Editorial Note
The Faculty Newsletter (FNL) publishes letters, opinion pieces, and editorials that reflect the views of their authors. Occasionally, when concerns arise on the editorial board regarding accuracy, tone, or the treatment of members of our community, the FNL charges an editorial subcommittee to review the piece and work with the author to make revisions. Ultimately, however, authors retain responsibility for their words.

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Reflections on the Compact

Dear FNL:

Regarding Franz-Josef Ulm’s opinion [“MIT’s Faustian Bargain“], I believe it was very well written and sincere. A robust and resilient government would have no fear of anything any university does – other than cease to create brilliant students and their ideas. Similarly a robust and resilient university should have no fear to actually “negotiate” line by line a “compact” with a government. There is no need to be “Tank Man.”

In our case I am not sure we are stuck between rock and hard place – or the opposite of sorts – a “sponge and a soft place” for unless MIT wants to just go its own way and spend its endowment to replace all federal funding, we actually have constructive alternatives we must quickly come forward with, else I predict based on a red team blue team scenario I played in my head on a long run:

1. a) DC controls the courts, military, and national guard. They are not afraid to use them.
2. b) DC will not lose or back down.
3. c) The Compact “invited” the chosen to come to DC to discuss (and evolve?) and then sign, not showing up will be considered seditious behavior.
4. d) Seditious universities will be labeled a national security threat which the POTUS has the authority to do so.
5. e) ICE will come to campus and haul all foreigners away – and any who resist in any form are also arrested and hauled away. Go ahead and file lawsuits . . . make POTUS day! The prisoners will be on planes to a foreign land prison.
6. f) The university will effectively be shut down and cease to exist.

Think back in history for the sound of breaking glass in emergency if need an example. Many of us older folks have direct relatives/parents who witnessed such events. We must not dawdle because these things happen quickly.

The moral/ethical thing to do, in my humble opinion, is before the quartering wind blows and twists us and knocks us down, transactionally engage with the transactional administration – point by point to weld together poorly bolted joints and achieve some semblance of structural integrity to weather the thousand-year storm; for example:

1. Administrator bloat: this is a legitimate issue that must be looked into – why has the ranks of administrators seemingly swelled while profs. and instructors who teach hands-on has shrunk? Propose “To accommodate the need to shrink administration, AI has the potential to help, but we need to accelerate the development of such focused AI systems, so we propose provide AI R&D funding for the specific task of automating administrative activities.” A predicate is Dr. CaBot https://bioengineer.org/an-ai-system-utilizes-in-depth-diagnostic-reasoning-to-support-its-claims-a-closer-look-for-the-science-magazine/.
2. Foreign students: We all came from immigrants, as that is the nature of the human species to seek a better life. Those that come here to learn and go back and do better at home, we understand the concern that the US is losing critical knowledge. So propose that the Compact includes President Trump’s own excellent idea for a green card for foreign students who earn advanced degree and want to stay in the land of the free.
3. The “gender bender issues”: Male, Female according to biological fertility function at birth? Many “males” and “females” are sterile – so then what? Why not simply Male, Female, “XYX” (TBD? “Trans” let them decide) and as many businesses do these days, restrooms for Male, Female, and “Gender neutral.” No more discussion needed. FYI I believe I am in tune here having been director of ESG for a decade and our second child is trans. Of course there will be those that disagree, and that’s healthy, but please suggest measures that could potentially work, else be prepared to fight alone.
4. Admissions: I happen to agree with the admin (which one) – give them what they want . . . WITH an experiment “OK next admin cycle we will do it our way and your way and before pi day (3.14.26), Dept of Education come and review who was admitted under the proposed DC way (the results will shock them btw I suspect).
5. ^N.

We must in good faith go and try to face-to-face negotiate and evolve the proposed compact. In my humble opinion, the compact has arisen because many universities have created a climate of fear for conservative voices. I have personally witnessed “witch trials” (and “burnings”) of colleagues as we fall over ourselves to be “perfect” and purge of all that is not pure in the minds of those who define it. Why did we banish/burn the works of Prof. Lewin and deny his teaching brilliance to countless people? The works could simply have carried a warning label, like a pack of cigarettes, that this person grew old, famous, and fell to the forces of darkness, so watch and learn physics and also the lesson of maintain humility and respect. Beware 29 is prime and the power of the triumvirate over the decade!

