Linguistics for Liberation or for Domination?
The battle at MIT over a linguistics course on Haiti, Palestine, Israel and the war on Gaza
Preamble: This essay is part of a complex and multilayered personal story unveiling rising fascism in higher education. My working title for the book-length version of this essay is “MIT Linguistics Notebooks,” to echo Antonio Gramsci’s “Prison Notebooks.” Here I demystify some of the marginalization of voices criticizing Israel’s propaganda about the war on Gaza. My story is a microcosm of a deeply entrenched power struggle in higher education which conspires to undermine the foundations of academic freedom and freedom of expression—all for the sake of shoring up geo-political complicity in hegemony against those whom Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” Here I unveil political repression in the august linguistics department that Institute Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky helped bring to fame. So this piece, rooted in my personal experience as a Haitian-born linguist/activist facing political repression in Academia shows the illusion of morality among those who proclaim to uphold scholarly integrity and intellectual diversity.
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The MIT Linguistics department is widely regarded as one of the premiere Linguistics departments in the world, setting the highest standards for the pursuit of linguistic knowledge for over 50 years. It is, however, the saddest irony that some MIT linguists claim they do not understand what it means for language to be used as a weapon. Myriad examples abound which demonstrate such linguistic realities, but a very early one comes at the onset of Spain’s conquest of the Americas, as Spanish linguist Antonio de Nebrija offered his grammar of Spanish as “consort of empire” to Queen Isabella in 1492.
In 2024 at MIT there’s a campaign unfurling which similarly supports empire-building, a campaign which is disguised as concerns about “curricular fit,” “integrity,” “expertise,” and “intellectual and professional standards.” Such censorship is all the more troubling amid widespread support among US political and intellectual leadership for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Such censorship is more than coincidental as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — an MIT graduate — received a standing ovation from Congress on July 24th upon claiming that “Israel got the civilians out of harm’s way” during its bombing of Rafah, a city in Gaza.
As a senior tenured full professor of linguistics at MIT with decades of research and teaching on the politics of language and linguistics and on the role of language in society, I experienced this censorship upon proposing a seemingly innocuous elective “Special Topics” seminar. This course proposal, in the context of the war on Gaza, has exposed deep divisions between myself and nearly all my MIT Linguistics colleagues, raising fundamental questions about academic freedom, political dissent, intellectual and racial discrimination, and about the role of linguistics to help understand how language shapes our society and our understanding of the world.
The course title is: “Language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation and for peace and community building from the river to the sea in Palestine and Israel to the mountaintops in Haiti and beyond.”
The Course Proposal
On December 5th, 2023, I submitted a brief preliminary description (as is customary) for a Fall 2024 elective “Special Topics” seminar. The proposed course falls squarely in my main area of research, examining:
“... issues in and related to the book that I'm working on during my sabbatical to be published by MIT Press. It’s a book on the use of language and linguistics in (de)colonization and liberation struggles and strategies. ...”
More specifically, the course aims to explore the profound impact of language on political discourse and power dynamics, particularly in regions such as Haiti, Palestine and Israel — whose histories are marked by protracted conflict and injustices where language plays a key role in perpetuating said conflicts and injustices. “Explore” is an operative term here because this is the very raison d’être of MIT Linguistics’ “Special Topics” courses which, like “special subjects” in other departments, are meant to “cover topics not offered in the regular curriculum.”
Drawing on my extensive research on the politics of language and linguistics in society — and in the context of teaching previous courses such as Black Matters, Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities and Linguistics and Social Justice — I envisioned a seminar critically examining how language has been weaponized for oppression and, conversely, how it can be harnessed for decolonization, liberation, peace and community-building. The course is designed to equip students, staff and faculty with linguistic tools to critically analyze how colonial and neo-colonial power is embedded in and aided by language. I received a grant from MIT’s MindHandHeart initiative to host a superb cast of scholars in a speaker series to be embedded in the seminar, and to equip the entire MIT community with a view of linguistic inquiry as a means for positive social change, and to provide a forum for safe and open-hearted discussions toward community building.
However, this course proposal immediately encountered doublespeak and, eventually, rejection. As we’ll see below, the doublespeak from the unprecedented ad hoc committee that reviewed the course is reminiscent of George Orwell’s novel 1984 for “the defence of the indefensible” … “where there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims,” as in the label “Ministry of Truth” for the government agency responsible for propaganda. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a close study of doublespeak such as “humanitarian interventions” for brutal US occupations and “collateral damage” for the killing of civilians in war.
As far as I know, never before had any proposal for a Special Topics course been rejected by MIT Linguistics. In my 28-year history at MIT, such proposals are typically approved in a couple of days, with very few (if any) questions asked. My colleague Prof. Michael Kenstowicz has recently confirmed via email dated July 31, 2024, that he
“ … voted to allow the course to be so scheduled (as per our usual procedure) when this matter was first discussed at a faculty meeting last winter. I continue to believe that it should be so offered—for many of the reasons you have mentioned in your messages over the past nine months.”
