FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: MAY5 21, 8:00AM
On May 17, MIT’s administration narrowly survived a de facto vote of no-confidence in its decision-making. Tenure-track faculty voted on a resolution calling on administrators to drop interim suspensions against us, concerned scientists active in the anti-apartheid, anti-war movement for Palestine on campus. The vote reveals that faculty are split, with 45% to 55% calling for an impartial faculty-led disciplinary process that does not prejudge students as guilty until proven innocent. The narrow margin demonstrates the growing disunity between faculty and the administration.
The suspensions are inordinate punishment imposed without due process. Qualifiers like "interim" or "temporary" do not ameliorate the immediate harm that the suspensions have brought upon our lives. MIT has arrested us, evicted us, banned us from campus, barred us from graduating, and rescinded our funding and wages for our labor without a single disciplinary hearing; we were guilty before we even heard our charges. These harms fall with greater impact on students of color, who represent about 80% of those suspended. The legitimacy of the suspensions are deeply questionable. They violate state law, disregard MIT's own policies, take a shredder to grad workers’ collective bargaining agreement which protects concerted action in the workplace, and flout greater principles that MIT claims to hold dear. With regards to state law, Massachusetts tenant law applies to campus housing: landlords like MIT cannot evict tenants or licensees without a court order and without due process. Yet, five students have been summarily evicted from campus housing.
MIT also violates its own policies. First, students who face disciplinary action have the right to confront the evidence against them; that right was denied to us. The dismissal of four cases that were based on dubious information and racial profiling is a clear admission by MIT of the lack of rigor put into issuing initial suspensions. Second, according to MIT rules, sanctions are supposed to be gradual, measured, and proportionate. Yet they have reached for the most severe punishment first by banning us from campus on the premise of ‘safety’ when we all know their decision is about power and ideology. This is a highly political, arbitrary, hasty, vague, and frankly racist attempt at silencing young scientists who recognize that MIT’s collaboration with the Israeli military is immoral and must end.
Presumption of innocence until proven guilty is fundamental to a just society, yet MIT’s administration has flagrantly violated that principle. To convince faculty and the public, administrators spin a web of lies; they mis-translate our chants and cherry-pick images to suit their narratives. The enforcement of interim suspensions was originally intended as a mechanism to protect reporters of sexual assault from their alleged perpetrator. In communication to faculty, provost Cynthia Barnhart explicitly drew that analogy to us in their statement on Wednesday. MIT administrators are saying in effect that we threaten the MIT community at the same level of a sexual predator. This is a heinous abuse of campus safety rhetoric to punish political speech and non-violent civil disobedience. If the administration truly cares about sexual violence, we invite them to investigate the many counter-protestors, including MIT students, who have screamed variations of “Go to Gaza to get raped!” to our faces. Even then, we are doubtful that our reports on these incidents submitted to MIT’s official report system (IDHR) will do anything but languish for months until they’re eventually dismissed. In fact, we are aware of a number of cases of repeated sexual harassment and assault that MIT has quietly swept under rug – the perpetrators given paid leave, their funding preserved, and no interim suspension imposed. The hypocrisy is insufferable.
Of course, we have seen these tactics before. In the 1980s, there were similarly heated faculty meetings about MIT’s decision to tear down shanty-town structures on Kresge Lawn built by students protesting MIT’s complicity with apartheid in South Africa. In 1970, at the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement, MIT targeted student-leader Michael Albert with expulsion for “rude and divisive language”, even as the Union of Concerned Scientists and Social Action Coordinating Committee fought to get MIT out of the business of dropping napalm on the Vietnamese. We join our predecessors in demanding that MIT research affirm human life, not build dystopian and militarized futures. As our colleague Ira Rubenzahl (SACC student leader) told The Tech in 1969: “One doesn’t have the right to build gas chambers to kill people.” To that we add, “One does not have the unqualified right to build drones to kill people.” Academic freedom must have limits; scientific institutions and laboratories do not have the right to collaborate with génocidaires.
