Arkansas Professor Sues Over Firing She Says Was Driven by State's Antisemitism-Funding Law

A faculty committee at the University of Arkansas voted unanimously to reinstate Shirin Saeidi. The university fired her anyway.

Saeidi, a tenured professor of political science, was removed in December from her position as director of the school's King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies over social media posts critical of Israel, according to a lawsuit she has now filed against the university. A national free-speech organization wrote to the school at the time objecting to the removal. Saeidi was terminated outright in March. An appeal failed in May, and the university upheld the firing.

The 15-count suit seeks to void the termination, recover back pay and damages, and strike down Arkansas Act 721, a state law signed in April 2025 by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The law allows the state to cut off public funding to any college or university found to have allowed or failed to act against antisemitism.

"This law is a really good example of a limitation on free speech disguised as equal protection," said Badria Mryyan, one of Saeidi's attorneys.

Mryyan said the combination of Act 721's funding threat and pressure from a state senator, not any university finding of wrongdoing, drove Saeidi's dismissal.

The campaign

The lawsuit says the push against Saeidi was organized over several months by the Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists, an Iranian American group opposed to Tehran's government. The group lobbied the university with claims that Saeidi worked on behalf of the Iranian government and allegations of plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation at Cambridge. Saeidi denies both accusations.

"When someone tries to take everything from you, and your identity, your scholarship, your entire labor of your adult life through framing you and lying to the media, it works," Saeidi told The Intercept. "It makes people doubt you, and this is the big issue with defamation. So it's been shocking to experience it, but I was not surprised."

The lawsuit names Lawdan Bazargan, listed as the group's director in public filings, as having spearheaded the effort. Bazargan denied the allegations in a statement, writing that she "categorically" denies defaming Saeidi or conspiring with journalist Benjamin Weinthal, Sen. Dan Sullivan, or university officials to secure her termination.

Leonard Bright, a professor of public service and administration at Texas A&M, said the case follows a pattern that should concern anyone watching campus speech on Israel and Palestine. "This is a case of a person expressing their viewpoints on their own personal Twitter pages, and when an investigation was conducted to see if they violated university rules, the university employees said no," Bright said. "For the university president to come and override that, that's highly disturbing, and it compromises the faculty member's freedom to speak her mind about issues of public concern."

Saeidi said she has since left Arkansas because she no longer feels safe there. Her case now tests whether a state law built to police "antisemitism" on campus can survive a First Amendment challenge when the record shows a university overruling its own faculty process under outside and legislative pressure.