The MIT professor accused of harassing a Jewish PhD student out of the university by calling him a “real-life case study” of Zionist “mind infection,” remains on staff at the university.
Former Computer Science student Will Sussman described what he calls a “climate of terror on campus” for Jewish people at the university in a story published in The Post.
He is also suing MIT and the educator he claims targeted him, professor of linguistics Michel DeGraff.
Sussman alleges in the suit that he “was subjected to anti-Semitic harassment by Professor Degraff that was so extreme and intolerable that it forced him to leave MIT.”
Sussman claims in the lawsuit things started when he had objected to a guest lecturer speaking to DeGraff’s class “about an alleged settler-colonial Zionist (i.e. Jewish) ‘mind infection,’” being funded “through organizations such as Hillel [and] Chabad” – both Jewish campus groups, with Sussman the then-president of the Grad Hillel.
The lawsuit then claims DeGraff went on to call him a “real-life case study” in an email thread with high-profile staff, including President Sally Kornbluth, on November 10, 2024.
DeGraff also posted publicly on X a day earlier, starting a thread including Sussman’s handle attempting to justify the “mind infection” remarks.
Later in the chain he wrote to a different Jewish group’s account: “Sorry that your mind might seem so infected that you can’t follow the data & logic.”
He also pointed out the guest lecturer, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, is herself an Israeli Jew.
DeGraff, who is originally Haitian, received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. According to MIT’s website his interests include “education and knowledge production for decolonization and radical liberation.”
He has since talked about a “mind infection” in relation to Jewish people throughout December 2024 and January of this year.
Sussman alleges in his lawsuit that when he asking DeGraff to “please leave me alone” via email, he instead responded to the thread and “expressed an intent to explore this ‘real-life case study’ of Sussman at the next class.” It is unclear if that seminar ever took place.
Sussman also describes “a relentless series of mass emails, copying high-level administrators, including President Kornbluth,” causing a “pile-on” from other students, staff, and non-affiliates.
“The most disturbing aspect of this whole episode was that President 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,” Sussman writes in his op-ed.
In a response to The Post, MIT said it “will defend itself in court regarding the allegations raised in the lawsuit.
“To be clear, MIT rejects antisemitism. As President Kornbluth has said: ‘Antisemitism is real, and it is rising in the world. We cannot let it poison our community.’”
In his lawsuit, Sussman claims MIT’s Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office did not pursue a discrimination investigation after he filed a complaint.
A request for comment from DeGraff was not returned, but an automatic response from his MIT email clarified he is “no longer faculty” at MIT Linguistics as of November 2024 and has been “removed from [his] academic unit of 28+ years and now I am ‘Faculty at large’ in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.”
“One of the goals of Hasbara and the distortions therein is to distract from the horrors in Gaza and the West Bank,” he wrote. “So let’s keep centering what Amnesty International calls ‘a live-streamed genocide.’”
Sussman, who was considering pursuing a career in academia, is requesting “injunctive relief to eliminate the hostile climate for Jews and Israelis at MIT” and an “award of compensatory and consequential damages,” including loss of his educational opportunities, wages, and career earnings.
