A tenured professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has long been accused of fabricating her Native American heritage, will be allowed to retire with full benefits and her title intact.
Ethnic Studies Professor Andrea Smith will reportedly be permitted to keep her present position through August of 2024. She will be allowed to teach classes until then.

Smith’s exit is the result of a separation agreement arranged by the school. It comes in the wake of a recent grievance by more than a dozen faculty members, who accused her of breaching academic integrity by lying about her Native American lineage.
The agreement is extraordinary both in that it will allow Smith to keep full benefits and the use of the honorary emeritus title, and in that the university will pay Smith up to $5,000 to cover the legal costs she undertook to settle the complaint.
Smith and the school signed the deal in January. Its terms prevent an investigation into the faculty gripe and authorizes Riverside to duck the legal battle that could be the consequence of its move to fire a tenured professor.
Accusations that Smith lied repeatedly about her Native American heritage date back to at least 2008, when she was denied tenure at the University of Michigan.


A spokesperson for Riverside said the agreement ‘brings a timely conclusion to Professor Smith’s continued employment with the university.’
‘Investigations of a tenured faculty member for alleged misconduct have potential for litigation and appeals, and can unfold over the course of years,’ he added.
Allegations about Smith’s ethnic background first surfaced in 2008, when her dissertation adviser, famed radical activist, Marxist, and academic Angela Davis called her former student ‘one of the greatest Indigenous feminist intellectuals of our time.’
It was then that Cherokee academics began conducting due diligence on Smith.
The Native American academic, Steve Russell, discovered that despite much of her personal and public identity being based around her status as a member of the Cherokee nation, Smith was not registered with the tribe.
After failing to obtain tenure at Michigan, Smith was quickly hired by UC-Riverside, but questions about her lineage did not disappear.
In 2015, amid the scandal centered on race-faker Rachel Dolezal, Smith once again came under fire.
Crucially, Cornsilk said he had discovered no links between Smith and the Cherokee Nation.

In an op-ed at the time, Cornsilk wrote: ‘Wannabes like Andrea use the myths of Cherokees hiding in the hills, passing for white or being saved by righteous whites, to perpetuate their lies.’
‘In the 1990s, Andrea Smith sought me out as a Cherokee genealogist, on two separate occasions, to see if she had any connections,’ he continued.
‘My research into Smith’s ancestry showed that her ancestry was not connected to the Cherokee people.
‘In the subsequent years, many have challenged her identity including representatives of the Cherokee Nation.
‘In those ensuing years, she has had ample opportunity to come forth with proof of her Cherokee claims.’
But she did not.
Cornsilk postulated that Smith could dial back her public claims of Cherokee blood, but could not admit her full deceit, given how much of her career was predicated on being a woman of color.
Smith’s work focuses primarily on violence against women of color – especially Native American women.
Perhaps ironically, she has taken relatively hostile stances in the past against white feminists for ‘opting to become’ Native American.
Over the years, various family members of Smith’s have come out of the woodwork to say there is no Native American blood in their family tree.
A relative on her father’s side said of her claims: ‘Yeah, we heard about that and we just kind of shook our heads.‘
The relative confirmed her father Donald was not Ojibwe (another tribe to which Smith allegedly claimed to be related); instead, he is a white man with British ancestry.
A family member on her mother Helen’s side, Margaret Jane Wilkinson, said Helen had never identified as Native American – until she did.
Yet another relative, cousin Barbara Smith, shot down the idea that it was anyone’s grandfather who was Native American, adding: ‘We’re mostly Scandinavian.’
UC-Riverside has stood by its tenure choice for all these years.