Commentary: UVA Darden’s New Dean Comes Under An Ugly & Unfair Attack

Yael Grushka-Cockayne has been dean of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business for less than a month. Apparently, that was long enough for some students to decide she should be fired.

Students for Justice in Palestine at UVA is demanding her resignation, accusing Darden’s new dean of supporting and even participating in “genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing.”

The evidence?

Grushka-Cockayne is Israeli. She served in the Israel Defense Forces as a young woman, as most Israelis are required to do. And before beginning her academic career, she worked for an Israeli software company.

That’s about it.

There is no evidence that Grushka-Cockayne committed a war crime. No evidence that she participated in anything resembling ethnic cleansing. No evidence that she had anything to do with the conduct of the current war in Gaza. In fact, her military service ended in 1996 — nearly three decades before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, that triggered the current war.

But facts like those apparently don’t matter when outrage is the objective. There is another curious fact about this campaign. The people making these extraordinary accusations don’t publicly identify themselves.

SJP’s petition demanding Grushka-Cockayne’s resignation identifies its creator simply as “SJP (UVA) Students for Justice in Palestine.” The group’s Aug. 13 statement accusing her of participating in genocide was similarly issued in the organization’s name. No individual author or officer is identified. UVA recognizes SJP as a Contracted Independent Organization, yet its public university listing names no officers. The organization’s current president and executive board do not appear to be publicly identified.

Think about that for a moment.

A student organization is willing to identify a professor by name, accuse her of participating in genocide and demand that she lose her job. But the individuals leveling those accusations aren’t putting their own names on them. If you’re going to make an accusation that serious against another human being, shouldn’t you at least have the courage to put your name behind it?

What makes the attack even more absurd is that Grushka-Cockayne is hardly an unknown quantity at the University of Virginia. She has been at Darden for 17 years. That’s a long time for colleagues and students to get to know someone. And during those years, Grushka-Cockayne has established herself as one of Darden’s most admired professors and academic leaders.

She has twice won Darden’s Outstanding Faculty Award. She has won UVA’s All-University Teaching Award and the Mead-Colley Award. She previously led Darden’s full-time MBA and professional degree programs and served as academic co-director of the school’s LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business. Her online course on project planning and management has reached more than 350,000 learners in roughly 200 countries.

This is the person we are now supposed to believe is somehow unfit to lead Darden because she was born in Israel and once served in its military?

Come on.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to be horrified by what has happened in Gaza. The enormous loss of Palestinian life and destruction in Gaza are undeniable. The policies and conduct of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government deserve scrutiny, criticism and debate.

Universities should be among the places where that debate is most vigorous. But criticizing the Israeli government is one thing. Holding an Israeli-born professor personally responsible for the actions of that government is something else entirely.

And it is a dangerous road to travel. Would we hold an American professor personally responsible for Abu Ghraib because he once served in the U.S. military? Would we demand that a Russian professor resign because Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine Would we question whether a Chinese-born academic should lead a university program because of Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs?

The questions sound ridiculous because they are ridiculous. Yet that is essentially the standard being applied to Grushka-Cockayne.

There is another irony here that should not be lost on anyone at Darden.

Business schools spend enormous amounts of time telling students how to become better leaders. They teach critical thinking. They teach students to examine evidence, challenge assumptions and resist simplistic answers to complicated problems.

Darden, in particular, has built its reputation around precisely that kind of intellectual engagement. Its case-method classrooms depend on students listening to people with different views, weighing evidence and changing their minds when the facts warrant it.

What lesson does it teach if a professor can spend 17 years building an exemplary record as a teacher, scholar and administrator only to have her fitness for leadership questioned because of her nationality?

Grushka-Cockayne became Darden’s 10th dean on Aug. 1. She is also the first woman in the school’s 70-year history to hold the job. She is an excellent choice for the dean ship.

Judge her on whether she attracts great students and faculty. Judge her on the quality of a Darden education. Judge her on whether graduates get great jobs. Judge her on whether she raises the money necessary to keep Darden among the world’s best business schools. Judge her on whether she has the courage to make difficult decisions and the judgment to make the right ones.

And by all means, judge her on what she says and does as dean. But don’t judge her for being Israeli. And don’t casually accuse a respected professor of genocide because she once wore the uniform of the country where she was born.

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John Byrne is the founder of Poets&Quants and a former Executive Editor of Businessweek and Editor-in-Chief of Fast Company.

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