December 10, 2024
Dear President Kornbluth,
We are writing in response to your statement of December 6, 2024 to the MIT Community entitled “Actions out of bounds in our community” (https://president.mit.edu/writing-speeches/actions-out-bounds-our-community).
We would like to thank you for condemning the actions targeting Professor Daniela Rus and her laboratory and we hope that those responsible will be promptly identified and appropriately disciplined. We must, however, point out that the egregious actions targeting Professor Rus have been enabled by the pervasive and hostile atmosphere of antisemitism and harassment of Jews that has been allowed to flourish on the MIT campus, with a noticeable acceleration since October 7, 2023. This poisonous atmosphere persists because MIT leadership and administrators have been unable or unwilling to take actions necessary to squarely address and decisively eliminate this antisemitic scourge.
You state :“[f]or more than a year, our community has grappled with issues around free expression, including the question of when expression crosses a line into harassment and personal targeting, which we must not and will not tolerate.” However, it is widely known and understood that if a minority group other than Jews was targeted for harassment, no similar grappling with “issues around free expression” would occur. (As example, MIT-required harassment training for the entire MIT community characterizes “deadnaming” someone as a violent act, regardless of context.1) If a minority group other than Jews was targeted for harassment, we know that MIT administrators would take all immediate and necessary action to ensure that such harassment was brought to an instantaneous halt. Lastly, if a minority group other than Jews was targeted for harassment, a right to free expression claim would not be accepted as a defense for those responsible. It is unique in the case of Jews, however, that MIT leadership and administrators appear willing to accept continued harassment, all in the name of free speech.
Amplification of the call to harass Professor Rus came from an editorial published in the Tech, an official publication of the Institute. While the editors later retracted the editorial2, this came one month after its publication, and only after repeated events targeting the professor. Having a call to action in an official publication gives this manner of harassment implicit support of MIT. That is unacceptable. It is telling that no one involved in this endorsement of harassment has been penalized.
As we have stated multiple times in previous communications, by failing in their duty to adequately and consistently respond to violations and enforce MIT’s own rules of conduct, MIT leadership and administrators have enabled the growth of a threatening and pervasively antisemitic environment that culminated in an unsanctioned and brazenly intimidating encampment lasting almost three weeks. This neglect of duty has resulted in the creation of an atmosphere where targeting a professor and her team, including with distribution of “Wanted” posters, for all intents and purposes appears to perpetrators as permitted and even sanctioned.
We trust that MIT leadership and administration will without further delay, take all necessary steps, including working with law enforcement, to appropriately address and to end what has become a chronically menacing environment for Jews and for individuals who associate with Jews, where threats of violence made to individual persons, as well as to the MIT Jewish community at large, are now commonplace. We ask that MIT leadership and administrators take definitive action to remedy, once and for all, the pervasive and widespread poisonous atmosphere of antisemitism that now permeates all aspects of academic life at MIT.
Respectfully,
MIT Jewish Alumni Alliance Executive Committee
2[RETRACTED] Daniela Rus, The People Demand: No More Research for Genocide | The Tech