We as young scientists at MIT are not risking our livelihoods for the hell of it. We have material demands. These demands are rooted in the deepest principles of human morality and international law. MIT should immediately end its research ties with the Israeli military and stop taking Israeli funding for weapons and surveillance research. This funding is a minuscule fraction (only .03%) of MIT’s 2023 allocated research sponsorship. If MIT actually adhered to its own rules, as detailed in the 2020 Suri report, this funding would be immediately rejected on the grounds that the Israeli military is “directly engaged in gross violations of political, civil, or human rights.”
There is recent precedent for such divestment. In 2022, MIT voluntarily ended its collaboration with Moscow-based Skolkovo Institute following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. MIT administrators now spin an Orwellian fiction, claiming that Skoltech was an “institute-level programmatic commitment” while the IDF-sponsored grants today are “independently sought by laboratory heads” and purportedly protected by academic freedom. A quick look at MIT’s financial records expose this hypocrisy: in 2022 at least 26 PIs took funding from Skoltech, representing 45 grants and nearly ten times the amount currently sponsored by the Israeli military. Following the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Skoltech funding at MIT was immediately and unilaterally ended mid-stream without PI input, and transitional funding was made available. Similarly, in 2019, MIT publicly condemned the killing of the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and unilaterally ended millions of dollars of lucrative research grants sponsored by the Saudi state-owned oil giant ARAMCO in 2020. There is no excuse for refusing to similarly condemn the Israeli government and cut research ties.
The difference between these cases is not legal or technical; it’s political. By equivocating, the MIT administration asserts that some human beings matter more than others and that the prejudices of its donors and trustees trump Palestinian life. We reject this assertion. There are now the human equivalent of 35,000 Jamal Khashoggis dead in Gaza, including over 100 journalists. More than twice as many civilians have been killed in Gaza over the past 6 months than have died in Ukraine over the past two years. This week, the International Criminal Court announced its intent to issue arrest warrants for Israeli cabinet officials, characterizing the siege on Gaza as a starvation campaign. The scale of famine is reminiscent of the Srebrenica massacre.
In January 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s conduct in Gaza plausibly constitutes a genocide in intent and effect. Yet Israeli media and cabinet officials continue to relentlessly pump out Radio Rwanda levels of dehumanizing propaganda about Palestinians. For more than half a century, Israeli laws have enshrined a regime of apartheid – the domination of one ethnic or national group over another – which is present in all aspects of non-Jewish Arab life: voting, marriage, property rights, habeas corpus, civil liberties, internal movement, and rights to water, food, and shelter.
Finally, as young scientists, we recognize that polite emails and clever arguments alone do not convince institutions to change when they have stakes in the status quo. We must fight in every avenue–in the streets, in the press and with our labor. It was under popular pressure that administrators walked back their illegal eviction of a suspended student’s family this week. In fact, the whole toolkit of civil disobedience and disruptive protest – sit-ins, vigils, encampments, flyers, chants, and peaceful arrests – is part of the political tradition of students in this country. They may try to bury us under red tape and throw us in bureaucratic limbo; they may try to put us on the defensive with suspensions and inflict violence on our bodies. But they cannot suspend the movement for Palestinian freedom.
Our arrests and suspensions have called MIT’s bluff, exposing the ugly, naked face of power. We have ripped away the thin veil of their cliches about safety, diversity, inclusion, ethics, and critical thinking. When forced to choose, the administrators would rather inflict state violence on their own students than follow the principles of the MIT mission: to work “for the betterment of humankind.” Here MIT administrators have made a critical misstep. Sally Kornbluth, Melissa Nobles, David Randall, Suzy Nelson and the police who follow their orders believe that through suspensions and arrests, they can deter or demobilize us. Instead, MIT has radicalized us more deeply for the cause of Palestinian freedom. We will continue to agitate because we recognize there is no alternative. As the great American abolitionist Frederick Douglass said in 1857:
If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Free Palestine.