Michel DeGraff is a professor of linguistics at M.I.T. His specific area of expertise is Haiti's creole language. But after the 10/7 attack on Israel, DeGraff decided he wanted to teach a course about Zionism. The proposed course was 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 of Haiti and Beyond." M.I.T. said no.
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.”
Twenty paragraphs later, the author of this NY Times article mentions that DeGraff wasn't actually stopped from pursuing this entirely. In fact, DeGraff simply turned it into an ungraded seminar. The contents of that seminar are not mentioned at all by the NY Times. But a fuller discussion of it appeared in a Daily Wire story back in 2024.
In a seminar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, linguistics professor Michel DeGraff argued that Jews have no connection to Israel and that Israeli textbooks “weaponize trauma of the Holocaust.”
“They grew up with this trauma that made them fear that their existence is in threat, by anyone who doesn’t believe in the superior position of the Jewish people in Israel,” DeGraff said of Israeli youth...
Wednesday’s lecture had just 20 attendees, one of whom was manning the camera. During the seminar, a keffiyeh-clad DeGraff covered a variety of topics during the seminar which spanned from what he believes “Zionism really means,” and why he believes the “on campus Israel lobby” is a wealthy foreign-funded industry, to the recent attack of Jews in Amsterdam...
Before DeGraff’s Wednesday class, he faced criticism after an MIT graduate student, Will Sussman, exposed the previous week’s seminar, which featured a speaker claiming that Jewish religious and student life groups like Hillel and Chabad promote Zionism and are “targeting critics of Israel.”
Sussman pointed to DeGraff’s public Instagram post, which included screenshots of the speaker’s slides, writing that the lecture “opened our eyes on the workings of Israeli education as settler-colonial Zionist ‘mind infection’ for the Nazification of Palestinians.”
Gee, I wonder why none of this really got mentioned by the NY Times' author? It's almost like they wanted to present a portrait of DeGraff that had been drained of all of his obvious animus toward Jews.
In addition to his seminar, DeGraff was a constant presence at an anti-Israel tent camp set up at M.I.T. for several weeks. Here he is refusing to say how he felt about the 10/7 attack.
This is professor Michel DeGraff at the MIT encampment in the spring being smug and blowing kisses when asked if he condemns October 7 or Al-Qaeda. https://t.co/mZPaQBxoWf
— Kassy Akiva (@KassyAkiva) November 19, 2024
DeGraff seems to have pissed off nearly everyone he works with during his campaign to teach this class.
In the process of seeking approval to teach the class under the authority of his department, DeGraff had public clashes with department head Danny Fox. In a Zoom meeting between the two, DeGraff kept using charged language including describing the Israeli offensive in Gaza as a “genocide.” DeGraff told the Chronicle that, Fox responded by saying, “You’re f***ing out of your mind.”
After DeGraff’s course was officially rejected in May, he aired his grievances in emails that included many non-involved MIT faculty and students, social media, and the campus paper. In The Tech, DeGraff highlighted Fox’s Israeli nationality, criticized his political views, and defended the anti-Israel student encampment which he described as standing up to MIT’s complicity in “Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.”...
In July, nine senior faculty members from the Linguistics Department published a response to DeGraff’s article, voicing their support for Fox and criticizing DeGraff for suggesting that his course was rejected as a personal attack or due to Fox’s nationality or political beliefs.
This year he filed a lawsuit against his employer but he's been kicked out of his own department and is currently listed as a "professor at large." M.I.T. has pointed out that despite not being allowed to teach the class, DeGraff still led the seminar. In other words, he's not being silenced at all.
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.”
What DeGraff wants is for M.I.T. to cosign a class that he's not qualified to teach, one that just happens to line up with his personal politics and activism. In a normal environment, he would have been fired by now, but in academia he has tenure which means he can't be fired for almost anything, no matter how much he strays from the job he was hired to do.
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