On December 5, 2023, Michel DeGraff submitted a request to teach a course about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In the 10 months since then, the professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been locked in a near-constant feud with his department head and colleagues. An MIT dean has issued formal letters of reprimand and withheld a pay raise.
DeGraff’s colleagues argue that the course — which would analyze the language used in conversations surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — doesn’t align with the department’s curriculum and that DeGraff lacks the necessary expertise to teach it. DeGraff believes the rejection is actually rooted in his pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus and social media, activism he considers an obligation.
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On December 5, 2023, Michel DeGraff submitted a request to teach a course about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In the 10 months since then, the professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been locked in a near-constant feud with his department head and colleagues. An MIT dean has issued formal letters of reprimand and withheld a pay raise.
DeGraff’s colleagues argue that the course — which would analyze the language used in conversations surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — doesn’t align with the department’s curriculum and that DeGraff lacks the necessary expertise to teach it. DeGraff believes the rejection is actually rooted in his pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus and social media, activism he considers an obligation.
“I don’t think it’s fair to expect professors to check their morals at the door of the classroom,” DeGraff said in an interview with The Chronicle.
The dispute has spilled into public view. DeGraff has accused the university of infringing on his academic freedom, which he’s written about in columns for The Tech, MIT’s student newspaper, and in social-media posts. Meanwhile, linguistics faculty members have pushed back, condemning DeGraff for pinning the course’s rejection on political bias and for singling out the head of their department, who is Jewish and Israeli.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a lightning rod on campuses for years. But as the current war rages on and ideological divisions harden, college curriculum has come under a harsh spotlight. Republican members of Congress have accused colleges of allowing professors to spread antisemitic rhetoric in their classrooms. In Florida, the chancellor of the state’s public universities ordered a review of certain courses for “anti-Israel bias.” As these tensions persist, curricular decisions can become especially fraught.
For some scholars, DeGraff’s predicament underscores a deeper concern over the dampening of academic freedom, which has traditionally granted professors latitude to teach about topics slightly outside their expertise in the pursuit of intellectual curiosity.
But many of DeGraff’s MIT colleagues argued that the review of the proposed course was appropriate and prudent, and that DeGraff’s frustrations veered into problematic personal attacks that muddied a fair process.
DeGraff thought his proposal was about as routine as it gets: He wanted to teach a course inspired by his forthcoming book.
The book is not about the Middle East. But, as DeGraff sees it, both the book and the course are focused on the intersection of linguistics and social justice, the topic that has defined his almost 30-year tenure at MIT.
I don’t think it’s fair to expect professors to check their morals at the door of the classroom.
Originally from Haiti, DeGraff joined the linguistics and philosophy department in 1996, specializing in the study of Creole, a group of languages born during the rise of colonialism. His previous seminars have examined issues like racism, prejudice, and human rights through the lens of linguistics. Outside of teaching, DeGraff is also director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, a nonprofit that promotes access to STEM education taught in Haitian Creole.
DeGraff’s colleagues have lauded his ability to marry linguistics and activism. In 2022, Danny Fox, head of the linguistics department, praised DeGraff for using linguistics to combat “prevalent misconceptions about the nature of the world, identifying their detrimental consequences, and fighting for change.” Fox’s comments came in an article marking DeGraff’s recognition as a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.
DeGraff said his passion for activism has always extended beyond the classroom, but he’s become increasingly outspoken since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 Israelis. Israel’s military response has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians over the past year.
DeGraff has attended pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus and criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza on social media, referring to the conflict as “Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.” Sometimes he wears a keffiyeh, a traditional Arab headdress that has become synonymous with pro-Palestinian advocacy.
“It stands for something that’s very important — for the struggle of people that have been denied their land, their home, their self-determination. And as a Haitian, I feel for that,” DeGraff said.
As DeGraff’s activism has intensified, so has the backlash. He was confronted on campus by a student affiliated with the MIT Israel Alliance, according to an MIT Police Department report. DeGraff also reported receiving a threatening letter in the mail related to his activism.
