In November 2009, subsequent to the Fort Hood shooting, Forbes.com published an article by Varadarajan titled "Going Muslim", a play on the colloquial American phrase "Going Postal". The opinion essay prompted some controversy, including political objections from some students at New York University, where he was a clinical professor, as well as in the media. NYU President John Sexton condemned the remarks as offensive. In the article "Is Your Professor an Islamophobe?", Columbia University epidemiologist and HuffPost contributor, Abdul El-Sayed, quoted Varadarajan's article, among others, when he discussed phenomenon of "a growing number of academics using (their) intellectual identity to promote intolerance and xenophobia against Islam and Muslims".