MIT’s President Is Still Standing

And then there was one.

The campaign to force the resignation of Sally Kornbluth, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has ramped up significantly in the days since Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University.

Kornbluth is the last woman standing of the three university leaders who were called on to resign after last month’s congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. The presidents were condemned for their attempts to diplomatically respond to a question from Rep. Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican, on whether calling for the genocide of Jewish people violated their colleges’ codes of conduct.

M. Elizabeth Magill stepped down from the presidency of the University of Pennsylvania less than a week later after facing an intense wave of scrutiny and a donor revolt over her response to pro-Palestinian protests. Gay resigned amid plagiarism accusations.

In a post on X about a half hour after The Harvard Crimson broke the news of Gay’s resignation, Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager behind much of the push for the presidents to step down, questioned, “Et tu Sally?” Stefanik posted in all caps, “TWO DOWN.”

Ackman later said he plans to conduct a full review of whether Kornbluth has plagiarized. (He disclosed his plan a day after his wife apologized for instances of plagiarism in her own doctoral dissertation, from MIT.)

On December 7, two days after the hearing, the executive committee of the MIT Corporation, which is the university’s board of trustees, released a statement in support of Kornbluth. The MIT Alumni Association Board of Directors, faculty governance, and dozens of deans, department heads, and other faculty leaders also released statements of support.

Kornbluth “has done excellent work in leading our community, including in addressing antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate, all of which we reject utterly at MIT,” the MIT Corporation’s statement reads. “She has our full and unreserved support.”

Kimberly Allen, a spokesperson for the university, said last week that the administration “continues to underscore” letters from those groups.

The MIT Corporation did not respond to a request for comment.

On January 3, the day after Gay resigned, Kornbluth announced a series of changes, including reviewing the university’s process for handling student-misconduct complaints, creating a new Committee on Academic Freedom and Campus Expression, hiring a new vice president for equity and inclusion, and including a set of questions focused on antisemitism and Islamophobia in the campus-climate survey.

“I’m working to use every lever available to address conflict on our campus, enhance the tenor of our discourse, and help us find improved ways to live and work together here at MIT,” the statement says.

Since the hearing last month, some alumni and faculty members have been pressing for Kornbluth to resign.

A petition for her resignation has now garnered more than 3,000 signatures (the petition is open to the general public).

“President Kornbluth’s continued presence in office sends a dangerous message: that the safety and well-being of Jewish students are not priorities at MIT,” the petition says. “This is unacceptable. A university that claims to uphold values of equality and justice cannot stand idly by while its own students are targeted with hate speech and violence.”

Edward Cotler, a 2002 MIT graduate who started the petition, said he’s lost faith in how the campus is operating.

Kornbluth “doesn’t do the things that make Jewish people feel welcome on campus and Jewish students feel welcome on campus,” Cotler said. “She doesn’t take the right action. She’s not a bold leader.”

Just before winter break, two senior executives from the university reached out to Cotler to set up an in-person meeting with Kornbluth.

On January 2, a few hours before Gay resigned, Cotler agreed to a one-hour meeting on January 9 with Kornbluth and booked a ticket from New York to Boston. But on January 7, an MIT executive who had arranged the meeting said it was being canceled because of a conflict. Cotler said he was not given an option to reschedule. He said he had a similar experience with Mark P. Gorenberg, the chair of the MIT Corporation, who had been scheduled to meet with him in early December.

“I don’t know what’s going on with MIT and who is helping these administrators decide what to do in this crisis,” Cotler said, “but they seem to be all over the place.”

Allen, the MIT spokesperson, confirmed that Kornbluth was unable to make the meeting but said that she has met with “numerous alumni” over the past few months.