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Three days after the war began, DeGraff emailed his department head, Fox, about the outbreak of violence in Israel and Gaza.
DeGraff wrote that the situation was “beyond horrendous” and that he wanted to send “good vibes of friendship” to his Israeli colleague, according to emails the professor shared with The Chronicle. He suggested having lunch or coffee. Fox agreed, replying that it was “a difficult time on so many levels.” Scheduling conflicts prevented the two from meeting for weeks, according to the emails.
In November, DeGraff and Fox again exchanged emails about the war. Fox expressed opposition to DeGraff’s use of the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
Around Thanksgiving, Fox wrote to DeGraff: “It might not be easy for us to meet, given what might be real disagreements. But it is also important, I think.” DeGraff replied, “I do think it’s OK that we disagree.” The professor said he hoped they would be able to “learn from each other, even in this awfully tense context.”
Fox did not respond to repeated requests from The Chronicle to discuss his relationship with DeGraff.
Around that time, DeGraff began envisioning 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. The course would be open to graduate students, upper-level undergraduates, and visiting faculty and students from other colleges.
According to the course description DeGraff developed months later, class discussions were to feature topics like anti-Palestinian rhetoric in U.S. media coverage, the distinction between antisemitism and warranted criticism of the Israeli government, and biases embedded in the Israeli education system.
Many of the readings that DeGraff envisioned assigning expressed pro-Palestinian views, featuring known critics of U.S. foreign policy and Zionism like Noam Chomsky and Edward Said. The course title that DeGraff ultimately landed on — “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” — drew from the controversial phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Many pro-Israel advocates argue the phrase is a call for the destruction of Israel.
DeGraff’s list also included some readings focused on pro-Israel views, including “Why Anti-Zionism Is Inherently Anti-Semitic,” by Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman.
The seminar was to rely heavily on guest speakers, most of whom are either critics of Israel or whose research centered on anticolonial thought. One proposed speaker, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, is Israeli and a former professor at Hebrew University. She was suspended last year from a different institution over remarks she made in a WhatsApp group chat about the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. She wrote: “‘After so many years that the neck of the occupied has been suffocating under your iron foot and suddenly was given a chance to raise his eyes, what kind of gaze did you expect you would see there?’ We saw this gaze.”
In December, DeGraff emailed Fox about his course proposal. A few days later, the two met over Zoom to discuss DeGraff’s teaching plans for the fall.
According to DeGraff, the conversation veered off course from an academic discussion to a heated exchange, driven by Fox’s opposition to DeGraff’s views on the war.
On the call, DeGraff said, Fox accused him of antisemitism, citing a letter DeGraff had written to Liz Magill, then president of the University of Pennsylvania, DeGraff’s alma mater. In the letter, DeGraff accused Magill of bowing to pressure from “Jewish donors” when she issued a statement at the start of the Israel-Hamas war that he found insufficiently sympathetic to Palestinian civilians.
At one point during the meeting, DeGraff said, he drew comparisons between Hitler’s antisemitic rhetoric and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s characterizations of Palestinians. He said Fox responded with profanity. According to DeGraff, Fox later apologized.
“This was the first time, in my entire career as a professor, I had a department head tell me, ‘You’re fucking out of your mind,’” DeGraff said.
The meeting between DeGraff and Fox was the start of months of conflict that eventually implicated the entire department.
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In January, at Fox’s request, DeGraff submitted the proposed course’s title for official consideration: “Use of Language and Linguistics in (De)colonization and Liberation Struggles.” At the time, the title did not include “from the river to the sea.”
Fox wrote back a few weeks later, saying the title raised questions about the course’s alignment with the linguistics curriculum and suggesting it might be more suitable for another department. The email, also signed by Sabine Iatridou, director of graduate studies, and Donca Steriade, director of undergraduate studies, asked DeGraff to provide a course description, syllabus, and core readings. DeGraff provided the exchange and dozens of other emails to The Chronicle.
