How the Rights of MIT Student Protesters Were Undermined (And How to Fix Things Moving Forward)
Marah GubarEditor’s Note: The following exposition was requested by the Faculty Newsletter as a Special Feature and accounts for its necessary unusual length.
On May 8, 2024, administrators at MIT began informing 23 members of the group MIT Scientists Against Genocide (SAGE), who had been encamped on the Kresge Oval since April 21, that they were being placed on an “interim suspension” that would last “at least through commencement activities and pending a review by the COD.”[1] As that line in the suspension letters indicates, this preemptive punishment was levied by the administration before these student political protesters were afforded the chance to offer exculpatory evidence and exonerate themselves to the faculty-led Committee on Discipline (COD).[2]
To protest this bypassing of faculty governance and lack of “any meaningful due process” for the SAGE protesters – many of whom were later exonerated after being allowed to defend themselves – an Alliance of Concerned Faculty (ACF) penned an open letter that by May 10th had been signed by 154 MIT faculty and lecturers and sent to the administration.[3] By May 17th, a petition circulated by the MIT Graduate Student Union, which demanded that MIT immediately drop its “unjust” disciplinary measures against SAGE protesters, had been signed by 2218 members of the MIT community.[4]
As a historian of youth culture, I wondered: how have student political protesters been treated in the past at MIT? Have interim suspensions been used in such a peremptorily punitive way before?
Drawing on knowledge already gathered by MIT community elders and SAGE student activists,[5] and with help from a brilliant MIT librarian, I started digging into the archives to see if there was any past precedent for the administration’s use of interim suspensions on a group of student political protesters. What I’ve found so far is strong evidence that no, there is not: this bypassing of the COD – and thus, faculty governance – to levy punishment on students engaged in a collective political protest represents a radical break with past precedent, whereby pro-Palestinian protesters have been subjected to a disproportionately harsh punishment compared to other prior groups of political protesters at MIT.
Moreover, during the 2023-24 school year, MIT’s “time, place, and manner” restrictions on student-organized campus events were ratcheted up on the fly by MIT administrators and staff, in a way that similarly sidestepped faculty governance. There is an urgent need for these newly restrictive “MIT Rules for Campus Protests and Demonstrations” to be subjected to review by the Faculty Policy Committee (FPC) and the Committee on Academic Freedom and Campus Expression (CAFCE). For in their current form, these rewritten policies do not merely carry the potential to criminalize even the smallest and most peaceful gatherings of students expressing their political views. Rather, they have already begun doing so, having been cited in an unprecedented summertime rash of new COD cases filed in July 2024 against students who were exercising their free speech and assembly rights in ways that could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as constituting a “direct threat” to others on campus nor disrupting “the essential activities of the Institute” – the reasons for restricting free expression identified in the “MIT Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom” (2022).[6]
An Unprecedented Wave of Interim Suspensions
What evidence suggests that MIT’s bypassing of the COD to levy interim suspensions on the SAGE protesters last May was unprecedented? To begin with, as recently as 1990, this mode of punishment was not being used to circumvent the due process of political protesters, as a dramatic run-in between MIT student protesters and campus police reveals. In April of that year, Ronald W. Francis and Steven D. Penn – two members of the student-led group Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA), which was urging MIT to divest from South Africa – were accused by MIT’s police chief of a serious crime: assaulting a campus police officer, who was physically injured when CAA demonstrators rushed into an elevator at E52 as part of one of their pro-divestment demonstrations. The student protesters were attempting to enter the sixth floor Faculty Club where Corporation members were meeting and lunching.[7] The police officer was injured severely enough that three months later she was still unable to return to work.[8]
Yet even this serious allegation did not trigger the MIT administration to levy peremptorily punitive interim suspensions on Francis and Penn. Rather, the police chief’s allegation was taken directly to the faculty chair of COD, who “reviewed the complaint and decided that a hearing [was] warranted” to enable both sides to present evidence before any judgement of culpability (much less punishment) was handed down.[9] It was fortunate that no preemptive punishment was levied in this case, since photographic evidence soon revealed that Francis and Penn were not even in the elevator when the injury to the officer occurred.[10]
The case of Francis and Penn is worth reflecting on today because it proves that, in the past, the immediate involvement of the faculty-led COD in matters of disciplinary governance has worked as a guardrail against over-hasty judgement and sanctioning of students. What happened later in May 2024 with the SAGE students provides additional support for this point. As soon as the COD process was allowed to proceed in the aftermath of these suspensions, five of the SAGE protesters (more than 20%) were exonerated within two weeks. In their meetings with the COD, these students were afforded the opportunity to present time-stamped evidence that proved they were not onsite nor even (in one case) on campus when the actions they were alleged to have participated in transpired.[11]
But unfortunately, SAGE students had already endured the stress of being hit with one of the most serious punishments the Institute can mete out: interim suspension. Multiple May 8th full suspension letters informed the students that “You must leave campus immediately”: they were “prohibited from participating in any academic activities – including classes, exams, or research – for the remainder of the semester”; “prohibited from participating in commencement activities”; and not permitted to continue residing in MIT housing nor using MIT dining halls. While the students who were able to quickly contest and disprove the charges against them did get these sanctions lifted faster than the letter indicated was possible, others assumed their chance of finishing the semester and attending commencement was gone and focused on dealing with the urgent threat of being evicted.
