Letter to MIT expressing concern about the decision not to allow Professor Michel DeGraff to teach a course relating to Palestine in Fall 2024

Sally Kornbluth

President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Sally.kornbluth@mit.edu

 

Paula Hammond

Vice Provost for Faculty, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

hammond@mit.edu

 

Danny Fox

Linguistics Section Head, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

fox@mit.edu

 

Sabrine Iatridou

Graduate Program Director, Linguistics Section, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

iatridou@mit.edu

 

Dear President Kornbluth and colleagues: 

 

We write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom to express our concern about the decision of MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy to deny Professor Michel DeGraff permission to offer a proposed course on language, linguistics and decolonization in Israel/Palestine. There is reason to believe that this decision reflected political considerations rather than Professor DeGraff’s competence to design and teach the proposed course, thereby contravening the principles of academic freedom.

 

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the prestigious International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 2,800 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and outside of North America.

 

According to reporting in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in November 2023 Professor DeGraff began developing a seminar “to explore how language can both fuel harmful propaganda and the peacemaking process, focusing largely on the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Discussions about the course with the head of the department’s Linguistics Section, Professor Danny Fox, began in December 2023. After Professor DeGraff proposed the course, Professor Fox, along with the department’s Graduate Program Director Professor Sabrine Iatridou, and its then-Director of Undergraduate Studies Donca Steriade, emailed Professor DeGraff asking for a course description and reading list while also suggesting that the course (at that time titled “Use of Language and Linguistics in (De)colonization and Liberation Struggles”) might best be offered in another department. On 8 May 2024 Linguistics faculty members agreed that Professors Fox, Iatridou and Steriade would act as a committee to decide whether to approve the class. Professor Professor DeGraff maintains that he was unaware of a similar procedure having been deployed with regard to any other proposed departmental course. On 20 May 2024 the faculty committee decided that the course should not be offered, a decision that was in part based on the claim that the subject matter fell outside of Professor DeGraff’s area of academic expertise. 

 

After Professor DeGraff went public with what he saw as an unprecedented and unfair process, including in an article published in the MIT student newspaper The Tech,  MIT Vice Provost for Faculty Paula Hammond constituted a panel of professors from outside the department to examine the process used to assess Professor DeGraff’s course. According to the Chronicle, the panel found that the Linguistics Department had adopted a “reasonable and fair process” that conformed to “the range of approaches departments use to decide on a new course.” In fall 2024, with funding in part from the MIT Women & Gender Studies program and MIT Mind Hand Heart office, Professor DeGraff’s proposed course became a speaker series, now titled “A People’s Seminar for MIT Community on Language & Linguistics in Decolonization and Liberation Struggles in Haiti, Palestine, and Israel.” Professor DeGraff reports that five students successfully petitioned the Linguistics Department to award them credit for taking the course as an “independent study,” not as a linguistics course.   

 

The circumstances surrounding the decision not to approve the proposed course, and Professor DeGraff’s history of teaching in the department, suggest that the political sensitivity of a course sympathetic to Palestinian narratives, and some faculty members’ discomfort or disagreement with those narratives, may have played a role in the decision to refuse to authorize the course as a department offering. Professor DeGraff contends that, in his first meeting with Professor Fox about the proposed course, Professor Fox called him an antisemite because DeGraff, as an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania, had written to that university’s then-president, Liz Magill, alleging that she had succumbed to the influence of “Jewish donors” in formulating a statement to the Penn community soon after 7 October 2023 that Professor DeGraff felt inadequately addressed the rights of Palestinian civilians. In a 13 March 2024 email to Professor DeGraff about the course, his department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies asserted that what the Chronicle termed “the intensifying political climate” around the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza was “a very real worry for faculty as well as students. So don’t you think that under these circumstances a communal faculty think is warranted to see what is the best thing we can do to represent the department?”  

 

We note that the course that Professor DeGraff proposed closely followed the format of a fall 2021 graduate course which Professor DeGraff had offered within the Linguistics Department, titled “Linguistics and Social Justice: Language, Education, and Human Rights.” In this 2021 course, several class sessions related to Professor DeGraff’s area of expertise – the Creole language and its minoritization – were followed by sessions on other minoritized languages, including Ch’ol, Basque, Inupiaq, and languages in Ireland and New Zealand; a number of guest speakers also brought their expertise to bear on these topics. The“People’s Seminar” version of Professor DeGraff’s course brought general linguistic theory, including work by scholars such as Noam Chomsky as well as his own expertise on Haiti, into dialogue with Israel/Palestine and the use of the Arabic language in Israel. As in the fall 2021 course, guest speakers addressed their areas of expertise; they included Chana Morgenstern of Cambridge University, Yonatan Mendel of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Samira Alayan of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

 

It is also worth noting Professor DeGraff’s history of teaching on social justice issues in the Linguistics Department prior to the proposed course. Professor DeGraff has taught at MIT since 1996. In addition to his published research on Haitian Creole, he co-founded the MIT-Haiti initiative, which seeks to improve Creole-language education in Haiti, and the Platfòm MIT-Ayiti pou yon lekòl tèt an wo, a database for sharing Creole teaching materials developed with a colleague in the MIT Department of Mathematics and funded by the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab. Professor DeGraff’s stature in the field of linguistics is evidenced by election in 2023 as a Fellow of Linguistic Society of America (LSA), the most prominent institution in the field. MIT publications on Professor DeGraff’s election suggest strong support for his engagement with contemporary political questions as well as his activist approach. For example, in a news release dated 13 October 2022 on the MIT  website, Professor Fox is quoted as saying that “it is good to see a professional organization like the LSA promoting scientists not just for their research, but also for the kind of activism that might accompany it: battling prevalent misconceptions about the nature of the world, identifying their detrimental consequences, and fighting for change. Michel has been involved in all these activities.” It is clear that the field of linguistics, and the MIT Linguistics department, valued not only Professor DeGraff’s substantive research on Creole but also the “kind of activism that might accompany it,” as Professor Fox put it. 

 

We therefore call on MIT to initiate a thorough, independent and transparent investigation of the circumstances that prevented Professor DeGraff from offering the course he had proposed for the fall 2024 semester. We further call on MIT to publicly and forcefully reiterate its commitment to the principles of academic freedom, including the right of faculty to propose, design and teach courses that reasonably relate to their areas of scholarly expertise.

 

We look forward to your response.

 

 

Sincerely,

 

Aslı Ü. Bâli 

MESA President

Professor, Yale Law School

 

Laurie A. Brand
Chair, Committee on Academic Freedom
Professor Emerita, University of Southern California