DeGraff said he had never faced such questioning over a course proposal.
In subsequent emails to Fox, Iatridou, and Steriade, copying all department faculty, DeGraff said that the manuscript the course was based on was incomplete. He also said that he would “fine-tune” the content closer to the seminar’s start and during the semester, which he called routine for discussion-heavy courses.
It is important to remember that academic freedom does not grant faculty permission to teach whatever they want.
“I will not accept to have my work censored in the ways you suggest,” DeGraff wrote on February 2.
Fox responded with a message signed by him, Steriade, and Iatridou, saying that similar requests had been made for other curricular proposals — for instance, philosophy courses that focus on “interactions between philosophical and social political work, in the context of activism.”
In email exchanges over the next couple of months, DeGraff continued to portray the review of his seminar as an assault on his academic freedom. DeGraff said he believed the extra scrutiny was driven by Fox’s opposition to his characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal.
Most faculty in DeGraff’s department appeared to view the situation differently. Those involved with reviewing the proposal defended their decision to do so. Several linguistics faculty members did not respond to or declined The Chronicle’s multiple requests for comment on the ongoing dispute.
“A close study of these documents,” Steriade wrote to The Chronicle, referring to emails DeGraff shared with the publication, “will provide as much information as I’d be able to offer.”
In a March 13 email to DeGraff, Iatridou said the intensifying political climate had contributed to the decision to review the course.
“This is a very real worry for faculty as well as students,” Iatridou wrote. “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, and the people in it? How can this possibly hurt?”
Iatridou also expressed frustration with DeGraff for repeatedly connecting the review of his course to his disagreements with Fox about the Israel-Hamas war, which she said had nothing to do with the decision.
“You have decided to draw connections between unconnected events and jump to conclusions,” Iatridou wrote in an email on March 14. “I can repeat myself only so many times. I give up.”
In April, DeGraff provided information to Fox, Steriade, and Iatridou about his plans for the course, which included a list of expected speakers and a course description.
Emails also revealed that colleagues repeatedly urged DeGraff to attend in-person faculty meetings to discuss the concerns raised about his course during the review process. DeGraff said he refused to attend such meetings because it would conflict with his academic-year sabbatical. DeGraff also said he wouldn’t meet with Fox, Steriade, and Iatridou, to protest what he later described as an “unfortunate saga of repression.”
Linguistics faculty members unanimously agreed during a May 8 faculty meeting, which DeGraff did not attend, that Fox, Iatridou, and Steriade would work as a committee to make a determination about whether to approve the class. Such a process, according to DeGraff, had never been used for any linguistics-course proposal in his decades working for the department. (A faculty panel later determined that the committee’s approach aligned with the various methods departments use to review course proposals.)
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“How can this department head be the one voting and organizing a process for a course that he already told me he disagrees with on political grounds?” DeGraff said. “To me it is disingenuous to claim the two are not connected.”
The faculty committee officially rejected DeGraff’s seminar on May 20. Its reasoning hinged mostly on one issue: DeGraff’s expertise.
Fox, Iatridou, and Steriade expressed support for DeGraff’s work on language and education in Haiti, a topic that was sprinkled throughout the proposed course description. However, they raised concerns about DeGraff’s ability to teach about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and some of the fields of linguistics covered in the course readings. The committee presented DeGraff with several options for moving forward. He could either revise the course proposal to address the committee’s concerns or pursue teaching the class under a different academic department — either alone or with another professor.
“It is important to remember that academic freedom does not grant faculty permission to teach whatever they want,” the committee wrote to DeGraff. “Instead, it protects the faculty’s right to teach material within their areas of expertise.”
In response, DeGraff sent a blistering email to the committee, MIT administrators and faculty members, the national office of the American Association of University Professors, the MIT Free Speech Alliance, and others within the academic community, including students.
