Before Oct. 7, 2023, I was the literal poster boy for a PhD student at MIT. I was featured in a July 2023 profile in MIT News, which relayed my background and aspirations.
“Although he has just two years of graduate school under his belt,” it said, “Sussman is considering a career in academia.”
That career is no longer available to me. In January, I left MIT because of the antisemitism I experienced on campus. Now I’m suing the university.
The antisemitism didn’t start on Oct. 7. I joined the board of MIT Grad Hillel during my first year on campus because, as I told MIT News, “I think it’s important to demonstrate Jewish culture at a time when antisemitism is on the rise.”
Three months after the profile was published, Hamas terrorists waged the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust — and my fellow students at MIT celebrated, posting, “Victory is ours.”
Chanting for violence
As president of Grad Hillel, I had to cope not only with my own grief but also with that of my community members who sought support in the face of antisemitism that they encountered on campus. We witnessed our peers chant for violence against Jews, take over buildings, interrupt classes with antisemitic rants, and harass, intimidate and bully Jews for being Jewish.
This hostile environment was exposed to the world in December 2023 when MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, was called to Congress alongside the presidents of Harvard and Penn, to answer for the antisemitism on her campus.
She testified, now infamously, that calls for the elimination of the Jewish people can be antisemitic “depending on the context.” After that day, calls for the genocide of Jews continued, and the climate of terror on campus intensified.
It became increasingly difficult to focus on my computer science research. Students were arrested for unruly protest both inside and outside my office building. A man urinated on the window of the MIT Hillel Center. When demonstrators erected an encampment in the middle of campus, MIT Hillel was forced to move and postpone its long-planned annual celebration of Israel’s Independence Day.
With MIT doing nothing to curb the escalating antisemitism on campus, the situation spiraled out of control.
In November 2024, a tenured MIT professor posted online that a “Zionist ‘mind infection’ ” is being funded by “Jewish student life organizations” such as Hillel and Chabad.
When I pointed out that his message was extremely dangerous rhetoric, the professor began targeting me personally in X posts to his 10,000 followers. He did so over and over again. In his sixth post, for example, he referred to me as “an excellent case study.”
I sent the professor an email with a simple request: “Please leave me alone.” He then emailed the entire Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, including students and faculty, promising to use me in his upcoming seminar as a “real-life case study” of the Jewish “mind infection.”
He continued targeting me in a relentless series of mass emails, copying high-level administrators, including Kornbluth. In one of these emails, he stated that I have “powerful connections” to the media and to “influential friends in Congress like Rep. Elise Stefanik” — which is false.
Staying silent
Suddenly, I became the target of widespread harassment. Students, staff and non-affiliates piled on, amplifying the professor’s vitriol against me. One staff member sent a mass email painting me as a racist. My mother worried I would be killed.
The most disturbing aspect of this whole episode was that Kornbluth — who was copied on the exchange where the harassment was on display in real time — stayed silent, as did the other high-level administrators. Not one of them intervened.
On the morning of the seminar, flyers were slipped under the doors in the graduate dormitory where I used to live, containing an article advocating for violent “resistance” against Jews. The flyer specifically targeted me. It contained a graphic styled after Hamas headbands that read, “This article and the author were banned from MIT after Zionists tweeted about it.”
I was one of the Jews who had tweeted about the article, which says, “We will burn the ground beneath your feet” next to the logo of a US-designated foreign terrorist organization.
Then the professor followed through on his awful promise, beginning his 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” — by discussing me.
“There was one student … I won’t mention his name, but you probably know who he is,” the professor said. “Let us not forget that as we engage in this academic exercise that there is a genocide going on.”
I filed a formal complaint with MIT’s Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office, but the staff decided “not to pursue a discrimination investigation” and stated that their decision “is not subject to appeal.”
Incredibly, they claimed that the professor’s conduct was not antisemitic because his use of the term “mind infection” refers to “settler-colonial Zionist propaganda” that he believes “is funded by the Israeli government.”
I was left with the distinct impression that MIT’s own antidiscrimination office had used common antisemitic tropes to reject my antisemitism complaint, and I felt there was nowhere left to turn.
No other choice
It was the privilege of a lifetime to study computer science at MIT. But when it became clear that the university would not protect me from the ongoing harassment and threats, I had no choice but to leave my PhD program and abandon my dream.
All because I am Jewish.
From Tablet magazine. Will Sussman is the lead plaintiff in a new lawsuit against MIT. He served as president of MIT GradHillel from 2023 to 2024. Follow him @realWillSussman.