-defunct antiracist research center from 2021 to 2022.
“That perplexed me,” he said. “Why would BU, which has an honorable reputation otherwise, allow someone who publishes violent social media posts about Jews to be held out as an anti-bigotry fellow?” (JNS sought comment from Aziz.)
Hauer-Gilad asked university leadership why Aziz was being held as an anti-bigotry fellow on BU’s website, given her social media posts and her lack of current connection to the school.
“I firmly believe that people can have different views on Gaza. I’m friends with people who claim that Israel is committing genocide,” Hauer-Gilad told JNS. “What stood out here was a visible disconnect with BU holding somebody as an anti-bigotry fellow who is pushing out social media that had gone from the political to the violent.” (The Jewish state and Trump administration insist that Israel is not committing “genocide,” and U.S. and Israeli officials have said that charge is a blood libel.)
Colin Riley, executive director of media relations at Boston University, told JNS that the school “has a foundational commitment to nurture individuals from all backgrounds and create a place where they can fully engage and thrive in our community.” He added that “the university followed its processes for responding to the issues raised between Ms. Aziz and Mr. Hauer.”
Hauer-Gilad shared emails that he wrote to Aziz, copying others, in 2024 with JNS. In one, he asked her to stop denying Hamas rapes, noting that she holds “a very high level of authority as a scholar and thought leader.” He told JNS that he also sent Aziz’s social media posts to schools at which she was scheduled to speak about Gaza.
In one email, Hauer-Gilad asked Brian Ballentine, senior vice president for strategy at Rutgers and chief of staff to the public university’s president, what Rutgers is doing to encourage “Aziz to conduct herself in a civil and professional manner.” In another email, he wrote to the Rutgers Law School dean, copying Aziz and accusing her of being a “bigot and antisemite” and stating that he intended to file a bar complaint against her.
In December 2024, he wrote to two professors at Boston College, copying Aziz, telling them that it was a “serious lapse of judgment” for their department to host Aziz the prior month and that he would mention it to the college’s board and president.
That same month, he was informed that Boston University’s equal opportunity office and police department had received a complaint accusing him of cyberstalking.
Hauer-Gilad told JNS that Victoria Sahani, a law professor and then associate provost for community and inclusion at Boston University, sent the complaint. He added that Sahani is “good friends” with Aziz. (JNS sought comment from Sahani.)
Boston University’s police department did not find evidence to open an official police report, according to Hauer-Gilad, but the school intended to open a Title IX investigation of him. (JNS sought comment from the Boston University police.)
Under Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, a federal law, schools that receive federal funding are barred from engaging in sex-based discrimination, which includes sexual harassment and sexual violence, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Stalking is the most severe form of sexual or gender-based misconduct under Boston University’s Title IX policy, Hauer-Gilad said.
In a December 2024 email, which Sahani sent to the Boston University equal opportunity office, Title IX coordinator Jean Estevez, university police chief Robert Lowe and Kelly Nee, vice president for safety, security and preparedness, she wrote that she was filing a report sent to her “about actions committed by a BU law lecturer against a visiting law professor.”
In the email, Sahani wrote that the complainant was Aziz, whom she identified as a Rutgers law professor who had served as a visiting law professor at Boston University in 2021. She wrote in the subject line that the complainant was “a non-BU faculty member.”
In the complaint, Aziz accused Hauer-Gilad of “electronically stalking me for over a year” and having “defamed me in public” and “sent emails to the Rutgers president and law school demanding that Rutgers fire me.”
Aziz added in the note, which JNS viewed, that Hauer-Gilad “has made me feel unsafe.”
“I believe his motivations are hate toward me and a desire to hurt me as a Muslim and Arab woman,” she wrote.
Hauer-Gilad told JNS that Sahani knew that she could “push through” a “confusingly worded report” as a Title IX complaint. He maintains that his emails to Aziz were respectful.
‘Shook to the core’
On Jan. 5, Hauer-Gilad resigned from Boston University because he thought that he would be “in a position where I’d have to step out of class, because I would be told that I would be under investigation,” he told JNS. “If I’m under investigation for something as severe as stalking, then I can’t be in class.”
