A federal lawsuit filed against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week accuses a tenured professor of harassing an Israeli researcher and Jewish student, to the point where the student left the university.
Meanwhile, the suit claims that MIT President Sally Kornbluth and other top administrators stood idly by.
The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law — on behalf of Jewish students, researchers and faculty — filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts Wednesday accusing MIT of allowing faculty and students to cultivate “an environment rife with anti-Semitism and fear.”
The professor, Michel DeGraff, is also named as a defendant in the suit.
The 71-page court filing claims MIT became a “breeding ground for hatred” following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel. It says students celebrated the terrorist attacks, urged violence against Jews and interrupted classes with antisemitic chants.
Read more: 6 Mass. schools are under federal investigation for antisemitism. What are the claims?
Students also urinated on the campus Hillel building, blocked Israelis and Jews from entering certain areas of campus, and distributed “terror maps” promoting violence at campus locations deemed Jewish, the lawsuit claims.
The Brandeis Center previously filed a similar lawsuit against Harvard University, which prompted the school to make changes in order to address antisemitism.
‘My mother is worried that he is going to get me killed’
The suit alleges that President Kornbluth “emboldened” DeGraff, a then-tenured linguistics professor who publicly harassed a young Israeli researcher through the spring and fall of 2024.
DeGraff posted the researcher’s name with the context that he served in the Israeli Defense Forces — as all Israelis do — and shared images and videos that he edited on social media, at one point tagging Al Jazeera, according to the lawsuit.
DeGraff then published an article in a popular European newspaper, Le Monde, about the researcher, the suit said.
As a result of the professor’s actions, the lawsuit claims, the researcher was confronted by strangers in various locations, including at his child’s daycare and the grocery store.
The lawsuit accuses Kornbluth of not taking action when the researcher emailed her expressing concerns for his safety and the safety of his family.
Then, in November 2024, the lawsuit claims DeGraff “relentlessly harassed a Jewish student in full view of President Kornbluth and top-level administrators” when he sent a series of mass emails accusing the student of having a Jewish “mind infection” and threatening to use him as a “real-life case study” in a class.
According to the complaint, Kornbluth and the other administrators copied on the exchange remained silent.
That same day, fliers were slipped under doors in a dormitory where the student had previously lived, targeting him specifically in white lettering on a green band — styled after Hamas headbands — advocating for violence against Jews, the lawsuit states.
The student at one point contacted MIT Police seeking a restraining order. “My mother is worried that he is going to get me killed,” he wrote in an email to police.
The student ultimately left MIT before completing his PhD program as a result of the ongoing harassment, “abandoning a dream and a promising career in computer science.”
The alleged incidents involving DeGraff were previously reported on by conservative media websites Campus Reform and the Daily Wire.
Last October, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a story about how DeGraff’s request to teach a course about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resulted in a department-wide clash. DeGraff has also claimed he’s faced censorship and attacks for trying to teach about Palestine at MIT.
Neither MIT nor DeGraff immediately returned requests for comment for this story.
An automated email response from DeGraff stated that he is no longer faculty at MIT Linguistics, and has since been “removed” to instead be faculty at large in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
“I have very limited bandwidth over the summer to reply to email, especially media inquiries from bad-faith reporters,” the automated reply said.