Perhaps because the administration’s legal advisers know that Massachusetts law frowns on evictions being enforced without advance notice on people subsisting peacefully in place – per the wonderfully named “Covenant of Quiet Enjoyment” – a follow-up letter to the still-suspended students extended the date of eviction to May 15th.[12] Even so, stress and hardship generated by the eviction threat (e.g., packing up belongings in case eviction was enforced; deciding whether to stay or go; finding new housing options for the rest of the semester and/or the summer) made the process of scheduling and preparing for upcoming COD meetings more challenging for students.
Witnessing this and other negative effects that the interim suspensions were having, 23 faculty and staff who had agreed to serve as these students’ advisors in the COD process co-wrote an urgent email to DSL on May 13th “to implore you to rescind these interim suspensions.” Among other issues, they cited the subversion of student due process and faculty governance as contributing factors to the misidentification – and possible racial profiling – of suspended students who had already been exonerated, two of whom were Palestinian.
Concerned about these and other problems related to the potentially permanent effects of sanctions designed to be temporary, most of the MIT faculty who spoke up at an Institute faculty meeting held on May 15th, 2024 repeated this call to the administration to lift these interim suspensions immediately, with Franz-Joseph Ulm making a formal motion to this effect that was seconded by Sally Haslanger. In its final form, this motion read:
MOVED that all interim punitive actions associated with the recent suspensions of MIT students who have been charged in connection with some form of involvement in the SAGE encampment movement be dropped immediately, to allow the normal faculty-led disciplinary process operating through the Committee on Discipline to proceed with a thorough review of each student’s case and avoid judging any student guilty until proven innocent.
During the ensuing discussion, the administration denied that there was anything out of the ordinary about how this disciplinary tool was being used on the SAGE protesters, a claim they repeated during a special follow-up faculty meeting held on May 17th. Interim suspensions are “a normal part of the COD process,” they asserted, before the vote on Ulm’s motion was taken, and failed to garner enough votes to pass: 159 faculty members voted in favor of it, while 200 were opposed.[13]
To support its claim that the use of interim suspensions in the SAGE case does not represent a radical break with MIT’s past precedent, the administration could have indicated – using anonymized, generalized data – how often interim suspensions have been used in past years, and for what types of allegations. Instead, repeated requests to them to release such self-exonerating data have gone unanswered, which adds to the impression pro-Palestinian student protesters might be the main – if not the only – student group to have been sanctioned using this measure.
That explanation would also make sense of why the administration cited only one type of disciplinary case during these faculty meetings as setting a precedent for their issuance of interim suspensions to student political protesters: namely, sexual harassment. The implicit analogy they drew between ethically motivated political protesters and sexual harassers provoked audible gasps of shock and anger from some faculty in the room at the May 15th Institute faculty meeting. If the administration had a more relevant and appropriate analogous example to cite, wouldn’t they have done so?
Additionally, any public protest disruptive enough to give rise to mass interim disciplinary action of the kind SAGE students endured last May would almost certainly be readily recuperable, not just by researchers and archivists but also by staff (who often serve as the trusted guardians of institutional memory at MIT) or fellow faculty (who often recall – if not participate in – various kinds of activism on campus).[14]
All of these data points strongly suggest that even though the COD rules in place today technically allow the administration to levy interim suspensions on a group of student political protesters, in actuality they have never been applied in this way – and for good reason, since the harsh consequences of being hit with such a punishment without first being given a chance to prove your innocence risks chilling free speech and assembly on campus.
Indeed, archival research aimed at tracing how the COD rules have shifted over time supports the hypothesis that the current application of such a peremptorily punitive measure to a group of students is unprecedented. Interim actions that disrupt due process seem to have been initially developed by the COD not to be applied in the case of collective political protests, but rather to address the much more singular situation in which someone facing “potential or pending criminal charges” for harassment or other similarly serious allegations might need their MIT hearings to be put on hold because “there is significant concern with respect to self-incrimination” (since pleading the Fifth in a COD meeting is problematic).