The MIT Jewish Alumni Alliance, which formed in November to help combat antisemitism on the campus following pro-Palestinian protests, has also applied pressure on MIT, though it’s not calling for Kornbluth’s resignation, yet. The group has called out Kornbluth for not apologizing after the hearing (Magill and Gay both issued apologies for their testimonies). The alliance also asked the administration to discipline student protesters more harshly and announce that calls for violence against civilians is grounds for expulsion, among other demands. The group is encouraging alumni to decrease donations to $1 a year until the “administration takes constructive action to address the growing antisemitism and intolerance of Jewish presence on campus.”

Kornbluth has yet to commit to any of the demands, said Matthew Handel, an MIT alumnus and a founder of the alliance.

While the group’s members want to work with Kornbluth, they won’t wait forever, he said.

Her January 3 memo, he said, was a “missed opportunity to begin the correction process.”

“Our approach is to try to solve the problem first,” Handel said. “But if people or a person like Dr. Kornbluth doesn’t show any interest in trying to really solve the problem, the next step is to find people who will.”

Retsef Levi, a management professor at MIT, said that Kornbluth has “lost control” of the campus and failed to keep the community safe. He pointed to rising incidents of antisemitism at MIT and said he had spoken with many students who were scared to leave their dorms during the first few weeks of the war. Levi also expressed concern over diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that he said enforced a mentality where Jewish people are always seen as an “oppressor” rather than “the oppressed.”

But the impact of Kornbluth’s resignation would be limited, Levi said.

“MIT and other universities really need a reset of leadership,” he said. “The style of leadership has to be much more broadly engaging to the entire campus and not a small group of people and faculty and students that dictate an ideology that I don’t think is representative of the entire campus.”

Last week Mauricio Karchmer, a computer-science lecturer, announced his resignation from MIT in a LinkedIn post. Karchmer, who declined an interview request, wrote that MIT’s administration “exhibited open hostility” toward Jewish and Israeli students and employees.

Levi said he’s confident that Kornbluth won’t be able to rebuild trust with faculty or be an “effective leader” without it. She will resign, he said. It’s just a matter of when.

“As much as [MIT’s administration] tries to deny this reality, I think that the reality is the reality and it will turn out to be that way sooner than later,” Levi said. “But whether it’s going to take two months or two years — that’s hard to assess.”

Kornbluth, a cell biologist, became MIT’s president a year ago this month. She grew up in Fair Lawn, N.J., and has degrees in political science, biology, genetics, and molecular oncology. She began her career as an assistant professor of pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke University before becoming vice dean for basic science at the Duke School of Medicine and, eventually, the university’s provost. She’s also Jewish, which she discussed during the House hearing.

As pressure builds on Kornbluth, some at MIT don’t think her resignation would fix the problems the campus is facing.

Calls for Kornbluth to resign are a distraction from the continuing violence in the Gaza Strip, said a statement to The Chronicle from the MIT Coalition for Palestine, a group of 14 pro-Palestinian student organizations.

“We recognize that this is just another method that the billionaire donors and right-wing, Zionist politicians are using to suppress the movement,” the statement said.

Many faculty members at MIT still support Kornbluth, said Peko Hosoi, a mechanical-engineering professor and the associate chair of the university’s faculty governance.

Removing the president wouldn’t resolve such problems as differentiating between free speech and harassment, Hosoi said. Instead, the administration and faculty need to work together to enact changes quickly.

“We all understand that there are problems that have to be worked out, and I think everybody’s ready to roll up their sleeves and work them out,” Hosoi said. “I don’t think we’re the kind of community where we will just hand responsibility off to the administration.”

To Hosoi, the loudest calls for Kornbluth to resign are mainly external. Most faculty members are hoping to work with the president to fix issues on campus, Hosoi said, especially since she’s only been in her role for a year and seems “ready to engage.” While MIT could still operate without Kornbluth, it becomes much more difficult when presidents can be forced out by people on the outside, Hosoi said.

“I don’t think we should be running our institution based on Tweets. That doesn’t seem like a great way to do things,” Hosoi said. “If it turns out that presidents can be removed in that way, even if they have the internal support, then I think we have a bigger problem.”