In our department’s “usual procedure,” which I’ve participated in for decades now, there’s never been a course proposal voted down, and there’s never been the sort of ad hoc review process that my course proposal was subject to, for any reason whatsoever.
The pushback started soon after December 5th, the date when I submitted the course proposal. December 5th is also the date when Rep. Elise Stefanik in the US Congress hearing on antisemitism on US campuses caricatured the core linguistic notion of “meaning” by categorically defining “Intifada” as a “call [...] to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally”—tendentiously distorting the actual history and semantics of this Arabic word for “shaking off,” “uprising,” “resistance," etc. This is one among many examples of Orwellian weaponization of language that can be cited as motivation for my course proposal. A few weeks after my proposal, an unprecedented ad hoc review was launched, after my department head had strenuously objected to key terms in the discourse about Palestine and Israel—terms that also occur in the course title and description. The ensuing debate, which has now played out over seven months of email exchanges and public statements in the periodicals Le Monde Diplomatique and The Tech (both by myself and my colleagues), has exposed a clash of perspectives on the role of linguistics, the boundaries of academic freedom, and “the responsibility of intellectuals” (à la Chomsky) to engage with pressing social issues.
This essay will delve into the complexities of this debate, demystifying Orwellian linguistic distortions in my colleagues’ key arguments against my course proposal, and the power dynamics at play there. In doing so, I will also unveil the various layers of intellectual and racial discrimination at MIT Linguistics, ranging from not-so-subtle microaggressions to vile racist jokes.
The Politics of Language and the Language of Politics at MIT Linguistics
The heated debate about my course proposal began on a December 8 Zoom meeting with my department head, three days after I submitted the preliminary description of my “Special Topics” course. The proposal I submitted contained key terms familiar from my previous teaching and research over decades exploring “the use of language and linguistics in (de)colonization and liberation struggles and strategies.” For this particular course, the key terms also include “settler-colonial Zionism,” “genocide,” and “antisemitism.” During our Zoom, my department head disagreed so vehemently with my use of these terms that at some point he started shouting profanities in the earshot of my 6-year-old daughter who was with me at home. (He eventually apologized to me and my daughter, toward the end of the meeting.) Note that linguists’ investigation of these terms — particularly public and private disagreements around their meaning and usage — is germane to the course’s objectives.
My department head appealed to his positionality as an Israeli Jew to counter my views, making it crystal clear that he fundamentally disagreed with me about my interpretation of the political realities of Israel’s war on Gaza and the appropriate language to describe them. Instead of recognizing my course as an opportunity for linguistic and metalinguistic analyses of terms like “antisemitism,” my department head accused me of being “antisemitic.” He compared what he considered my antisemitic use of the phrase “fear of losing access to the checkbooks of Jewish donors” in an October 17, 2023, letter to former UPenn president Liz Magill with what he would consider as racist in his hypothetically using the phrase “fear of Black protesters” in a letter to MIT President Sally Kornbluth about a #BlackLivesMatter protest or about MIT’s Coalition Against Apartheid students. He explicitly connected his argument to his being Jewish and to my ethnicity as a Black man, expecting a similar outraged reaction on my part to his hypothetical mention of “Black protesters.” I pointed out that my letter to Magill did not include any comment on the Jewish people as a whole. I countered his “Black protesters” example by stating that his hypothetical letter about Black protesters would not engage with the same relation of power and (in)justice — Black people vis-à-vis police brutality — as my statements about the mistreatment of pro-Palestinian protesters by authorities at UPenn and other campuses, many of which are endowed by pro-Israel donors who identify as Jewish. That same day (December 8), I further questioned Fox’s accusation by emailing him links to a variety of articles in mainstream media in the US, Europe and Israel that also use “Jewish donors” and related phrases, thus showing that such phrases cannot be taken prima facie, without reference to context, as evidence of antisemitism.
This incident laid bare the deep political divisions that undergird the subsequent rejection of my course proposal. But that same incident also convinced me how crucial my course proposal was toward creating a space where we all at MIT could constructively confront, on firm scientific foundations, these conflicting definitions, metalinguistic attitudes and strategies at the core of empire building.
Here’s a partial list of other disagreements as they surfaced in that conversation with my department head on December 8, 2023:
Disagreement over my characterization of Israel as a settler-colonial project. He argued against my use of “decolonization” in my social-media postings about Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation. He said how uncomfortable he, as a Jewish person, felt about these social-media posts. He took the position that Israel could not be considered a colony since the Zionists had no “colonial base” to rely on. (NB: “Colonization” is a key term in the very title of the course.) In response, I called attention to the current role of the US in support of Israel’s war on Gaza. In retrospect, I should have recalled Theodore Herzl’s own writings, his Jewish Colonization Agency and his invitation to Cecil Rhodes of Rhodesia to help colonize Palestine. I should have also recalled the history of assimilated Jews in Europe. I should have asked whether his “motherland” argument would hold in the alternate possible worlds that Herzl had initially sought—a Zionist colony either in Argentina or Uganda…
Disagreement on my use of the term “genocide” to describe the war on Gaza — he would have preferred “ethnic cleansing,” and he argued that there are degrees of crimes against humanity, and that it’s not “politically effective” to conflate these two categories.