The language I just quoted is lifted from a prior version of the COD rules that was still in effect as recently as May 2013. “When the [COD] has deferred the hearing until court proceedings have been resolved,” it states, “interim measures, including temporary suspension, may be taken by the Dean for Student Life” (III.C.2).[15] Note that this very brief mention of interim suspensions implies that the DSL would only levy such peremptory punishment after a court and the faculty-led COD had weighed in to certify the seriousness of an alleged offense.
In other words, as recently as May 2013, interim suspension was alluded to only very briefly in the COD rulebook, for use in cases in which the question of who exactly had committed an alleged violation against whom had already been made crystal clear by a court and/or the COD. That’s pretty much the opposite of the messy situation that typically ensues in the wake of politically motivated collective action, which by its very nature muddies the question of who did what to whom, making it very difficult to apportion personal responsibility for particular rule violations to particular people.
No wonder, then, that circumstantial evidence suggests that such peremptory suspensions have been used relatively rarely at MIT, for cases in which a particular individual’s presence on campus has already been judged to constitute an immediate and direct threat to the safety of another particular person, such as sexual harassment.[16] If that’s right, then the next pressing question is: When and why did the nonsensical logic of “Sentence first – verdict afterward!” start to seem salient to the diametrically different case of student political protesters engaging in collective action?[17]
Let me tackle the question of when first. In July 2013, when the COD rules got revised, the single sentence mentioning “interim [. . .] suspensions” I just quoted suddenly mushroomed into a whole section on “Interim Actions.” That new section opened with a line so broadly expansive in its assertion of autocratic power that it would make Caligula blush:
To protect the intellectual integrity, safety, and wellbeing of the MIT community, the Chancellor reserves the right to take any action that they deem necessary or appropriate. In addition, the Dean for Student Life, or designee, may take appropriate interim action regarding a student in order to respond to concerns for the health, safety, and wellbeing of the community. Interim action is taken without prejudice to any subsequent COD process or finding.[18]
If you follow the link in the footnote below, you can review the revised version of this section of the COD rules in place today, which had doubled in size (again) by 2021, and which now reads as even more eager to grant the administration free reign to issue many different kinds of interim restrictions and punishments, “without limitation” and with zero input from the faculty-led COD (III).[19]
To be sure, the general preamble that prefaces the COD rules has long granted the Institute the overarching “right to take any action that it deems necessary or appropriate to protect the intellectual integrity, health, safety, wellbeing, or educational or working experience of the campus community” (as the current wording states). Caligula has been hovering in the background a long time. But again, the mere fact of having had that COD-superseding right doesn’t mean that the MIT administration was actually exercising it, in general or in the particular case of student political protesters. Similarly, the fact that COD’s guidance about interim actions was radically expanded in July 2013 without much public notice does not mean that such guidelines have routinely guided MIT’s actual practice, nor that – having now noticed them – we should allow them to stand unrevised going forward.
Indeed, even those who approve of interim suspensions being used to end the SAGE encampment may feel frightened when alerted to how radically the passage on interim measures in the COD rules has expanded since 2013 to widen the scope of the kinds of cases that administrators are being encouraged to settle on their own prior to COD involvement. One reason why this autocratic method of resolving disciplinary measures should be used as sparingly as possible is that it results in a situation in which even the most draconian and unjust punishments handed down by the administration cannot be officially challenged, much less remedied or reversed, by faculty. (Even if Ulm’s motion had passed, it would have been purely advisory to the administration.)
That said, it seems to have been not the administration, but the COD itself – in consultation with the Faculty Policy Committee (FPC) – which has been making these periodic revisions to their rulebook. That’s great news, since it means that the current COD can immediately be 1) apprised that a quiet lurch toward language that encourages top-down administrative decision-making on a broad array of disciplinary matters has happened recently, and 2) encouraged to undertake the urgent task of rewriting the rulebook to rein in that language now. That revision by the COD should be done in consultation with DSL staff, who can work on making similar and related changes to the MIT Mind and Hand Book.[20]
A Rash of New “Time, Place, And Manner” Restrictions
Let’s turn now to the question of why a radical expansion of the administrative license to discipline and punish occurred at MIT when it did: 1998, 2013, and (as we will soon see) during the 2023-24 academic year. The timing of this shift actually makes perfect sense, since it coincides with two broader phenomena that affected how American universities at large changed their rulebooks during this period.
