Jessica A. Krug — the George Washington University scholar who recently admitted to lying for years about being a Black Latina — has resigned, effective immediately, the university’s provost and dean of arts and sciences told the campus on Wednesday.
Krug didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
On September 3, Krug, then an associate professor of history, confessed in a Medium post that, for the better part of her adult life, she had “eschewed” her “lived experience” of her white Jewish childhood and instead identified “within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then U.S.-rooted Blackness, then Caribbean-rooted Bronx Blackness.”
She wrote that she had been “battling some unaddressed mental-health demons” but that those issues would never explain or justify her behavior. “There is no ignorance, no innocence, nothing to claim, nothing to defend,” she wrote. “I have moved wrong in every way for years.”
Before Krug went public, a small group of Black Latina scholars had suspected that she was lying and had begun questioning her close friends and editors, two of the scholars, Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez and Yarimar Bonilla, wrote in The Guardian. Krug’s decision to go public was probably a “pre-emptive move” to control the narrative before being exposed, they wrote.
After the revelation, current and former students of Krug’s told The GW Hatchet, the university’s student newspaper, that they felt betrayed by her deception. And Krug’s departmental colleagues quickly called on her to resign. Failing that, they wrote in a public statement, her tenure should be rescinded and she should be fired.
“The discipline of history is concerned with truth-telling about the past,” the statement said, and Krug’s conduct had raised questions about “the veracity of her own research and teaching.” Tenure is intended to protect intellectual freedom, said Dane Kennedy, a professor in the department. It’s not meant to protect someone “who engages in lies and deception to further their professional career.”
In their Wednesday email to the campus, M. Brian Blake, the provost, and Paul Wahlbeck, dean of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, said that Krug’s classes this semester would be taught by other faculty members and that students in those courses would receive “additional information this week.”
They also encouraged students who had been affected by Krug’s actions to seek support at one of various university offices. Faculty and staff members could seek assistance through the university’s well-being hotline, they wrote.
“We hope,” they said, “that with this update our community can begin to heal and move forward.”