Disagreement over whether Israeli leaders have expressed genocidal intent towards Palestinians and over the significance of Israeli leaders’ use of the biblical term “Amalek” in reference to Palestinians — he compared Israel’s stance toward Palestine to Iran’s stance toward Israel, claiming that genocidal intent is absent in both cases.
Disagreement on whether Netanyahu’s hate-filled language against Palestinians can at all be compared to that of Hitler against Jews — and whether the genocide of Palestinians by Israel can at all be compared with the genocide of Jews by the Nazis. This is the point at which my department head started shouting profanities such as “You’re out of your f**king mind.”
Disagreement over the interpretation of anti-genocide students’ chants like “Intifada” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” I reminded him of the linguistic and historical dimensions of these phrases while he argued that such phrases are “politically ineffective.”
These disagreements are not merely a matter of semantics. They reflect a clash of political perspectives and underscore that power defines the narrative in any war, a linguistic phenomenon visible in the present as the narrative of the war on Gaza takes shape. Though controversial to various degrees, the terms that I used (and that my department head strenuously objected to) have been widely employed by scholars, activists and human rights organizations to describe the systematic dispossession, displacement and violence inflicted upon Palestinians by the Israeli state for decades, long before October 7. By objecting to these terms and refusing to dispassionately look at their history, by evoking his positionality and his trauma as an Israeli Jew, and by accusing me of antisemitism, my department head, in effect, attempted to delegitimize a critical framing of discourse around the war on Gaza. He attempted to silence me. Discussion of such issues should inevitably trigger intellectual discomfort, though not causing any threat to anyone’s safety. Here, MIT President Kornbluth judiciously reminds us that “learning is not always pleasant.”
Until this debate began I had assumed, perhaps too naively, that linguists would feel comfortable — even enthusiastic — using tools from our trade to shed light on these complex problems. This is MIT, after all, where we aim to solve global challenges—Mens et Manus et Mundus. The politics of language is inherently related to struggles where different interest groups compete to control the meanings of words and the narratives they construct. We saw such semantic wrangling most clearly in the US Congress on December 5. Recall that this is the date when—just 3 days ahead of the heated exchange with my department head, a semanticist—we heard Representative Elise Stefanik blatantly engage in linguistic distortions about the “meaning” of the Arabic word “Intifada.” In the context of the ongoing war on Gaza, the struggle over meaning is particularly acute, as the language used to describe the conflict has profound implications for how it is understood, debated, and ultimately resolved. That is why the “Special Topics” seminar I’ve proposed is so timely, even urgent. Challenges to academic freedom often occur when intellectual topics overlap with deeply held political convictions. It was my hope that by exposing these divisions, we can foster a more honest and transparent dialogue, one where academic discourse is not stifled by political agendas.
Be that as it may, my MIT Linguistics colleagues responded in The Tech that the decision to reject my course was not at all influenced by the department head's nationality and political beliefs. This leaves me incredulous in light of my department head’s own statements.
In their response to my June 13th opinion essay, my colleagues also state:
“… we do think it is important to clarify that the decision concerning the proposed seminar has been the result of a course approval process involving a proposal, a committee, and discussion by the department as a whole.
This statement suggests that the “course approval process” unfolding in relation to my proposal is a standard procedure within our unit — one that previously was uniformly applied to all course proposals. However, this could not be further from the truth. As I already detailed, this process has been anything but ordinary. My colleagues have acknowledged this as well, citing the current “atmosphere” on campus as a contributing factor to this exceptional review. In fact, this ad hoc process, which has never been applied to any other course proposal during my 28 years at MIT, appears to have been instituted with the specific intention of rejecting my proposal. This suspicion is further supported by the fact that this unprecedented ad hoc committee was assembled by the very department head who had already vehemently expressed strong political opposition with my views on Palestine and Israel. Consequently, it seems that this “course approval process” was fundamentally flawed from the outset, tainted by a conflict of interest arising from his political disagreements with the faculty proposing this course.
Consider these questions: Is it likely that the department head's strongly expressed political beliefs in conversations that started soon after October 7 in person, via email and on Zoom played no role in the rejection of my course, especially when the course aims to analyze the same key terms that triggered his anger, and especially when he was the first to appeal to his nationality and his political allegiance to Israel as a non-colonial homeland, then he manifested uncontrollable rage against me because of divergences on definitions of “colonization,” “genocide,” and so on? Is it plausible that his nationality and beliefs had no influence, given that he also was the first to reject my proposal on January 10 for a statement from MIT Linguistics about the crimes against humanity in Palestine and Israel, modeled after our February 2022 Facebook statement about the war in Ukraine? And is it purely coincidental that he rejected, on the same day, my proposal for this statement before any other colleague could offer their opinion? And the reason given for his rejection of my proposed statement was his “personal evaluation” and his “personal sense” that, unlike for Ukraine, there was no “feeling of joint purpose among students and faculty” about Gaza. Please note the phrase “common humanity” in the MIT Linguistics Facebook posting in February 2022 to elicit sympathy about the victims of the war in Ukraine…
The Battle for the Definition of “Linguistics” at MIT
Just a few weeks after that heated disagreement with yelling and profanities by my department head, a committee he formed with himself and two other colleagues (the directors of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies at MIT Linguistics) raised concerns about the course's title (the original title was “Language and linguistics in decolonization and liberation struggles”) and lack of fit within the linguistics curriculum. This was a rather unexpected set of concerns for two reasons: Firstly, this was the first of a long series of Orwellian doublespeak in response to my proposal: given that the explicit objective of “Special Topics” (24.S96) courses is to “cover topics not offered in the regular curriculum,” how can my proposal be rejected because of “lack of fit” in said curriculum. Secondly, given my teaching history to date, for decades now, on these very topics related to the weaponization of language in society and to liberatory linguistics, does that mean that my teaching at MIT Linguistics has, so often and for so long, been unfit for the unit that hired me back in 1996?