As part of my playing out what might happen scenarios, I predict there will be an outcry over my letter, and many will want to nail me like a hammer for even suggesting we do not just rally behind the president with complete loyalty. On the other hand I predict many will agree but remain cowed into silence for fear of retribution. Maybe all will think hmmmm, Alex should be MIT’s next president! It would certainly solve my commute pains.

Regardless, thank you FNL for the courage to getting conversations started! Personally I am not surprised by anything anymore these days, just trying to do my best to help students learn as much as they can, while they still can.

Alexander Slocum
Walter M. May and A. Hazel May Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Double Standards of the FNL

Dear Editorial Board of the MIT Faculty Newsletter:

It is astonishing — though perhaps no longer surprising — that the FNL would publish Ian Hutchinson’s essay “Are Ad Hominem Attacks Legitimate Academic Freedom?” with its sweeping and defamatory claims, while only recently refusing to publish my own essay on related matters for fear of “libel” (see forwarded thread below about my submission). These double standards are glaring, and they raise serious concerns about the FNL’s editorial commitments at a moment when the FNL is under review for its prioritizing certain faculty’s voices over others — and, more generally, when issues of academic freedom and free speech are under intense scrutiny.

Most troubling to me is Hutchinson’s treatment of the ongoing federal lawsuit Sussman et al v. MIT et al. Hutchinson concedes that the allegations against me are “as yet unproven,” but then he immediately proceeds to treat them as established fact. On this basis, he accuses me of:

“… egregious abuse of power as a faculty member, failing in the academic responsibility to engage in civil and rational discourse, and instead attempting to intimidate those disagreeing by abusive ad hominem attacks and threats … academic harassment, unworthy of an MIT faculty member. … A perpetrator ought to have been restrained in a timely manner by the MIT administration and strongly disciplined…”

So am I guilty until proven innocent, even if the relevant allegations are “yet unproven” — even by Hutchinson’s own admission? This leap from “allegations” to “fact” is not only logically indefensible, it is profoundly unjust — an example of what President Sally Kornbluth has called “willful mischaracterizations” in a different context.

Equally striking is what Hutchinson omits: the Plaintiff’s own published attacks against me, visible to all on social media platforms and in my articles in Mondoweiss and The Tech. By erasing this context, Hutchinson presents a one-sided picture that casts me as a “perpetrator” without acknowledging that I was responding to repeated, public attacks.

For contrast, one might look at a recent Substack post by Professor Eric Rasmusen, a self-identified Zionist and no ally of mine politically. Whatever one makes of the biases in his conclusions, Rasmusen at least lays out the main Plaintiff’s record of lies, distortions and mirror accusations, as he efficiently organizes some of the public evidence for others to judge. In other words, even those who disagree with me substantively have exercised more intellectual honesty than the Faculty Newsletter has shown in publishing Hutchinson’s piece without the level of scrutiny and censorship they devoted to my submission.

That the FNL would censor my own essay for supposed risk of libel, yet print Hutchinson’s accusations of “academic harassment” and his calls for my discipline, is difficult to reconcile with any consistent standard of editorial responsibility. At a minimum, FNL readers deserve to hear all voices on the issue at stake rather than reality-bending and selective amplification of certain faculty voices at the expense of others.

Given the FNL’s mission and its ties to AAUP@MIT whose president is FNL’s co-chair, the editorial board should be especially vigilant against reproducing the very inequities and silencing practices that threaten academic freedom and free speech on our campus.

“Hope springs eternal…”

-michel.

Michel Anne-Frederick DeGraff
Professor of Linguistics

Replicating Moral Courage at MIT

To The Faculty Newsletter:

Some MIT faculty continue to face opposition from the student body for their research contracts sponsored by the Israeli Ministry of Defense given crimes of starvation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government against Palestinians. Criticism has implicated a number of MIT professors. In the past two years, opposition has grown into majority votes by the Undergraduate Association, Graduate Student Union, and Graduate Student Council, the MIT Science for Genocide report, as well as the encampment in spring of 2024. In May, class president Megha Vemuri gave a searing indictment of MIT research complicity in her own graduation address.

Some faculty conclude that this opposition represents an unreasonable development in the student-faculty relationship. For instance, professor Yossi Sheffi in a recent edition of the Faculty Newsletter adopted a “go fly a kite” attitude toward student objections, arguing that “Students are not entitled to detailed information on faculty projects, nor do they have the authority to scrutinize them in this way.” However, many MIT faculty have chosen to respond positively to moral demands and spoken truth to power in the service of a more just scientific enterprise. In this letter, I consider three exemplars and reflect on the relevance of their courage to a moral issue of our time. 