“The above observations clearly suggest a Palestine exception that doubles as an attack on my academic freedom — in line with what we now see happening at campuses across the nation, a new McCarthyism,” DeGraff wrote on May 29, referencing the argument that pro-Palestinian scholars aren’t afforded the same right to speak out as scholars who support other causes.
Toward the end of the email, DeGraff referred to his disagreements with Fox. He said he’d be open to discussing his course as long as “any meeting that includes Danny Fox and where we have to discuss discourse about Israel and Palestine can proceed without any yelling on his part.”
Fox, along with the department’s two directors, replied to the student and faculty recipients of DeGraff’s message, saying that DeGraff had mischaracterized their conversations. “This is not about political views,” they wrote, adding that many linguistics faculty members support efforts against the “Israeli occupation” and “war on Gaza.”
Over the following weeks, DeGraff continued to contest the rejection over email, but the committee did not change its stance.
Around that time, DeGraff took his academic-freedom case public.
During the summer, he began posting on social media and contacting news outlets. In June, DeGraff wrote about the situation in MIT’s student newspaper, The Tech. “I doubt it’s a coincidence that this exceptional level of scrutiny — in effect, censorship — is led by my department head, an Israeli,” DeGraff said in the column, calling out Fox.
Linguistics faculty members publicly responded to DeGraff’s piece in The Tech in July. The column, signed by nine faculty members, asserted that the rejection was the result of a course-approval process that had involved a committee selected by the department’s faculty and extensive department discussions, not political interference.
DeGraff’s attacks on Fox had gone too far, faculty members wrote. “The decision did not stem from our head’s nationality and political beliefs (which, as it happens, Prof. DeGraff’s column characterizes misleadingly), and to imply that it did is an unwarranted personal attack,” they wrote.
In July, MIT administrators got involved in the situation. DeGraff hoped they would overrule his department’s decision on the course. He didn’t get what he wanted.
Activism outside the classroom can actually deepen a faculty member’s understanding of the issues, and deepen the teaching from that kind of understanding.
Paula T. Hammond, MIT’s vice provost for faculty, commissioned a review and tapped a faculty panel of professors outside the linguistics department. The panel concluded that the linguistics department had followed a “reasonable and fair process” in line with “the range of approaches departments use to decide on a new course,” according to emails obtained by The Chronicle.
DeGraff’s persistent protests eventually led to professional consequences.
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Agustín Rayo, dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, sent DeGraff a series of letters over the last several months, each marked “private” and “confidential,” that reprimanded him for what Rayo described as inappropriate conduct. Rayo cited the fact that DeGraff regularly copied students and faculty members uninvolved in the ongoing dispute in email correspondences, as well as DeGraff’s public remarks about Fox’s Jewish and Israeli identity.
By the third letter, Rayo’s tone sharpened: The dean informed DeGraff that his planned salary increase would be suspended for two months, beginning September 1. In subsequent letters, Rayo extended this suspension through March 31, 2025.
“I have directed that you stop this practice multiple times; a directive which you have, to date, ignored,” Rayo wrote to DeGraff on October 3.
An MIT spokesperson provided a statement from Rayo about DeGraff’s case: “This decision is an academic one, which reflects the thinking of a panel of linguistics faculty about what should be taught as part of the linguistics curriculum at MIT,” Rayo wrote. “I appreciate the breadth of ideas and scholarly contributions by all of our faculty members.”
At MIT, not many faculty members have openly defended DeGraff. One who has done so is Haynes Miller, a mathematics professor who also helped develop the MIT-Haiti Initiative.
“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time in 70 years that MIT has prevented a professor from teaching students in a classroom for political reasons,” Miller wrote in an email to The Chronicle. He referenced Dirk Struik, a left-wing MIT mathematics professor who was suspended from teaching in 1951 after being indicted for conspiracy to overthrow the Massachusetts and United States governments. “We are seeing an era of McCarthyism.”
The dispute at MIT comes amid a national debate about the role of activism in academe and the degree to which academic freedom should shield extramural and intramural speech.