When I shared additional details about the course, with a longer title that included “from the river to the sea in Palestine and Israel to the mountaintop of Haiti and beyond,” my colleagues began raising concerns about my “expertise” in the subject matter, even proposing that the course be taught in Political Science or History instead of Linguistics and possibly be cross-listed in Linguistics. This was a rather surprising suggestion given the linguistic content of the course, far more extensive than, say, some of my own previous courses.
Furthermore the proposed course directly addresses the linguistic dimensions of social and political issues, a topic well-established in the field of linguistics under the labels “Language in Society,” “Sociolinguistics,” and “Postcolonial Linguistics.” These labels are the titles of peer-reviewed scientific journals. I myself have been researching, teaching and publishing on language in society for decades, and my work has been published in the corresponding peer-reviewed scientific journals and recognized internationally, including by the foremost and largest professional organization in linguistics, the Linguistic Society of America, which has awarded me “the highest honor in the field.” All of this seems unknown or irrelevant to the three-person committee (Danny Fox, Sabine Iatridou and Donca Steriade). Not only do they keep repeating the slander disguised as “concern[s] about [my] lack of expertise,” but they also insist that they don’t understand “what [I] call the ‘weaponization of language’” and “how [my course proposal] relates to any field of linguistics” (quoting Iatridou and Steriade’s email dated July 19). Yet, in 1492 already, Antonio de Nebrija, author of “Gramática de la lengua castellana,” explained to his Majesty Queen Isabella that “language is the consort of Empire”. This is one central aspect of linguistics that I’ve engaged in as one major thread of my career as a linguist looking for ways to counteract the hegemonic use of language in society and the ways in which students are indoctrinated through linguistics to believe in hierarchies of humanity — or “grades of man” in historical linguist August Schleicher’s phrase.
It’s also instructive to examine my colleagues’ stance about what counts as “fit” with our curriculum, as defined (say) in MIT Linguistics’ overly narrow mission statement, in the context of visiting faculty Maya Honda “Special Topics” course on Linguistics and Education—a course which the department head himself invited Professor Honda to teach and which is now on its second iteration. Late Professor Wayne O’Neil, former MIT Linguistics department head, taught a similar course for years as part of the departmental curriculum. The current department head recently called this “Special Topics” course on Linguistics and Education a wonderful opportunity for our students—and he promised to attend as much as his schedule allows. Is it not strange that the head of MIT Linguistics would invite a “Special Topics” seminar by visiting professor Maya Honda on linguistics and education into our program, yet exclude this topic in our “mission” as MIT linguists?
It’s particularly instructive to compare these courses on language in society with what the department has included in its mission statement which makes no mention whatsoever of the social aspects of linguists’ work (a core concern in my own research and teaching agenda). Such silencing invisibilizes important work on language in society, like it invisibilizes MIT Linguistics’ own Indigenous Language Initiative, with the latter becoming a stepchild in our academic unit, outside our mission statement proper. In effect, MIT Linguistics' definition of “linguistics” is extraordinarily narrow and exclusionary, focusing solely on formal aspects of language and neglecting its social and cultural dimensions. In this mission statement, it’s as if both language and linguistics happen in a total social vacuum. This gatekeeping approach to our field creates artificial barriers or marginalization against scholars like myself who work and teach on critical issues of language, power, justice, identity, etc. By excluding these perspectives, MIT Linguistics perpetuates an incomplete and biased understanding of language, failing to acknowledge its complex role in shaping social structures and perpetuating inequalities.
In any case, given my documented expertise on issues related to the politics of language and linguistics and to language in society and given the rationale and history of “Special Topics” seminars in our unit (to explore “topics not offered in the regular curriculum”), this rejection and the reasons presented for it are, in Orwellian mode, a smokescreen for the real issue at hand: the suppression of dissenting views that challenge the dominant narrative about Israel and Palestine. The suggestion that I lacked the necessary expertise to teach a course on linguistics and language for decolonization and liberation, despite my decades of research, publishing and teaching on the subject, is not only insulting but also indicative of a narrow and exclusionary understanding of linguistics, in keeping with MIT Linguistics’ mission statement. Furthermore, the insistence that the course be co-taught or relegated to another department reveals a deeply troubling assumption that the study of language and its social and political implications, in this particular case, must be subordinated to other disciplines.