First, having gotten into legal trouble for not taking allegations of sexual discrimination and harassment seriously enough in the 1990s and early 2000s, college administrators got “accustomed to using punishment as a go-to solution rather than a last resort” during the 2010s in an attempt to address that issue.[21] Second, during this same time period, a nation-wide crack-down on the rights of student political protesters occurred in the US that scholars, lawyers, and activists refer to as the “Palestine exception” to free speech. Pro-Palestinian speech and activism, their research shows, has been met with far less tolerance than other forms of free expression and assembly exercised during prior American protest movements.[22]
Following the passage of US anti-terrorism laws in the 1990s and 2000s that the Center for Constitutional Law described as “Anti-Palestinian at the Core,” many US universities began adopting more restrictive rules governing protests at the very moment when campus activism was becoming “increasingly central” to the movement for Palestinian rights.[23] Keenly aware of this historical context, two Harvard faculty – a historian and a political scientist – published an Op Ed in The Harvard Crimson last May to warn their own administration that “Suspending Student Protesters Would Be a Palestine Exception to Free Speech.”[24] “Such disproportionate penalties for relatively minor rule violations,” they contended, “break sharply with more than 50 years of Harvard practice.”
This Op Ed about Harvard came out on May 8th, 2024, the very day that MIT sent out its first batch of interim suspension letters to SAGE students who had participated in the encampment at MIT. So, clearly, it is worth asking whether MIT, too, might have been making a Palestinian exception.
The obvious place for any such investigation to start would be by determining when MIT’s “Guidelines for Free Expression at Campus Events, Vigils, Protests, and Demonstrations” – as they were called during the 2023-24 academic year – went into effect and evolved over time. That’s because the clearest signal that a Palestinian exception to free speech and assembly is occurring is that a raft of new “time, place, and manner” restrictions on student protesters get penned by a university just in time to squelch pro-Palestinian activism on campus.
For example, when our neighbor Northeastern revised its rules for student political protests in 2013, the group Students for Justice in Palestine became the first organization ever sanctioned for violating a permit policy that, as their spokesperson noted, was so new that “nobody even knew it really existed.” This freshly penned rule imposed a multi-day waiting period for such events that the students deemed so “chilling” to their free speech that they organized another demonstration, to protest the policy itself.[25] As the advocacy organization Palestine Legal has documented, hundreds of similar “incidents of censorship, punishment, or other burdening of advocacy for Palestinian rights” occurred during the 2010s.
Disturbingly, the evolution of MIT’s Guidelines seems like an even clearer case of the Palestinian exception. For by the administration’s own account, these Guidelines were “updated” in November 2023 and then again in January 2024, in a way that pro-Palestinian student protesters have credibly objected was specifically aimed at quashing their demonstrations.[26] For example, on November 8, 2023, the very day before a planned demonstration by MIT’s Coalition for Palestine (C4P) was set to take place in Lobby 7, an email blast went out to the MIT community announcing the existence of what was described as an “updated” version of these Guidelines, which banned Lobby 7 as a venue for student protests.
“I might be misremembering, so double-check me on this,” a graduate student member of the Jews for Ceasefire (J4C) who participated in this sit-in recalled, “but I remember MIT sending out protest guidelines the day before the November 9th sit-in in Lobby 7. At the time the event was organized it was not against the rules, but then MIT made sure it was against the rules by creating new rules.”[27]
Concerned but determined not to jump to conclusions, I contacted DSL in July 2024 to ask them to supply me with a link to (or a pdf of) an earlier version of the Guidelines, so that I could follow the student’s advice and check what was and wasn’t new about the November iteration of them.[28] But my request to see an earlier version went unanswered, even though DSL was one of the named groups listed on the Guidelines webpage as having participated in the process of revising them, along with “Institute Events, MIT Emergency Management, [and] MIT Police.” This list indicates that not a single faculty governance committee was involved in the process of “shap[ing]” these rules.[29]
By MIT’s own account, in other words, the campus police have had more “input” on MIT’s most consequential student free-speech policies than faculty. Indeed, as of June 2022, the members of the Ad Hoc Faculty Working Group on Free Expression were apparently unaware that these Guidelines even existed: the detailed report they issued then contains a comprehensive account of all “Current MIT Policies Related to Free Expression” – which makes zero mention of any such guidelines.