DeGraff views his vocal stance on Palestinian rights as an extension of his scholarly expertise in social justice and linguistics. But as pro-Palestinian demonstrations re-emerge on campuses this fall, administrators and some faculty members are taking steps to avoid appearing to engage in or endorse activism. Many colleges have adopted or considered institutional-neutrality policies in an attempt to establish themselves as institutions of learning outside the political fray.
A handful of academic-freedom experts and professors who study the Middle East wouldn’t comment directly on DeGraff’s expertise, but they largely agreed that professors can engage in activism without rendering themselves unfit to teach.
“Activism outside the classroom can actually deepen a faculty member’s understanding of the issues, and deepen the teaching from that kind of understanding,” said Risa L. Lieberwitz, former general counsel for the AAUP and current president of Cornell University’s chapter.
DeGraff’s June column in The Tech raises serious concerns about potential bias in the review process for his course, she added. Lieberwitz, whose expertise is focused on labor and employment law, said that her ongoing activism in support of collective bargaining and unionization has never drawn scrutiny over her ability to teach about these subjects. A different standard seems to apply when it comes to pro-Palestinian advocacy, she said.
Ussama Makdisi, a history professor at the University of California at Berkeley and scholar of modern Arab history, said that a professor’s expertise can evolve.
“Professors develop new interests and teach new interests all the time,” said Makdisi, who was recently named inaugural chair of Berkeley’s new endowed program in Palestinian and Arab studies. “But on this issue, there is consistent censorship.”
A key consideration for faculty members seeking to balance activism and teaching, some professors stressed, is ensuring all sides of complicated issues are explored equally in the classroom.
Steven R. David, a professor of international relations at the Johns Hopkins University, said professors who use their classes to impose their political views about the war onto students are committing malpractice. David has taught his course, “Does Israel Have a Future?” since 2016. The class engages students with a range of viewpoints on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through debates and discussions.
While it’s difficult to fully omit political bias in teaching on subjects like the Israel-Palestine conflict, David — who is Jewish and supports the existence of Israel while being critical of its government — said it’s important to make possible biases known to students and limit them in instruction.
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“I’d like to think that the test of my class, and other classes in this area, is that you cannot, by looking at the syllabus, know the opinion of a professor teaching the syllabus,” David said.
Bernard Haykel, a historian of the Middle East and professor at Princeton University, said he establishes clear rules against thought policing and encourages his students to play devil’s advocate.
Although social-justice and political disputes can raise tensions on campus, Haykel said, colleges are uniquely positioned to engage with difficult topics.
“The best way that can happen is if the university and departments uphold standards of academic freedom very rigorously, which means no censorship of anyone on either side of these issues,” he said.
For now, DeGraff has been allowed to conduct his seminar as a speaker series, which began in September.
Three students were allowed to receive credit for participating by registering for an independent study with DeGraff. Still, this workaround highlights the unresolved friction between DeGraff and his department, which maintains its decision to deny the seminar as a regular linguistics course offering.
DeGraff’s absence from linguistics faculty meetings has become routine. Recently he also sparred with the editors of his department’s weekly newsletter, accusing them of censoring requested announcements about his speaker series. The newsletter has since been suspended after all the editors resigned last week, according to an email DeGraff shared; they didn’t say why in the message.
As the war continues, some students and scholars are becoming ever more vocal about Palestinian rights, while others are sounding alarms about antisemitism. Colleges are struggling to respond to complaints from both sides — and, in some cases, determine whether speech or conduct has crossed a line. One tenured professor said her institution fired her for expressing pro-Palestinian views.
DeGraff stands behind his seminar proposal and how he’s advocated for Palestinian rights. Yet, if he’d known how the process would unfold, he said he would have been more strategic about gathering support for the course within his department.
“But I’m not a politician,” he said. “I’m a scholar-activist who takes linguistics as a powerful tool for mutual understanding, justice, and peace for all worldwide, and I don’t regret that.”