My colleagues’ suggestion that my course proposal is somehow outside the bounds of legitimate academic inquiry in MIT Linguistics is particularly ironic given the well-documented role of language in social-justice struggles and given MIT's stated commitment to fostering a diverse and inclusive intellectual environment. The institute’s mission statement for a #BetterWorld emphasizes the importance of “advancing knowledge and educating students in science, technology, and the humanities that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.” This mission, I believe, necessitates a critical examination of the historical and contemporary injustices that continue to shape our world, as well as the role that language plays in perpetuating or challenging them.
My course proposal is not only consistent with this mission but also directly addresses some of the most pressing challenges facing our society today, in keeping with MIT’s mission to solve “global challenges” (the now familiar Mens et Manus et Mundus). The “Question of Palestine,” for example, like the history of linguistic apartheid in Haiti, is one of the most intractable and complex challenges in the world, with far-reaching implications for global peace and security. The ongoing violence and human rights abuses in Haiti, a country with a long history of colonialism, imperialism, and political instability, also demand our attention and engagement. By exploring the linguistic dimensions of these conflicts, my course would provide students with a unique and valuable perspective on these complex issues, as well as the analytical tools to critically examine the dominant narratives and discourses that often obscure the root causes of these conflicts.
The Battle for Academic Freedom at MIT
The attempt to censor my course proposal, based on some alleged lack of “fit” and “expertise,” also represents a clear violation of academic freedom. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) defines “freedom to teach” as:
“…the right of the faculty to select the materials, determine the approach to the subject, make the assignments, and assess student academic performance in teaching activities for which faculty members are individually responsible, without having their decisions subject to the veto of a department chair, dean, or other administrative officer.” [emphasis added]
This freedom is essential for the functioning of a democratic society, as it allows scholars to challenge conventional wisdom, explore controversial ideas, and contribute to the public good through their research and teaching.
However, I understand that academic freedom is not absolute. It is subject to limitations, such as the requirement that faculty members teach within their areas of expertise and adhere to professional standards of scholarship and pedagogy. As MIT’s Report of the MIT Ad Hoc Working Group on Free Expression explains,
“Regarding freedom of teaching, faculty do not have total discretion over their course content. For example, a class titled “Beginning Chinese” cannot be taught as an advanced calculus class. And department heads would be within their rights to consider faculty members’ expertise in the process of making or adjusting teaching assignments.” [emphasis added]
Of course “Beginning Chinese” and “Advanced Calculus” are distinct fields. In contrast, my proposed seminar directly aligns with my areas of expertise, as documented by my publications, previous courses and my overall work as a linguist for the past couple of decades, continuing in the present. And the AAUP explicitly recognizes that faculty members have the right to address controversial issues in their teaching, so long as they do so in a manner that is germane to the subject matter of the course, and it asks university administrators to:
“… recommit themselves to fully protecting the academic freedom of their faculties to teach, conduct research, and speak out about important issues both on and off campus.”
In light of all the above, it’s now clear that the attempt to censor my course proposal represents a blatant violation of academic freedom. It seems part of a larger politically motivated campaign that seeks to silence critical perspectives about the war on Gaza and to stifle intellectual inquiry into the role of language in shaping social and political realities. Given MIT's commitment to upholding rules, regulations and faculty rights, the administration should support my course proposal. This would ensure that my freedom to teach is protected from undue interference by colleagues with differing political views.
The Battle for the Definition of “expertise” at MIT Linguistics
Recall my 2021 "Special Topics" seminar on Linguistics and Social Justice. Here is a semantics-related question: can one assume that “social justice” in that seminar’s title subsumes “decolonization and liberation”? If so, then it seems unlikely that my MIT Linguistics colleagues’ concerns in 2024, about the original title of my course (“Language and linguistics in decolonization & liberation struggles”), were at all related to expertise or lack thereof. If I had enough expertise to organize a seminar on linguistics and social justice in 2021, then such expertise can certainly apply to an exploration of linguistics in decolonization and liberation struggles in 2024. All of these themes related to the politics of language and linguistics and to language in society are recurrent topics in my teaching and research for more than two decades now. These themes were also at the core of my plenary lecture for the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute in 2017. This lecture, on the role of linguists in “un-silencing revolutions across space and time,” was introduced by none other than my long-time MIT Linguistics colleague Norvin Richards. These liberatory-linguistics themes are also fundamental to the MIT Press book that I've been working on for my sabbatical—to finally be published next year or so! Will that make me the first ever professor in MIT's history who, in effect, is prevented by his colleagues from teaching a seminar on topics related to a book he's writing?
Is it not ironic that, on the topic of my expertise on language in society, my department head himself, in an MIT News article just two years ago,
“... celebrated [DeGraff's Linguistic Society of America Fellowship] honor as recognition of [his] multifaceted, socially-minded approach to his field, as well as recognition of his outstanding scholarship. ‘It is good to see a professional organization like the LSA promoting scientists not just for their research, but also for the kind of activism that might accompany it: battling prevalent misconceptions about the nature of the world, identifying their detrimental consequences, and fighting for change. Michel has been involved in all these activities, mostly through the MIT-Haiti initiative, which he was instrumental in establishing. We are all very proud.’ ..."