Perhaps that’s because, as late as October 18, 2023, the “Freedom of Expression” section of the student handbook (Mind and Hand Book, II.10) likewise contained no trace of the text and link that would eventually be added in to alert students to the existence of these Guidelines.[30] Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we can pinpoint the precise period when this material appeared: the first allusion to the Guidelines’ existence in the Mind and Hand Book happened sometime between October 18, 2023 and January 5, 2024.[31]
What this means is that even if some kind of unpublished alpha version of these Guidelines was previously circulating behind the scenes, the November 8th, 2023 beta version almost certainly marked the first moment that these “time, place, and manner” restrictions were published and thus morphed from suggested guidelines into binding official policies that MIT students could be accused of – and punished for – violating. In other words, they only really went into effect as rules that the COD began enforcing in November 2023.
Yet among the changes made to the revised January 2024 version of these Guidelines was the sudden insertion of the following claim to longevity: “these written guidelines have been used for several years.”[32] This specious assurance of continuity obscured not only that these Guidelines had only just began to function as official rules a mere two months earlier, but also the fact that brand-new restrictions were being imposed on students in this January 2024 reboot. The most egregious of these is the requirement that student-organized events “of any size” must now register them by meeting with Institute officials at least three business days in advance and gaining approval to use a tightly limited set of campus spaces (emphasis mine).
“Of any size.” Really? Consider the following scenario. Suppose a single MIT student exercises her personal freedom of speech by donning a sandwich board that reads “Free Palestine” and standing silently in the middle of Lobby 7. She is neither disrupting any of the essential functions of the Institute, nor harassing nor threatening the personal safety of anyone else on campus. She is, however, recognizable to other MIT community members passing by – or called to the scene – as someone who, in the past, has led or participated in events organized by officially recognized MIT student groups, such as Jews for Ceasefire (J4C).
As of January 2024, all that has to happen next to set MIT’s disciplinary wheels into motion against this lone student is for any other single member of the MIT community – e.g., an MIT faculty member who strongly disagrees with the political view she’s expressing that day; a police officer who is tired of dealing with that student; etcetera – to file a complaint to the COD alleging that an unregistered demonstration has taken place in an unauthorized location. Because the Guidelines now specify that demonstrations can be “of any size,” the COD cannot simply dismiss this complaint, so it sends the student a letter requiring her to quickly schedule, prepare herself for, and attend an hour-long disciplinary meeting to defend herself against this charge.
Even if the sandwich-boarded student’s case is speedily resolved without a disciplinary sanction being imposed on her, this disciplinary meeting itself constitutes a stressful drain not only on her time and energy, but also on that of the one or two faculty supporters she is advised to bring with her to the meeting, not to mention the multiple COD staff and faculty members required to organize and run the meeting and resolve her case. And if the complaint against her has been filed not because she’s disrupting any essential Institute activities, nor threatening the safety of anyone else on campus, but rather because the complainant recognizes her as a leader or member of a student group whose political views he objects to and wishes to squelch the free expression of on campus, then what he’s doing counts as political harassment.
I wish I could have introduced this anecdote by calling it a “counterfactual” scenario. Unfortunately, MIT’s new “time, place, and manner” rules have already resulted in an unprecedented rash of nuisance COD complaints of this kind. By the OSCCS staff’s own account, July is usually their quietest month. Yet this year, at least seven new disciplinary complaints citing these Guidelines have been lodged against J4C and SAGE students, for small, peaceful July gatherings that barely anyone at MIT knows happened because they in no way disrupted the essential activities of the Institute. On one such occasion, a lunch gathering took place in Stata that was so unobjectionable that several of the participants in it were not charged with anything. But two students whose faces were familiar to campus police already – due to their prior participation in the encampment – received COD letters demanding they defend themselves for being present at that event. Both were Black.[33]
Police had initially been called to the scene of this lunch gathering by an MIT staff member whose written complaint reveals that they strongly disagree with the political views expressed on the materials that a few of the students had set out prior to the lunch. When the police demanded that they put these materials away, the students complied. At that point, neither of the two SAGE students had even arrived yet, so there was no good reason why they, too, were reported to the COD for having broken MIT’s Guidelines against unregistered demonstrations.
If this is happening in the summer, the fall threatens to be a disciplinary nightmare, especially since these Guidelines have just been revised and expanded yet again. On August 26, 2024, a far more detailed and restrictive version of them appeared online that retains the problematic “of any size” language and retitles them “MIT Rules for Campus Protests and Demonstrations.” Since this major revision occurred over the summer, presumably no faculty committees were involved, yet as now written, these Rules mark a huge shift in practice by actively discouraging many forms of peaceful protest that MIT students have historically engaged in with great success.
