Soon after admitting she faked her identity as a black woman, George Washington University assistant professor Jessica Krug resigned. Her resignation from the GWU’s history department was effective immediately and her classes will be picked up by other professors in the department.
GWU sent an e-mail about Krug’s resignation and said that it hoped “that with this update our community can begin to heal and move forward.”
Krug had written a blog post on Medium that she had lied to colleagues, university officials, and students during her academic career about her racial ethnicity and upbringing. She had claimed that she was a black woman, when she was a Jewish woman raised in the Kansas City metropolitan area. She acknowledged that she had “various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness.”
Krug blamed her lies on “unaddressed mental health demons” that she has been combatting in her life.
Her academic expertise was in the history and culture of the African diaspora, and she has taught history classes on African history and culture.
Krug is just one prominent professor who lied about her ethnicity and upbringing. In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, an adjunct professor at Eastern Washington University, was outed as a white woman despite her denials. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also claimed she was part-Cherokee for years but she later apologized after her presidential campaign botched its public relations announcement about her DNA test.