In this vein, there is a larger and deeper philosophical and pedagogical point to raise about the discriminatory allegation of lack of “expertise” in the context of my “Special Topics” seminar. In previous seminars at MIT Linguistics, it was explicitly stated that the goal was to increase expertise in the area of inquiry in question — “to make it up as we go along” (to cite my colleague philosopher and professor emeritus Bob Stalnaker's words, which my colleagues so very much appreciate that they keep citing it in their own course descriptions). In this vein, here is a whole series of remarkable quotes (with emphases strategically added) about expected levels of “expertise” when it comes to seminars, “Special Topics” courses and the like:
"As usual for advanced seminars, we expect the discussion to place us in unanticipated locations, hence no syllabus at this stage." (Danny Fox and Mitya Privoznov, Fall 2022)
“The schedule will be flexible and open ended, following the discussion where it leads, and spending as much time on each topic as it seems to need. That is, we will make it up as we go along." (Bob Stalnaker, Spring 2023, then cited by Kai von Fintel, Amir Anvari, Giorgio Magri and Forrest Davis in their own course descriptions)
"In this class we will discuss literature that is outside of our customary focus of attention, in an attempt to educate ourselves about research in adjacent areas that might be relevant to how we situate what we do, how we frame our long range research agenda, how we teach, and how we interact with sister disciplines." (Irene Heim and Martin Hackl, Spring 2012)
“... [Y]ou need to become used to feeling 'stupid'. I mean this in an entirely non-disparaging sense: obviously, you’re not stupid. What it is is that you’re not completely understanding a complex topic. Of course, that is in fact the permanent condition of science. The whole point of science is to work at things we don’t understand and make some progress towards understanding, but that progress will then result in even more things we don’t understand....” (Kai von Fintel, Fall 2016)
Is the freedom and privilege to have a seminar “place us in unanticipated locations” or to “feel stupid” or to "make it up as we along” or “to discuss literature that is outside of our customary focus of attention" or to "not completely understand a complex topic,” etc., the sole prerogative of only a select subset of MIT Linguistics faculty on some arbitrary subset of topics? What are the defining criteria here, and who defines these? Is the sole Black faculty member in MIT Linguistics outside of this privileged subset?
My MIT Linguistics colleagues will certainly remember that this issue of unfair and biased gate-keeping against me is not new in our department. Some will remember a previous department head who declared, flat out, that my work in the context of the MIT-Haiti Initiative was outside the realm of linguistics, even though the same department head would routinely advertise the same MIT-Haiti Initiative during visiting-committee evaluation.
Here we are treading on discrimination patterns that should be most troubling to all MIT faculty and to the administration. Similar patterns arise about my colleagues’ reactions to my inviting guest speakers to my Fall 2024 seminar.
The Battle for the Place of Guest Speakers in Seminars at MIT
The department has characterized the enlisting of guest experts as “outsourcing” my responsibility for the course. This is a disingenuous argument — again, Orwellian doublespeak — in a department where I was told, from day one 28 years ago, that it is a unit that values co-teaching, collaboration with other faculty, etc. Inviting guest speakers is a common practice at MIT and in academia, especially in advanced seminars, and it does not absolve the instructor of their responsibility. In fact, many courses in the department, including those taught by other senior faculty, have featured guest speakers. My intention in inviting guest experts is to enrich the course content and expose students to diverse perspectives, especially given the lack of diversity within the department — both intellectually and otherwise.
Consider one required course at MIT Linguistics, called Field Methods in Linguistics where the department pays the native speaker of an unfamiliar language (i.e., a language about which the instructor might have relatively little expertise in) in order for that language consultant to help the class explore the grammatical structure of the unfamiliar language in question. This is one case where there is explicit “outsourcing” to an expert outside of MIT. This is for a good reason: namely, to allow exploration into the structures of that language toward enriching the students’ knowledge in an area that the instructors themselves, truly, have relatively little expertise in. As far as I can tell, none of my MIT Linguistics colleagues has ever complained about this kind of “outsourcing.”
Here's another example of an MIT Linguistics offering — our Fall 2022 Industry Workshop, ably organized by a visiting faculty — which has made crucial and effective use of guest experts at every meeting. Why did such a workshop, as recently as two years ago, with such a strong cast of guest speakers, not raise any concerns whatsoever about “outsourcing of responsibility”?
In my own case, I shall recall my own teaching history at MIT and the fact that most seminar-style courses that I have previously taught at MIT Linguistics, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, have included guest experts. Consider courses such as the “Special Topics” seminar Linguistics and Social Justice in Fall 2021, the Haitian Creole Syntax seminar in Fall 2016 and the “Special Topics” seminar Computational Phylogenetics in Spring 2015. In all three courses, I invited the collaboration of colleagues, both in and outside MIT, who had much needed expertise on some key topics in the course. The same is true with my undergraduate courses Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities and Black Matters: An Introduction to Black Studies. If my colleagues’ concerns about “expertise” and “outsourcing” were genuine, then they should have already noticed this long established pattern of guest speakers sharing their expertise in relevant areas being explored in my courses. And this is exactly the model to be followed in my Fall 2024 “Special Topics” course.