Recall, for example, the peaceful 24-hour-a-day sit-in outside President Rafael Reif’s office that Fossil Free MIT student protesters organized, which lasted from October through March of 2016.[34] After the students successfully negotiated with the administration to pressure MIT to take additional steps to address climate change, President Reif publicly pronounced himself “inspired by both your conduct and your results.”[35] Yet today, students are being actively deterred from undertaking such action, because these Rules expressly prohibit demonstrations from taking place “in or adjacent to [. . .] administrative offices or office suites” and forbid all forms of “overnight camping [and] other unauthorized space takeovers [. . .] anywhere on campus, both indoors and outdoors.”[36]
Even if some of these Rules were technically on the books already and just not being enforced, the issuance of them now, in this newly detailed and threatening form, seriously inhibits free speech at MIT. Rather than building on a proud history of activism aimed at creating more socially conscious scientists, MIT has instead implicated itself in a repressive trend that the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) recently flagged as crucial for academics to resist. On August 14, 2024, the AAUP issued a statement condemning a nation-wide wave of “hastily enacted [and] overly restrictive policies” imposed “with little to no faculty input” by university administrators, which crack down too harshly on nonviolent campus protest.[37]
Thankfully, though, MIT already has access to a faculty-authored study it can draw on to fix this problem: the deeply erudite, ethically nuanced, yet also usefully pragmatic “Report of the MIT Ad Hoc Working Group on Free Expression” (June 24, 2022).[38] What needs to happen next is for the FPC and CAFCE to immediately review the “MIT Rules for Campus Protests and Demonstrations” with an eye toward bringing them into alignment with the excellent recommendations made in this Report. Presciently anticipating how easy it is for overly restrictive rules to be weaponized against MIT community members who express views that others disagree with, the Report reminds us that “Wherever possible we should treat freedom of expression controversies as opportunities for learning rather than occasions for disciplinary action or administrative oversight of some kind” (9).
Notably, this 2022 Report also recommended that the administration create a “Question and Answer” webpage to help all members of the MIT community familiarize ourselves with existing policies and support us as we grapple with the painfully hard cases: the ones that force us to recognize that a robust commitment to freedom of speech sometimes compels us to allow the expression of views on campus “that some experience as offensive or injurious” (21, 1). But what the administration created, instead, was a webpage aimed only at students that includes some brand-new policies that further restrict their free expression and assembly rights. In so doing, the administration and staff hastily altered MIT’s rules in a way that profoundly misconstrues both the remit of Recommendation 4 and the content of the Report as a whole.
MIT urgently needs to loop faculty back into the process of rewriting its rulebook(s). Hanging in the balance here is both the free expression and assembly rights of students and the right of faculty to have a say in governance issues related to academic freedom and student learning.
[1] These phrases appear in COD letters sent to multiple SAGE students on May 8, 2024, as compiled in a document used to collect anonymized, general data about these charges from students who consented in writing to share it. Future historians will want to cross-check this account with primary sources, some of which will not be viewable for decades (e.g., the full text of some COD documents does not become available to researchers until 75 years after their date of creation, due to FERPA regulations).
[2] The use of the conjunction “and” (rather than “or”) in this phrase indicated that the lifting of suspensions would not happen until both commencement and a full COD review were over. Such phrasing contradicted the brief disclaimer near the end of the letter: describing the interim suspension as “temporary,” it noted that the action being taken was “without prejudice to being revised at any time and will be reviewed after any internal MIT investigation and disciplinary proceedings are completed.” Yet even here, the first half of the sentence seems in tension with the second, inasmuch as the latter strongly implies that the suspensions will only be lifted after a full COD process concludes. In a May 21st follow-up email to suspended students, DSL itself acknowledged that the initial suspension letters had created “confusion” on this point and revised the relevant wording to clarify it (see footnote 20).
[3] By May 16th, after that letter was opened up to all MIT community members – such as graduate students and staff – the number of signatories had risen to 281. See https://sites-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/dueprocessnow/
[4] See “mitgsu” Instagram post of flyer https://www.instagram.com/mitgsu/p/C6_q7x6u6wd/?hl=en; petition itself is located at tinyurl.com/mit-unfair-discipline.
