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Washington. — Colleagues of George Washington University history professor Jessica Krug have called for her to resign after the prestigious school was forced to stop short of firing her for pretending to be black throughout her academic career.

“The discipline of history is concerned with truth telling about the past,” members of GWU’s history faculty said Friday in a joint on statement. “With her conduct, Dr Krug has raised questions about the veracity of her own research and teaching.”

The statement called for Krug to resign from her position as an associate professor or to be stripped of her tenure and fired if she refuses.

The response followed a statement by GWU saying that Krug won’t be teaching her classes in the current semester amid a university review of the situation. The university could be hard-pressed to fire Krug because her position is tenured. “They can’t just fire her,” Mia Bloom, a Georgia State University professor and terrorism analyst, said on Twitter. “She has tenure and lying about being a different race doesn’t qualify for one of the conditions in which you can lose tenure.”

If GWU were to terminate Krug’s position on that basis, or to accuse her of moral turpitude, the administration would put itself in the awkward position of essentially saying that being black was one of the qualifications for Krug’s job.

Massachusetts lawyer Omar Ghaffar tweeted that he’s glad to see such a conflict play out because it exposes a problem with tenured academia: “It speaks to the failure to vet and to a great prejudice against students who disagree with such militant views. We need to disinfect the academic system by outing more people like this.”

Krug, who also worked as an “Afro-Latina” activist in New York City under the alias Jess La Bombera, shocked her colleagues when she revealed last week in a Medium.com post that she had posed for almost her entire adult life as a black person.

She said she is, in fact, white and Jewish and grew up in suburban Kansas City. She used various black identities, including North African and African American, before settling on “Caribbean-rooted Bronx blackness.”

“I have built only this life, a life within which I have operated with a radical sense of ethics, of right and wrong, and with rage, rooted in black power, an ideology which every person should support, but to which I have no possible claim as my own,” Krug said.

She said she suffered abuse as a child and assumed a false identity as a “teenager fleeing trauma.” — RT.