This frequent inclusion of guest speakers is based on my desire for “integrity along with intellectual and professional standards” — to borrow some choice words from my department head in an email to our unit on May 30, 2024, in response to a linguistics graduate student who had written, the day before:
“Everyone deserves to have analytical tools that help them understand the situations that they find themselves in, and this is precisely where Michel’s body of work, his expertise, and his seminar can make a difference. His seminar would be a worthwhile contribution to the department, to the Institute, and to the fight against the ongoing dehumanization of Palestinians, and it would be a massive mistake to consider it outside the scope of our department. In my view, to do so would be to censor it.”
My goal has never been to “outsource responsibility” but to enhance the quality of my courses and offer the best to our students, including the best “analytical tools that help them understand the situations that they find themselves in…”
Another reason for my inviting guest speakers in many of my courses at MIT Linguistics is to expose students and colleagues to the true diversity of our field, intellectually and otherwise, in a department with an extraordinarily narrow mission statement and a striking lack of racial diversity. As the sole Black faculty at MIT for the past 28 years, I have witnessed first-hand a variety of “micro” and “macro” racist aggressions, from subtle to vile. Think, say, ugly sexual stereotypes about certain body parts of Black men in interracial couples. These are stereotypes, with a dreadfully brutal racist history, that came in through some joke addressed directly to me by a senior faculty colleague at a social event! And now I am being singled out by my fellow faculty, among them that same colleague, for“lack of expertise.”
This level of discrimination should not be acceptable to anyone, especially not to the MIT administration.
The Weaponization of Language in Decolonization and Liberation Struggles
Recall this disturbingly dissonant state of affairs: Though I’ve now written a couple of articles, in Le Monde Diplomatique and in Inside Higher Education, on recent cases of weaponization of language in the current political context, on top of decades of articles about the weaponization of language and linguistics against Creole speakers, my MIT Linguistics colleagues continue to claim that they do not understand what it means for language to be “weaponized” and how such use of language is at all related to linguistics. The short of it is that language is not a neutral tool but instead a powerful weapon that can be used to shape our perceptions of reality and our understanding of ourselves and others. The language we use to describe people, political events and social phenomena, including the language of linguistics (that is, language about language), can either reinforce existing power structures or challenge them.
In the context of decolonization and liberation, language and linguistics play a crucial role in reclaiming narratives that have been suppressed or distorted by dominant groups. It allows marginalized communities to articulate their own experiences and perspectives, to challenge the dominant discourse, and to envision alternative futures. As Arundhati calls it in her speech on “assaults on meaning,” “the keystone of fascism is the capture of language.”
This is why linguistics is so important for understanding and addressing issues of social justice and political oppression. It provides us with the tools to critically examine how language has been used to perpetuate injustice and to imagine how it can be used to promote liberation.
Noam Chomsky and Louis Kampf on “Intellectuals and Social Change”
The controversy surrounding my course proposal raises broader questions about the role of professors in society, especially vis-à-vis resistance to hegemony and indoctrination. In his essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals written during the time of protests against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, Chomsky argued that intellectuals have a moral obligation to use all of their knowledge and skills to challenge injustice and to speak truth to power. Chomsky, who has long been a vocal critic of Israeli policies towards Palestinians, has faced his own share of censorship and vilification for his political views.
Around the same time that Chomsky was writing his essay on the responsibility of intellectuals, he and late professor Louis Kampf co-taught a course titled Intellectuals and Social Change which was offered as “21.995”—a course in the former Humanities unit.
Now that Chomsky has suffered a stroke and can no longer speak about “The responsibility of intellectuals” vis-à-vis the US and Israeli war machine against Palestinians, it is sadly ironic that Chomsky’s own former colleagues and students have now appealed to the disciplinary classification of his course on “Intellectuals and Social Change” to block my course on linguistics and social change from being offered as a linguistics course, suggesting instead that it be co-taught with an instructor in History or Political science and possibly be cross-listed with Linguistics. Their argument is that, like Chomsky who, with Kampf, taught his political course outside of the linguistics unit, I too should arrange to teach my course outside of linguistics — with a co-instructor in Political Science or History — then possibly have it cross-listed in Linguistics. But there is one fundamental difference between Chomsky and Kampf’s 21.995 course and my “Special Topics” proposal—a difference that my MIT Linguistics colleagues have glossed over. Nowhere in the Chomsky and Kampf’s title and course description do they mention language or linguistics. Their course was all about politics and social justice. Ironically, the course contents—on “the role and responsibility of individuals who challenge the assumptions of the established political and social order, and who are concerned with ideas and their consequences”—seem relevant for arguments against the current political repression at MIT Linguistics and the rejection of my course proposal.