[5] Emails from SHASS faculty members received by author; SAGE website https://mitsage.my.canva.site/
[6] After noting that “MIT does not protect direct threats, harassment, plagiarism, or other speech that falls outside the boundaries of the First Amendment,” this Statement makes clear that students do, however, have a protected right to express political views “without constraints”: “We cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious,” it explains, adding that “Even robust disagreements shall not be liable to official censure or disciplinary action.” Though MIT may sometimes impose restrictions on “the time, place, and manner” of protected political expression, the bar for that kind of clamp-down is high: when it threatens “to disrupt the essential activities of the institute.” See https://facultygovernance-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/sites/default/files/reports/ 20221221_MIT_Statement_on_Freedom_of_Expression_and_Academic_Freedom.pdf
[7] Andrea Lamberti, “CPs Bring Penn, Francis Before COD for Assault,” The Tech 110:21 (24 April 1990): 1-2. This issue of The Tech also included an announcement for an upcoming colloquium set to feature both pro- and anti-divestment speakers – a little hint that we cannot claim that when past political protests happened on campus “there weren’t two sides,” as MIT administrators have said in an effort to justify actions taken in response to current tensions on campus related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In fact, Paul E. Gray, who served as president of MIT during the South Africa divestment protests, cited the existence of student counter-protesters in 1986 as a serious threat to the safety of encamped pro-divestment student activists, recalling an occasion on which the former threatened to attack the latter and had to be talked down by campus police. Even anti-Vietnam War protests on campus did not go unopposed: on November 7, 1967, the “Young Americans for Freedom” group organized a counter-protest, taking the other side when MIT’s “Committee to End the War in Vietnam” organized a sit-in against Dow Chemical Company (producer of napalm). The MIT Museum also has photos of an intense 1969 confrontation outside Kresge between anti-Vietnam-war protesters and a counter-protester whose sign reads “Fight Communists and Students’ Red Anarchy.” See “President Gray Discusses 1986, 1990 Demonstrations,” The Tech (April 25, 1990): 8; “Protesters Picketed at M.I.T.,” Boston Globe (November 7, 1967): 3; and https://mitmuseum-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/collections/object/GCP-00049818?query=photos%20student%20protest&resultIndex=6
[8] Linda D’Angelo and Dave Watt, “Penn and Francis are Cleared by COD,” The Tech 110: 28 (June 4, 1990): 1, 20.
[9] Lamberti, “CPs Bring Penn, Francis,” 1.
[10] See D’Angelo and Watt, 20.
[11] See footnote 1 for the source of this information as well as the quotes used in the following paragraph.
[12] http://www.mass.gov/guides/tenants-guide-to-eviction
[13] Notably, COD Chair Tamar Schapiro stressed in multiple ways during these faculty meetings that she had not been involved in the levying of these interim suspensions (e.g., by standing apart from other speakers).
[14] I don’t recall that any interim suspensions were issued to the Fossil Free MIT student protesters who conducted a sit-in outside President Rafael Reif’s office in the spring of 2016, for example.
[15] I found the May 27, 2013 version of the COD’s “Rules and Regulations” using the Internet Archive “Wayback Machine”: https://web.archive.org/web/20130527055943/http:/web.mit.edu/committees/cod/
[16] One of the very few explicit mentions of interim suspensions in MIT’s Distinctive Collection appears in a 1996 handbook entitled “Dealing with Harassment at MIT,” which notes that “When there is significant concern with respect to self-incrimination” by an alleged harasser “because of potential or pending criminal charges,” the COD Chair “can defer the COD hearing until after any charges have been heard in court. When the COD has deferred the hearing until court proceedings have been completed, interim measures, including temporary suspension, may be taken by administrative action” (48). This language almost exactly echoes (or perhaps even influenced, or coevolved with?) the more general COD rules, as revised in May 1996. See https://dome-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/handle/1721.3/189947 and https://web.archive.org/web/20011201054957/http://web.mit.edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/committees/cod/
[17] Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts issues this declaration at an absurd trial in Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland (1865).
[18] https://web.archive.org/web/20140122184837/http://web.mit.edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/committees/cod/
[19] See current COD rules http://cod.mit.edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/rules/section3, which were last revised in September 2021. During the May 2024 faculty meetings, the administration asked why the suspended students were not quickly scheduling their meetings with COD to address and resolve their cases. But why should suspended students rush in to attend these stressful meetings, when they had already been informed that their suspensions would last “through commencement”? As footnote 1 details, even DSL acknowledged that their initial letters had created enough “confusion” to necessitate the sending of a follow-up email on May 21st, which used new language to communicate that the interim suspensions could actually be modified “during” (not just “after”) the COD process, such that seniors could potentially graduate on time.
