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@sautter.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 11:36 AM

The Controversial Class That M.I.T. Is Paying a Professor Not to Teach.
Michel DeGraff, a vocal pro-Palestinian activist, can’t be easily fired because he has tenure. But he has been kicked out of his department.
www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/u... .

#MIT | #Palestine | #Israel | #MichelDeGraff

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.

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