The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has long stood apart from America’s elite universities.
Outside the Ivy League, the school prides itself on its anti-elite, prank culture. It uses standardized testing for admissions and releases those decisions on March 14 — better known as Pi Day. Situated right next door to Harvard University, it churns out rocket scientists, Wall Street quants and artificial intelligence experts.
For all its eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, MIT has been dragged into the biggest controversy in decades in US higher education. It started with allegations of antisemitism on campus in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. But it has since morphed into a broader fight over free speech and diversity.
MIT President Sally Kornbluth, a cell biologist, has faced calls for weeks to be fired, demands that have intensified this week after Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, quit after just six months in the role. Gay’s exit came on the heels of the resignation last month of the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill.
All three leaders were excoriated for their performance at a Dec. 5 congressional hearing over antisemitism on campus, when they provided narrow legal responses to Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s question about whether calling for the genocide of Jews is against university policy. While Gay and Magill said it depended on context, Kornbluth, who is Jewish, responded that it would be investigated as harassment “if pervasive and severe.”
Her slightly more forceful response made no difference to Stefanik and investor Bill Ackman, who led a campaign driven by social media to oust Gay from Harvard.
Kornbluth, who through a spokeswoman declined to comment, has always been in a different and less vulnerable position than the leaders at Penn and Harvard.
Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, also faced claims that she’d committed plagiarism in her scholarship. Magill had already been under pressure prior to the Hamas attack and Israel’s invasion of Gaza. In September, Penn hosted a Palestine literature festival on campus, a decision that infuriated influential donors including Apollo Global Management Inc’s chief executive officer Marc Rowan.
‘Toxic’ environment
All three university leaders appeared before Congress to answer questions about antisemitism on campus. Social media had been awash in reported incidents such as protesters disrupting classes and chanting slogans including “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which is perceived by many to be a call for the expulsion of Jews from Israel. There were also reports that some Jewish students were harassed.
Talia Khan, an MIT graduate student who provided testimony to Congress, said that the environment at the school had grown “toxic” since the war started. She said she felt compelled to speak up after witnessing a rise in antisemitism on campus and what she saw as MIT’s failure to protect its Jewish students.
Khan said she left a study group over her support of Israel and was forced to take down Israeli flags in her office windows overlooking Massachusetts Avenue while flags for other countries or causes have been allowed to stay.
Still, she thinks the problem is bigger than Kornbluth.
“The problem with everybody saying ‘two down, one to go’ is that it’s not productive,” Khan, who is pursuing a PhD in the department of Mechanical Engineering, said in an interview. “Just firing a university president if all of the rules stay the same, if the senior administration, the board of directors, if they all stay the same, there’s not going to be a change in campus culture.”
MIT and Kornbluth have remained largely silent amid the furor.
While the donor and alumni bases at Harvard and Penn were vocal in threatening to pull their support, their counterparts at MIT have been more muted.
A group of Jewish alumni at MIT this week launched a campaign to cut their giving to $1 but they aren’t seeking Kornbluth’s removal at this point. Instead they are seeking to work with the administration on changes such as disciplining students who violate rules and issuing clear statements that threats against Jews are wrong. They’re also pushing for Kornbluth to apologize for her comments during the congressional hearing.
“The lack of apology sends a clear message,” said Matt Handel, organizer of the MIT Jewish Alumni Alliance, who earned an MS in Management from the university’s Sloan School of Management in 1991. “We’re Jewish members of the MIT community who want to protect Jewish members of the MIT community.”
In the days after the congressional hearing, MIT said its leadership “entirely support” Kornbluth. In a statement this week, she described a review of MIT’s approach to handling complaints of student misconduct and announced a new committee on academic freedom and campus expression.
“While we address the pressing challenge of how best to combat antisemitism, Islamophobia and hatred based on national origin or ethnicity in our community, we need to talk candidly about practical ways to make our community a place where we all feel that we belong,” Kornbluth wrote in the Jan. 3 statement.
The moves were too little, too late for MIT computer scientist Mauricio Karchmer. The lecturer wrote on LinkedIn this week that he decided to resign his post.
“During a time when the Jewish and Israeli students, staff and faculty were particularly vulnerable, instead of offering the support they needed, the broader MIT community exhibited open hostility towards them,” he wrote. “Like many other college campuses nationwide, the institute clearly failed this test.”