The Brandeis Center argued in its complaint that MIT has become a ‘hotbed of anti-Semitic hate and lawlessness’ since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack against Israel
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology defended a professor who repeatedly harassed a Jewish student until he dropped out of school and an instructor who served in the Israel Defense Forces, according to a federal anti-discrimination lawsuit filed against the university on Wednesday.
Linguistics professor Michel DeGraff allegedly started targeting a student, William Sussman, after Sussman complained about a seminar titled, “Language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation and for peace and community building from the river to the sea in Palestine and Israel to the mountaintops in Haiti and beyond.”
DeGraff accused campus Jewish groups, including Hillel and Chabad, of funding the spread of a “Zionist mind infection.” He allegedly sent department-wide emails threatening to use Sussman as an academic “case study” of the “Zionist mind infection,” which he has described as a result of “settler-colonial Zionist propaganda,” the complaint from the Louis. D Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law reads.
According to the complaint, DeGraff’s “harassment was so extreme and intolerable” that Sussman felt he had to “leave MIT and abandon the course of study he had been pursuing.”
The MIT Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office declined to investigate DeGraff for discrimination, arguing that the professor’s comments were a critique of “how [Israel’s] ‘propaganda’ about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has impacted the discourse,” and were unrelated to Sussman’s Jewish identity.
Administrators also allegedly declined to investigate another complaint against DeGraff from MIT instructor Lior Alon.
Alon said DeGraff harassed him by posting Alon’s photo, personal information, and “details of his Israeli military service” on social media after Alon attended a campus vigil for victims of Hamas. The Brandeis Center alleged in the complaint that Alon began facing harassment during his daily life—at the grocery store and at his child’s day care center—as a result of DeGraff’s actions. Alon emailed MIT president Sally Kornbluth with the details of DeGraff’s alleged harassment, but the university declined to address the concerns, according to the Brandeis Center complaint.
The cases are “emblematic of a larger problem on the MIT campus, where anti-Semitism has been permitted to take root and fester,” said the complaint from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. The university, the Brandeis Center alleged, has become a “hotbed of anti-Semitic hate and lawlessness.”
MIT has faced scrutiny over numerous anti-Semitic incidents on its campus since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack against Israel. The House Education and Workforce Committee launched an investigation into the university last year after reports of anti-Israel demonstrators having urinated on the campus Hillel building, harassed Jewish students, and called for an “intifada” came to light.
MIT’s president Kornbluth—alongside Claudine Gay and Liz Magill, her former colleagues from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively—refused to say whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated MIT’s policies. While Gay and Magill ultimately lost their jobs, Kornbluth has held on.
Neither MIT nor DeGraff responded to requests for comment. DeGraff’s automated email reply said he is “no longer faculty at MIT Linguistics. I’ve been removed out of [sic] my academic unit of 28+ years and now I am ‘Faculty at large’ in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences.”
“This is a textbook example of neglect and indifference,” said Brandeis Center chairman Kenneth L. Marcus in a statement. “Not only were several anti-Semitic incidents conducted at the hands of a professor, but MIT’s administration refused to take action.”
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