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Boston Globe

MIT has stayed out of Trump's fight against elite colleges. Recent incidents could draw it back in.

All the elements are here for another high-profile confrontation — and it couldn't be happening at a more inopportune time. Advertisement 'There's no question that people in Washington are looking at MIT,' said Kenneth L. Marcus, chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which Kornbluth, who is Jewish, is yet again facing challenges to her leadership that also test the limits of free speech on campus, only this time President Trump is back in office. 'My central responsibility is to make sure that the work of the people of MIT continues, work that's central to America's health, wealth, and national security,' said Kornbluth, who has met with Washington officials, including Education Secretary Linda McMahon. MIT isn't immune to the whims and will of the White House, which is currently investigating the school's involvement with a higher education nonprofit as part of a widespread Advertisement But it has a unique vulnerability with its extensive relationship with the US Department of Defense: The school's That relationship also makes MIT uniquely valuable to the US government. And back in Cambridge, Kornbluth must navigate a delicate course managing an unwieldy range of constituencies. There are professors whose labs rely on defense funding, and protesters who claim MIT's contributions to technology are being misused by one of the US's allies, Israel. Even the pro-Palestinian movement on campus contains multitudes, including students who've lost family members in Gaza and Jewish allies who say the university is abetting mass violence in the Middle East. The rising activism has come along with a change in rhetoric that some see as increasingly extreme. Over the July Fourth weekend, vandals spray-painted 'Death to the IDF,' on the entrance to MIT's An outside group, Direct Action Movement for Palestinian Liberation, appeared to take credit for the tagging, and circulated a video accusing MIT professor Daniela Rus, who heads the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory inside the Stata Center, of being complicit in genocide. Kornbluth has repeatedly defended Rus, who did robotics research Advertisement But because serving in the nation's military is mandatory for Israeli citizens, the IDF graffiti also essentially targeted 'all of us' on campus, said Or Hen, an associate professor of physics from Jerusalem who estimates around 3 percent of faculty at MIT are from Israel. 'We have people on campus who fought in Gaza last year. We have people in reserve duty. So when they talk about death to soldiers ... we all did army service.' Rifts are resurfacing on campus, but positioning them as being between ethnic or religious groups is a 'false conflict,' said Jeremy Fleishhacker, a graduate student in plasma physics and member of The real divide is between school administrators and those pressuring them to cut 'problematic research connections' with Israel, Fleishhacker said and pointed to a An MIT spokesperson said the UN report contains 'mischaracterizations' that 'appear to be drawn from campus advocacy groups,' and noted that between fiscal years 2015 and 2024, MIT received less than $4 million in grants for individual research projects through the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Moreover, such research involves work that is 'open and publishable,' and not limited to a particular country, she added. FILE - MIT students and faculty protested outside campus in September 2024. Erin Clark/Globe Staff Kornbluth said in a Stata Center vandalism and will 'press for criminal charges.' That followed her Advertisement 'Of course it is legitimate to criticize the actions of any government,' Hen said he appreciates Kornbluth's 'extremely high' level of communication. But Mila Halgren, a postdoc in brain and cognitive sciences and member of the MIT Coalition for Palestine, says administrators are overly concerned with public messaging. In May, MIT 'They think that repression and punishment of students is going to quell people talking about Israeli military ties,' Halgren said. Others suggest MIT administrators don't seem concerned enough. Talia Khan, a PhD student in mechanical engineering and founder of the MIT Israel Alliance, said the Trump administration is making an example of Harvard for a reason, but school officials are failing to see that what's happening just 'down the road' can also happen to MIT. Now, with its lawsuit, the Brandeis Center is trying to pick up where the 2023 congressional hearings left off. 'MIT is significant because [Kornbluth] is the only university president from the congressional hearings who has apparently survived so far,' said Marcus. 'This case shows that antisemitism doesn't stop at the science quad.' The lead plaintiffs in the Brandeis Center's Advertisement The lawsuit claims MIT failed to address a 'hostile anti-Semitic environment on campus' after Hamas attacked Israel Oct. 7, 2023. It also named a tenured MIT professor of linguistics, Michel DeGraff, as a defendant. In fall 2024, DeGraff taught a seminar on language and power using his native Haiti as well as Palestine and Israel. Around that time, he posted on Instagram about a 'Zionist 'mind infection,'' which the lawsuit claims he linked to Jewish organizations such as Hillel. DeGraff said the accusation conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. When Sussman A university spokesperson said MIT 'rejects antisemitism' and will defend itself in court. In an email, DeGraff said the lawsuit's allegations 'are riddled with reality-bending lies, distortions, and mirror accusations,' which he sees as 'part of a larger settler-colonial Zionist campaign of obfuscation and intimidation that presents a major threat to academic freedom and freedom of expression, especially in the context of the plausibility of Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.' MIT had fended off a similar lawsuit related to the Gaza campus protests that was Advertisement The question this time around isn't just whether MIT can clear that bar again; for some, it's also whether clearing the bar is enough. 'Even if it turns out that MIT operated within the law,' said Ernest Fraenkel, Grover M. Hermann Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, 'that doesn't mean it lived up to the standards that MIT would like to hold itself to.' Brooke Hauser can be reached at