On Jan. 8, he had a Zoom call with two members of the Title IX office about his case, and told them that Aziz did not have standing in the complaint. He called the university’s Title IX office two days later, while he was driving in Florida, to ask if it had been dismissed. Hauer-Gilad was told that an investigation was going to be opened against him because Aziz is a member of the BU community.
“Imagine my utter shock and horror,” Hauer-Gilad told JNS. “It shook me to the core.”
The “whole purpose” of the Title IX complaint was to shut him down, according to Hauer-Gilad. “It was to get me out of BU, intimidate me,” he said.
Howard Cooper, an attorney for Hauer-Gilad, shared a January 2025 letter that he sent to Boston University asking it to confirm that it dismissed the complaint and retracted the “false police report” against his client.
Cooper told the school that there was no standing to open the Title IX complaint, since Aziz wasn’t a current BU professor. He noted that Boston University officials continued to refer to Aziz as “affiliated faculty,” although her website and resume do not state that she has any current affiliation with BU.
In his communication with Boston University, Cooper also stated that there were concerns that Sahani is biased, citing a letter she signed.
Cooper referenced a letter Sahani signed in March 2024 opposing the House Education and Workforce Committee’s probe of antisemitism at the Rutgers center for security, race and rights, and, she and colleagues said, targeting of Aziz. Sahani and other signatories said that House Republicans were engaged in “politically motivated and viewpoint-based attack on the center and a tenured university professor.”
Cooper also told BU that Sahani and Aziz serve together on the international law committee of the Association of American Law Schools and that if Sahani failed to disclose her relationship with Aziz when filing the complaint, that is “deeply concerning and profoundly unfair.”
Hauer-Gilad subsequently told Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean of the Boston University School of Law, that he would cease communicating with Aziz and asked her to convey that to Aziz. After he threatened to share his story with reporters, Hauer-Gilad told JNS that Erika Geetter, BU’s senior vice president and general counsel, took a “deep dive” into the case and told him that it was dismissed and offered him a “soft apology.” (JNS sought comment from Geetter.)
Yet Boston University didn’t address the contents of Cooper’s letter, according to Hauer-Gilad. JNS saw an email in which Geetter told him that Boston University did not receive an official Title IX complaint—only an email from Sahani. The university did not have jurisdiction to move forward with his case, she stated.
Hauer-Gilad told JNS that Boston University expels students who make false statements in the form of plagiarism. “It was incomprehensible that I would stand by and not speak up, and not raise to public awareness the fact that one of the most senior members at BU would be deceptive with respect to a Title IX complaint to help a friend,” he said. “That should never happen at a university.”
Title IX “is not a political weapon that, as a senior university administrator, you use for a friend,” he added.
Hauer-Gilad told JNS that he filed a complaint with the Department of Education under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act but opted to withdraw it for safety reasons.
He told JNS that he worried about “political exposure for work I’ve done in Ukraine, for human rights work I’ve done in other countries, including Malaysia and Pakistan, and for me to be potentially under more scrutiny by people who might threaten me because I am held out as responsible for bringing Donald Trump to BU.”
“I did not want to take that risk on,” he told JNS.
He thinks that Boston University leaders have acted in a “deplorable” way by declining to share “core documents” about the Title IX case with him.
Hauer-Gilad told JNS he is weighing suing Boston University and plans to file a defamation suit against Sahani and an ethics complaint against her with the Bar Association of the District of Columbia. (According to Sahani’s bio, she is “an active member of the bar in New York and the District of Columbia.”)
He also plans to meet with the Massachusetts attorney general to explore possible options against the university, he said, although he would drop the matter if Boston University issues a written apology to him.
“It makes me very sad,” he said. “I’m going to tell my story, because I think BU can do better and be better, and if I don’t tell my story, if I’m quiet, that’s exactly what BU wants.”
“They’re hoping that I get exhausted and go away,” he added. “That’s not my personality at all.”
