To Michel DeGraff, a professor of linguistics at MIT, the student protesters who have been camping on the school’s Kresge lawn for 13 days are on the right side of history.
“There is a genocide happening in Gaza,” DeGraff said. “Students have done their homework and found that specific MIT projects are contributing to Israel’s military power.”
Some of his colleagues, though — at MIT and beyond — disagree. Faculty and staff are deeply divided, both on whether their employers should divest from Israel, as protesters are calling for, and how their administrations should respond to the encampments. At MIT and Harvard, encampments are ongoing, while camps at Northeastern and Emerson have been broken up by Boston police at administrators’ requests. Thousands of protesters have been arrested at colleges across the country.
Calls for divestment from Israel’s military and institutions are at the heart of the campus protest movement, including at MIT.
Retsef Levi, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management who is Israeli, said the calls to divest from Israel are ridiculous.
“Students in the camps are lost souls. They are manipulated, ignorant and unfortunately, they are being supported by faculty,” Levi said. “No adult is in the room stepping up to educate but also discipline when necessary to make it clear that this is not OK.”
Although MIT’s administration has not responded to the students’ demands for divestment, DeGraff is encouraged that administrators have not called in local police to clear the camps. Hundreds of counter-protesters gathered on campus on Friday to oppose MIT’s pro-Palestinian encampment.
Levi blames MIT leadership for failing to take control of the situation and called for MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, to step down, saying she has lost the trust of not only the Israeli and Jewish communities but others.
“I came to MIT to work with people from all over the world who don’t necessary agree with me on everything,” Levi said. “Unfortunately, the leadership allows this distraction that creates a divide within the community.”
In a message last week, Kornbluth said that, among the flood of messages she’d received from students, alumni, parents, faculty and staff, she could “only describe the range of views as irreconcilable.”
At Northeastern last Saturday, more than 100 people were detained as Boston police swept the encampment at the university’s request.
Dena Snyder, a staff member at Northeastern University, praised the administration for shutting down the encampment. As a Jewish person, she said has felt unsafe on campus.
“From what I experienced, they were not anti-war protests. They were simply an antisemitic mob of students and others wishing the Jewish state of Israel and the Jewish people would be eliminated,” Snyder said.
Snyder said that many students were ignorant about what they were protesting.
“I asked two different students what ‘from the river to the sea’ meant and they could not tell me which sea and which river they were chanting about,” Snyder said.
Matthew Noah Smith, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Northeastern University, stands with the students. He disagrees with how the university responded.
“It was the administration that raised the temperature. It was the administration who was angry. It was the administration who called in the police,” Smith said. “I support the students’ demands that the university disclose, divest and denounce the unconscionable war in Gaza.
“The focus of the protests is to act in solidarity with the people of Gaza and Israelis who are against the war,” Smith added. “As a Jewish faculty member who is very involved with my Jewish community, I found the encampments peaceful.”
At Harvard, the encampment started last Wednesday. Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker called for it to be shut down in an op-ed in the Boston Globe.
“Encampments tax a university’s resources with the need for 24/7 security, attract antisemitic and sometimes violent outsiders, and signal that the university is authorizing one ideological faction to expropriate its commons,” Pinker wrote.
To Vijay Iyer, a professor of the arts at Harvard University, the student protesters are organized and informed.
“This youth-led movement is speaking to one of the most burning issues facing the world today, which is: how do we respond to plausible genocide, and what can be done about it from wherever we stand?” Iyer told GBH News.
Iyer believes a majority of Harvard faculty support more transparency in the university’s investments. In the past, the university has divested from tobacco, fossil fuels and apartheid South Africa.
Yet Iyer said he found it disappointing that the university has been unwilling to negotiate with students.
Harvard has avoided the same level of attention as other local colleges because administrators closed off Harvard Yard to the public. But Iyer worries what will happen with commencement a few weeks away. He hopes administrators will follow in Brown University's footsteps.
At Brown, student demonstrators negotiated with the university’s administration and protesters agreed to clear their encampment when Brown committed to bringing divestment from Israel to a vote by its board of governance in October.
