Massachusetts Institute for Technology has failed to address “severe and pervasive harassment and discrimination” of Jewish and Israeli students on campus adequately since Oct. 7, according to a lawsuit that the Louis Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts on Wednesday.
Paul Eckles, the center’s senior litigation counsel, told JNS that the 71-page complaint details a “series of real pervasive acts of antisemitism,” including urinating on a Hillel building, celebrating Hamas, chanting for Israel’s destruction, giving out terror maps and identifying Jewish groups using antisemitic slogans whose “only possible purpose of which would be to incite violence against those organizations.”
The “terror maps” that students distributed throughout campus highlighted buildings that “had connections to the Jewish and Israeli communities and promoted violence against them with the phrases ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ and ‘resistance is justified when people are colonized,’” per the complaint.
The complaint also alleges that a professor at the school publicly harassed a Jewish student and a Jewish postdoctoral associate and that the university failed to take disciplinary action against the faculty member, identified in the complaint as Michel DeGraff, a linguistics professor and director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative. (JNS sought comment from MIT and from DeGraff.)
DeGraff “aggressively” filmed Israelis, who were singing “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, in May 2024 when an anti-Israel encampment was erected on campus, per the complaint. The professor allegedly “shoved his phone” in the face of Lior Alon, the postdoctoral associate named in the suit who is now an instructor at the university.
“Soon after, Professor DeGraff posted videos on social media with Alon’s face, name and personal information, including details of his Israeli military service, tagging Al Jazeera and others—putting Alon at serious risk,” per the lawsuit. “Professor DeGraff edited the videos, creating a false narrative vilifying Alon.”
The professor also published an op-ed in a French paper that defamed Alon and falsely attributed statements to him, per the complaint.
Along emailed Sally Kornbluth, the MIT president, asked that the school require DeGraff to remove his offensive social media posts, but MIT never responded nor took any disciplinary action, the complaint alleges.
Kornbluth kept her job, though the Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania presidents both stepped down after the trio testified about Jew-hatred on campus before a House Committee on Education and the Workforce in December 2023.
The new lawsuit also alleges that DeGraff harassed Will Sussman, president of the MIT Graduate Hillel, to the point where the doctoral student dropped out of his doctoral program at the school.
“The administration was fully aware of the activity of the MIT professor, of the other acts that we talk about, and has failed to stop the conduct from occurring, that prevent it from happening again, to punish the wrongdoers, to enforce its rules,” Eckles told JNS.
“Fundamentally it has failed to acknowledge that it has a real antisemitism problem or take appropriate actions that deal with it,” he said.
Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Brandeis Center and a former assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education, stated that “this is a textbook example of neglect and indifference.”
“Not only were several antisemitic incidents conducted at the hands of a professor, but MIT’s administration refused to take action on every single occasion,” he stated.
Eckles told JNS that the Brandeis Center opted to file a district court lawsuit, rather than a complaint to the Education Department, due to the “seriousness” of the alleged incidents in the complaint, a professor being listed as a defendant and the MIT administration’s “lack of a response.”
“We have two individual plaintiffs, who have stepped up and put their name out there and get involved, who’ve been victimized and harmed in intangible ways, who are seeking fundamentally and most importantly systemic change and relief on the campus, but also recovery for them to remedy the harm that they experienced,” he told JNS.
Universities are quick to denounce Jew-hatred from the far-right, but “are less willing to see antisemitism when it’s tied up with what’s going on in the Middle East,” according to Eckles. “They are not used to recognizing the type of antisemitism they’re seeing and are just frankly in denial about what’s occurring and its seriousness.”
“That’s something that we’re seeing on a number of campuses and are hoping to change,” he told JNS. “The very people who are tasked with protecting students are not only failing them but are the ones attacking them.”
To remove hate from college campuses, “we must hold faculty and the university administration responsible for their participation in, and in this case their proliferation of, antisemitism and abuse,” he said.
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