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MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener is today celebrated as a founder of cybernetics who modeled stochastic noise processes in electronic control systems. In 1947, he published a bold letter in response to a missile firm asking for a paper he wrote. Anticipating Eisenhower’s Cross of Iron speech six years later, Wiener foresaw that rearmament in peacetime was dangerous and required decisions about research sponsorship. The mass civilian killings in Japan by US nuclear weapons had confirmed, in the mathematician’s words, that “to disseminate information about a weapon in the present state of our civilization is to make it practically certain that that weapon will be used.”

He concluded: “If therefore I do not desire to participate in the bombing or poisoning of defenseless peoples – and I most certainly do not – I must take a serious responsibility as to those to whom I disclose my scientific ideas.” Making good on that promise, Wiener refused to take funding from the US military and the weapons industry for the rest of his life.

In 1966, mechanical engineering professors Ascher Shapiro and Ronald Probstein decided to shift the research agenda of the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory to civilian technology. Under pressure from the movement against the Vietnam War, they pivoted the laboratory’s sponsor network to civilian sources. Shapiro left ballistics research to study fluid mechanics in heart valves. Probstein investigated techniques to desalinate sea water more efficiently. Others in the lab shifted to studying nitrogen oxide emissions and oil spills. By 1969, two-thirds of lab funding came from civilian sources, and half of graduates were entering civilian industry. In 1970, Shapiro called for full divestment from the Pentagon across the entire MIT funding apparatus.

In subsequent decades, apartheid in South Africa became a generation-defining issue in the United States. Three luminaries of the anti-apartheid movement at MIT were political scientist Willard Johnson, urban planner Mel King, and materials scientist Gretchen Kalonji. Scholars of strong moral fiber, they led successful faculty votes in support of divesting endowment assets implicated in apartheid. But unlike peer institutions, MIT President Gray and the MIT Corporation refused to divest, a damning moral stain on MIT’s legacy.

The political logic of divestment was straightforward then and applies now. As Willard Johnson wrote in the April 1990 edition of the Faculty Newsletter, “action now to rid ourselves of the moral fetters that continue to link us to apartheid would not go unnoticed and would add important popular pressure on the U.S. Congress and Administration…” He later recounts that the strategy to leverage state legislative (and university) power to address a national foreign policy question was deliberate, one conceived in dialogue with the African National Congress president Oliver Tambo. It made sense for those who could not make national progress to focus on local domains of influence.

***

Today, the MIT community also faces a generation-defining moral question in Palestine. According to both the Ministry of Health in Gaza and the IDF Chief of Staff, Israel has inflicted more than 200,000 direct casualties, or 10% of Gaza’s population in the past two years. From late May to August 2025, at least 1,838 people were killed at Gaza aid sites – another 13,409 wounded – overwhelmingly by Israeli snipers. Tens of thousands in Gaza have died violent deaths by gunfire, tank round, and airstrike, including our own loved ones. In August, IPC authorities declared that half a million were starving under a famine siege. More than a month into a one-sided ceasefire, Gaza endures daily bombings and denial of vital supplies.

Paramedics and journalists have been systematically killed; in the words of one source in the military’s Southern Command, air strikes are “carried out to ensure that rescue efforts do not take place. First aid providers, rescuers – kill them. Attack again, on them. This is the procedure.” More than 90% of Gaza’s buildings were razed by January 2025. Settler attacks in the West Bank are at record high. Home demolitions are at record high. The colonization process and apartheid laws continue. The torture and sexual abuse of Palestinian captives continue, as we learn from their lurid and shocking testimony.[1]

It is no surprise why the largest professional organization of scholars studying genocide, IAGS, voted in September 2025 to recognize the genocide in Gaza. By recognizing genocide, the association joins Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations’ highest authorities. Yet the new ceasefire agreement has moved Gaza from the fire back to the frying pan, as its people are held hostage to a plan of colonial bondage that denies Palestinians any right to determine their future.