Unlike Chomsky and Kampf’s Intellectuals and Social Change (21.995), my “Special Topics” proposal is decidedly a linguistic course, though it does bear on language in society and in political contexts, and it is even more linguistics-oriented than other courses I’ve taught at MIT. Furthermore, and here I must repeat ad nauseatum, language in society is an area of linguistics in which I have extensively researched, published and taught—more so than in any other area of intellectual inquiry! Imagine the consequences if my colleagues and the MIT administration were to accept the claim that I lack “expertise”” to offer this seminar in an area that I’ve devoted most of my career to. Then I certainly would lack “expertise” to teach any other topic in linguistics! Sigh…
Conclusion
It is important for the MIT administration and, more generally, leaders in higher education to support my course and others like it for several reasons:
Upholding Academic Freedom: The rejection of my course proposal, based on flimsy pretexts and political disagreements, violates the principles of academic freedom that are essential for intellectual inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge.
Protecting Faculty Rights: As a tenured full professor, I have the right to teach courses within my area of expertise without undue interference from colleagues or administrators with differing political views.
Promoting Intellectual Diversity: The course offers a unique perspective on language and linguistics, and their roles in social and political issues, contributing to a more diverse and inclusive intellectual environment at MIT. The course proposal thus aligns with MIT's emphasis on intellectual diversity and exploration of unconventional topics, as it delves into areas not typically covered in the regular linguistics curriculum — an expected feature for “Special Topics” courses at MIT Linguistics.
Addressing Pressing Social Issues: The course directly addresses some of the most pressing challenges facing society, aligning with MIT's mission, and the broader objectives of higher education to solve global challenges and promote a better world. In the case of MIT, my course directly relates to the Institute’s focus on using knowledge for the betterment of humankind (“Mind Hand Heart”). Indeed the course aims to equip students with linguistic tools to critically analyze power dynamics and promote positive social change.
Viewed from these perspectives, the attempt to censor my course proposal, therefore, is not only an attack on my individual academic freedom, but also a broader assault on the responsibility of intellectuals as critical voices in society. It is a symptom of a growing trend towards the suppression of dissent and the narrowing of acceptable discourse, particularly on issues related to Israel and Palestine.
This trend for politically-motivated censorship is not limited to academia. It is evident in the mainstream media, where anti-genocide voices are often marginalized or excluded altogether. It is also evident in the political sphere, where legislation aimed at suppressing criticism of Israel has been introduced in numerous states and at the federal level.
The responsibility of intellectuals, in this context, is to resist these attempts to silence dissent and to defend the principles of academic freedom and free speech. It is to use all available platforms—from email to social media to articles such as this one—to educate our colleagues, students and the public about the realities of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and to challenge the dominant narratives that perpetuate such crimes against humanity, courtesy of our own tax dollars and our electoral choices.
The battle over my proposed “Special Topics” seminar at MIT is a reminder that even colleagues and former students of Noam Chomsky, often considered as part of the “leftist majority” in academia, can engage in the most outrageous kind of “Palestine Exception” as political repression, and even claim Chomsky’s example while doing so. These ongoing attacks on academic freedom, particularly the suppression of critical analyses about the discourse surrounding the war on Gaza, have far-reaching implications for the future of academia. They are not only a threat to academic freedom but also a form of intellectual dishonesty and indoctrination. They contribute to the longevity of discourses about a so-called “just war” (another Orwellian distortion) whose goal is the genocide of the Palestinian people. If scholars are not free to explore controversial topics and challenge dominant narratives, the pursuit of knowledge will be stifled and the very foundations of academic inquiry will be eroded.
It is precisely in these moments of conflict and controversy over politically, intellectually and ethically fraught issues that the true value of tenure, academic freedom and intellectual integrity is revealed. It is through the open and honest exchange of ideas, even when those ideas are unpopular or controversial, that we can hope to advance knowledge and promote a more just and equitable world. As MIT President Kornbluth exhorts us to do, we need “to apply our legendary problem-solving skills to an age-old challenge: finding ways to build meaningful connections across differences” and “to strive to live up to our values of openness and respect.” As one of these videos promoting the #BetterWorld slogan eloquently tells us, “it’s exploring and solving that moves us forward... It’s what makes the world better. It’s what makes us MIT...”
The battle over a linguistics course and over the very definition of “linguistics” at MIT Linguistics is, therefore, not just a local dispute over a single elective “Special Topics” course and its place in the linguistics curriculum, but is a microcosm of a larger struggle taking place in academic institutions across the globe—a struggle about the very foundations of higher education. It is a struggle between those who seek to uphold the principles of academic freedom and intellectual integrity versus those who seek to silence dissenting voices in order to maintain the status quo, with the university becoming an echo chamber for fascism.
The stakes are high. If universities are unwilling to defend the principles of academic freedom, they risk becoming complicit in the suppression of knowledge and the erosion of democratic values. As my colleague Noam Chomsky, a staunch activist against fascist attacks on academic freedom, once wrote, “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”
I will not be silenced. I will continue to speak out against injustice, both in the classroom and beyond. The struggle for academic freedom is a struggle for the very soul of the university, and it is a struggle that we cannot afford to lose. We must all be willing to engage in this battle if we are to uphold fundamental principles of democracy and justice.