എം.ഐ.ടി.യിൽ വിവാദ കോഴ്സ്: പ്രൊഫസറെ പഠിപ്പിക്കുന്നതിൽ നിന്ന് വിലക്കാൻ സർവകലാശാലയുടെ നീക്കം

The name of the proposed Massachusetts Institute of Technology course was as provocative as it was long:

"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 of Haiti and Beyond."

The instructor was Michel DeGraff, a longtime tenured linguistics professor at M.I.T. who came up with the idea in the months after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. He was a leading faculty voice siding with pro-Palestinian campus protesters, whose frequent rallying cry for Palestinian freedom, "from the river to the sea," was seen by some Jews as antisemitic.

An M.I.T. panel rejected the course over questions about whether Dr. DeGraff, a Haitian scholar and expert in the study of Creole languages, had the expertise to teach it. That was supposed to finish the matter.

To Dr. DeGraff, it was more like the starting gun.

He disagreed that he lacked the ability to teach the course and protested the decision in a flurry of emails decrying it as part of a "new McCarthyism." He complained to his colleagues, including deans and the university's president in long email chains -- which he then made public.

He objected on social media and in published commentaries. He filed a federal lawsuit against M.I.T., accusing the school of chilling campus speech on Gaza and violating his academic freedom.

"M.I.T. should not be repressing my teaching in this way," Dr. DeGraff said in an interview. He called the decision a "violation of my professional rights."

The university, though a spokeswoman, declined to comment, though it has denied Dr. DeGraff's claims in legal filings.

As Dr. DeGraff's profile has risen, so has the volume of his critics. He was sued for harassment by a Jewish former student. A U.S. House committee staff report last spring accused him of perpetuating "antisemitic conspiracy theories."

Now three years into the dispute, his personal relationship with the M.I.T. linguistics section head, a onetime friend, is broken, and colleagues are exhausted by the controversy.

In many other American workplaces, employees who push back so forcefully would most likely risk their employment. But tenured professors are, by design, hard to get rid of.

He said in an interview that he had been denied a scheduled raise and access to new mentees, and had even been blocked from the department's Facebook page. For the third fall semester in a row, he said, he is being paid while not teaching a class.

He is one of a number of professors in disputes with their schools over speech recently.

Carnegie Mellon University announced in September that it was investigating social media posts from a professor who is accused of celebrating the deaths of conservative figures.

A University of Texas professor is contesting his 16-month paid administrative leave, which he believes is related to his criticism of school leadership.

And an arbitrator ordered San Jose State University to reinstate a tenured professor the university had fired over allegations related to her role in pro-Palestinian campus protests.

At a time when campus politics are under a microscope and schools are trying to avoid the attention of the Trump administration, Dr. DeGraff's fight has become one of the longest and most dramatic.

Chris Sharp, chief of staff at the Cicero Institute, a public policy organization based in Austin, said some tenured professors were cloaking their personal activism under the guise of "academic freedom." The term, he said, is often misconstrued as the right to teach or research without limit, when it should be understood as the right to teach and research within one's specialty.

"Just because I have a Ph.D. in one thing does not make me an expert in everything," he said.

Friends of Dr. DeGraff say his campaign for his proposed class came from his deep concern for free speech, human rights and his understanding of language as a means to exercise power.

"Michel's great virtue is his persistence," said Haynes Miller, an M.I.T. professor emeritus of mathematics who is close to Dr. DeGraff and who says his friend is not an antisemite. "He doesn't give up. If he sees an injustice he will attack it."

Dr. DeGraff, 63, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and persuaded his parents to send him to the United States to study computer science. But once there, he became more interested in his homeland's language, Haitian Creole, which, he said, is often derided as "broken French" and not a real language.

His Ph.D. thesis at the University of Pennsylvania was entitled "Creole Grammars and Acquisition of Syntax: The Case of Haitian Creole," he said. He joined the M.I.T. linguistics faculty in 1996.

Dr. DeGraff sees parallels between the Haitian struggle for independence and that of Palestinian people. "That is what brought me to want to further my research and teaching about these connections," he said.

The idea for the class came to him on Dec. 5, 2023, after he had watched M.I.T.'s president, Sally Kornbluth, and leaders of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania get rhetorically beat up by Republicans in a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism.

After the course was rejected, he turned the concept into a discussion series with guest speakers in the fall of 2024.

That year, he also frequently joined students who occupied part of campus in a three-week encampment demanding that the school end ties with Israel. He was there nearly every day, he said, before the police shut it down.

Agustín Rayo, dean of the M.I.T. School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, sanctioned Dr. DeGraff in late 2024. In a letter Dr. DeGraff shared, the dean said he was removing Dr. DeGraff temporarily from the linguistics section for being disruptive and creating the expectation that people who displease him "are at risk of being targeted" in public forums.

"Your speech rights do not place you above M.I.T.'s rules," the dean wrote in the letter.

Dr. DeGraff also came to the attention of congressional Republicans, who in a report pointed to accusations that Dr. DeGraff had targeted a Jewish student for harassment. That former student, William Sussman, joined a lawsuit against Dr. DeGraff and the school in 2025.

Mr. Sussman said Dr. DeGraff targeted him on social media as an example of a Zionist "mind infection" for his pro-Israel views. Mr. Sussman has said antisemitic harassment drove him out of the university.

Dr. DeGraff said the term "mind infection" came from an Israeli scholar who has used it to refer to how Israeli schoolbooks marginalize Palestinians. Dr. DeGraff said he was not an antisemite and that federal courts had said that criticism of Israel by itself is not inherently antisemitic.

Part of the suit, including the claims against Dr. DeGraff, was dismissed, though appeals are possible.

In a statement, Mr. Sussman criticized M.I.T., saying "the professor remains employed at M.I.T., where he continues to smear me."

His removal from the linguistics department means "his impact at M.I.T. is substantially reduced," said Dr. Miller, the friend of Dr. DeGraff's. "It is humiliating for him; it's a symbolic thing as well as a practical thing."

Last March, Dr. DeGraff filed a federal lawsuit against M.I.T., along with the congressional committee that had named him in its report and its chairman. In his suit, he accuses the university of punishing him for his political activism.

"If you ask faculty to keep quiet, then you are basically betraying the job of the university, which is to teach about difficult topics," he said.

M.I.T. denied his claims and asked the court to dismiss the suit.

"Indeed, the fact that DeGraff has continued to speak publicly and prolifically on the very subjects he claims have been chilled only underscores the speculative nature of his alleged injuries," the university argued in a court filing.

He is still scheduled to teach the spring classes he has taught for years, "Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities" and "Black Matters: Introduction to Black Studies."

Over this past summer, Dr. DeGraff proposed another new course, based on his book, published last month: "Our Own Language: Harnessing the Power of Kreyol and Other Mother Tongues for Education and Liberation."

It is common for professors at a research university such as M.I.T. to propose new courses. And in early September, an associate dean told Dr. DeGraff the department would discuss the idea. But first, could he provide a copy of the book?

No, Dr. DeGraff replied, the syllabus he submitted should be enough. Given the history with his last course proposal, he wrote, "requiring an additional departmental review of the book itself therefore strikes me as ongoing discrimination and harassment." He looped in top administrators, including Dr. Kornbluth, to his email.

His new class, he said, was rejected.