[20] See for example section II.18 (https://handbook-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/behavior-and-integrity), which seems to have been changed relatively recently to 1) support the recent COD updates on interim measures, and 2) include an emphasis on student “civility” that seems problematic in light of recent scholarship by African-Americanists and political scientists, such as Alex Zamalin’s book Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in Our Obsession with Civility (2022). Or, for an earlier reference, recall Henry David Thoreau’s famous quip in Walden (1854), which my MIT students found extra meaningful in spring 2024: “If I repent of anything,” this staunchly unruly practitioner of civil disobedience wrote, “it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”
[21] See Jeannie Suk Gersen, “Speech Under the Shadow of Punishment” (New Yorker, 3 June 2024): https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/speech-under-the-shadow-of-punishment?_sp=42519b12-a004-43ee-8a50-951de0b4c936.1718419102501
[22] See https://palestinelegal.org/the-palestine-exception
[23] See https://ccrjustice.org/anti-palestinian-core-origins-and-growing-dangers-us-antiterrorism-law
[24] See Alison Frank Johnson and Steven Levitsky (Harvard Crimson, 8 May 2024):https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/5/8/levitsky-frank-johnson-suspending-protesters-palestine-exception
[25] On the Northeastern protests, see https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/06/12/stifling-student-protest-northeastern-university/H7k5rk8VCsPlpWaJVS7eFI/story.html, https://www.openmediaboston.org/node/2686, and https://www.thefire.org/news/students-protest-northeastern-us-demonstration-policy
[26] These Guidelines were described as “updated” in an email sent out to all faculty entitled “Principles and Policies on expression” (8 Nov. 2023), as well as the one sent out to all students that same day: http://inj9.mjt.lu/nl3/c29AhcOTvSwjK5BkSEzsTQ?m=AWMAACqI3CwAAcrtEUwAAAA80XcAAYCrBVwAJdEsAAiQzwBlS_GAmGdLq78WSn6kXBMq1UDVqAAIIWc&b=a3c3498f&e=b5787ca0&x=uuHqfYKG6BLY4CuVIF3smg; additionally, the next iteration of the Guidelines webpage stated they were “Last updated: January 31, 2024”; see http://web.archive.org/web/20240608233720/https://resources-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/freeexpression-event-guidelines/
[27] Interview with author, August 2, 2024.
[28] Normally, you can use the “Wayback Machine” to view older iterations of webpages, but if you feed the address of the January 2024 version of the MIT Guidelines webpage – https://resources-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/freeexpression-event-guidelines/ – into this search engine, you discover that it was actually first created on that date; see https://web.archive.org/web/*/https:/resources.mit.edu/activismguidelines/* What this means is that – intentionally or not – MIT has made it virtually impossible to recuperate the text of older iterations of the Guidelines. But with help from a canny colleague, I still managed to track down a pdf of the November 2023 version: https://web.archive.org/web/20231113112115/https://studentlife-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/system/files/2023-11/202031103-mit-guidelines-on-speakers-protests-and-demonstrations-final_1.pdf
[29] See http://web.archive.org/web/20240608233720/https://resources-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/freeexpression-event-guidelines/
[30] See http://web.archive.org/web/20231018210311/https://handbook-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/expression
[31] Contrast the October 18, 2023 version of Section II (10) – linked to in previous note – with the next available snapshot of this site available on the Internet Archive, which was taken on January 5, 2024: http://web.archive.org/web/20240105194234/https://handbook-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/expression
[32] http://web.archive.org/web/20240608233720/https://resources-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/freeexpression-event-guidelines/
[33] This account of the July 15th incident in Stata is based on eyewitness testimony from two MIT faculty who were present during this event – and who later wrote to the COD to protest the levying of disciplinary charges against the students – as well as students’ own account of what happened, which I am sharing with their written permission.
[34] See https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/02/29/mit-fossil-fuel-protesters-settle-for-long-haul/XVpIvv2EjM8kZWyKlRMI2M/story.html?s_campaign=8315 and MIT faculty member Kieran Setiya’s account of the sit-in in Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way (2022, pp. 138-140).
[35] https://news-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/2016/agreement-climate-related-action-reached-mit-administration-student-led-group-0303
[36] https://resources-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/protest-demonstration-rules/. Contrast these draconian rules to former MIT President Howard Johnson’s assurance that “mill-in” protests that involve students congregating in MIT hallways “would be permitted as long as ‘reasonable access’ was maintained” for others to enter and exit offices and classrooms, as quoted in Robert Elkin and Steven Kaiser’s (misleadingly headlined) article “Faculty Supports Injunction,” The Tech (November 4, 1969): 2.
[37] AAUP Condemns Wave of Administrative Policies Intended to Crack Down on Peaceful Campus Protests” (August 14, 2024): https://www.aaup.org/news/aaup-condemns-wave-administrative-policies-intended-crack-down-peaceful-campus-protest
[38]https://facultygovernance-mit-edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/sites/default/files/20220901_Final_Report_of_the_Ad_Hoc_Working_Group_on_Free_Expression.pdf