Despite the ongoing case South Africa v. Israel at the International Court of Justice, despite arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court against Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, MIT continues to co-sign the atrocities by approving research sponsorships by the Israeli Ministry of Defense. We know this despite Institute attempts to conceal. This summer, MIT removed access from tools to understand our Institute’s research funding, such as the Brown Books which track the flow of external funds into MIT and the Kuali Coeus grant management website. Yet public records reveal that Israeli ministry contracts at MIT are accepted and approved on an ongoing basis. 

***

MIT’s ties to the Israeli military and its weapons firms are wrong. As MIT students in 1937 wrote in their petition against the Institute sending a delegate to the Nazi festival in Göttingen, MIT’s participation would “condone the acts and practices of the forces now controlling Germany.” Similarly, approving contracts with the Israeli military condones the acts and practices of Israeli forces. Academic freedom does not protect such ties. As the student leader Ira Rubenzahl told The Tech in 1969 during the Vietnam War: “One doesn’t have the right to build gas chambers to kill people.”

MIT already recognizes this principle at least partially, limiting or barring collaborations with the governments of Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia on the basis of human rights concerns. When activists revealed the MIT Media Lab took money from convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, no one in MIT officialdom publicly defended the funding nexus on the basis of academic freedom. No one rationalized the ties by appealing to the ‘fundamental’ basic nature of research sponsored by Epstein. Instead, MIT officials apologized and attempted financial redress. A similar apology is required now.

Faculty have a role in supporting efforts to make our research more ethical. The International Advisory Committee can advise a broad ban on Israeli government research sponsors or insist on implementing the red lights of the 2020 Suri report. Faculty can demand transparency: make Kuali Coeus and the Brown Books available again. They can flex mechanisms of faculty governance and pressure colleagues to reject unethical partnerships. One professor has already pledged to his lab to end Israeli military sponsorship; another cancelled an IMOD grant after student pressure and found alternative funding.

Faculty have influence over students and set the tone for what collaborations are acceptable. What does it say to young, aspiring scientists when their mentors accept money from the Israeli government? That its crimes are irrelevant as long as you can hire a post-doc? As the abolitionist Frederick Douglass argued in 1840s Scotland, for the church to accept the “blood-stained” tithes of American slaveholders lent them a specious respectability; it also denied the dignity of enslaved people. Taking funds from the Israeli ministry similarly denies the dignity of Palestinians and launders the reputation of a genocidal actor.

It can be tempting to avoid critical reflection but history warns us of the seductive power of such quietism. Most of us know about the horrors of Nazi human experimentation led by physicians such as Eduard Wirths and Josef Mengele – ardent believers in the Nazi cause. The medical profession established the Nuremberg Code of ethics in their wake. Yet many German scientists, including most physicists, never joined the Nazi party. Some were critics. That did not keep them from effectively tying their research projects to the demands of the Nazi state.

One was Otto Hahn, who helped lead Germany’s nuclear weapons program throughout the war. As recounted in the letters of his long-time colleague Lise Meitner – the Austrian-Jewish physicist who first discovered nuclear fission and whose work he took credit for – Hahn was not a raving Nazi idealogue. He was an unreflective careerist, focused on research and securing funding for his Institute, without critical reflection about whom he was serving.

After the war, Otto Hahn rationalized Nazi crimes as no worse than the allies and claimed his wartime work had been nothing but “purely scientific” research: fundamental, openly published and of no military relevance. In an unsent letter to Hahn, Lise Meitner wrote bitterly: “it was clear to me that even people such as you did not understand the true situation. . . . You all worked for Nazi Germany. . . . Certainly, to help buy off your conscience you helped a persecuted person here and there, but millions of innocent human beings were allowed to be murdered without any kind of protest being uttered.”

Others refused to serve the Nazis and acted on it.[2] MIT faculty must make a choice now if they want to be an Otto Hahn or a Lise Meitner. Innocent people are being ruthlessly attacked in Palestine as I write. Among the greatest protests to mass atrocities that we can utter as scientists is to say no more research for the Israeli government.

[1] See for example Palestinian Centre for Human Rights report “Torture and Genocide: The Shattered Futures of Former Palestinian Detainees in Gaza” May 12, 2025. B’Tselem’s report “Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps” August 2024. Testimony of Israeli state torture is reported in PBS, New Yorker, The Guardian, and 972+.

[2] Elisabeth Schiemann, James Franck, Max von Laue, and, most famously, Albert Einstein come to mind.

Richard Solomon
PhD Student, Course 17 (Political Science)

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