Michel DeGraff, a tenured linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, has said his latest proposed course has been rejected, extending a dispute with the university that began three years ago over a course on Palestine and Israel, The New York Times reported on Friday (9 October).
Over the summer, DeGraff proposed a new course based on his book, published last month: "Our Own Language: Harnessing the Power of Kreyol and Other Mother Tongues for Education and Liberation." Proposing new courses is common for professors at a research university such as MIT.
In early September, an associate dean told him the department would discuss the idea, but asked first for a copy of the book. DeGraff replied that the syllabus he had submitted should be enough.
Given the history with his last course proposal, he wrote, "Requiring an additional departmental review of the book itself therefore strikes me as ongoing discrimination and harassment."
He copied top administrators, including MIT President Sally Kornbluth, on the email. His new class, he said, had been rejected.
Federal lawsuit
Last March, DeGraff, 63, filed a federal lawsuit against MIT, the congressional committee that named him in a report and its chairman. He accuses the university of punishing him for his political activism, chilling campus speech on Gaza and violating his academic freedom.
"If you ask faculty to keep quiet, then you are basically betraying the job of the university, which is to teach about difficult topics," he said.
Earlier, he said, "MIT should not be repressing my teaching in this way." He called the university's decision a "violation of my professional rights".
MIT has denied his claims and asked the court to dismiss the suit.
"Indeed, the fact that DeGraff has continued to speak publicly and prolifically on the very subjects he claims have been chilled only underscores the speculative nature of his alleged injuries," the university argued in a court filing. Through a spokeswoman, it declined to comment further.
Sanctions and sidelining
Agustín Rayo, dean of MIT's School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, sanctioned DeGraff in late 2024. In a letter DeGraff shared, the dean said he was temporarily removing him from the linguistics section for being disruptive and creating the expectation that people who displease him "are at risk of being targeted" in public forums.
"Your speech rights do not place you above MIT's rules," the dean wrote.
DeGraff has since been given the title "faculty at large", which he includes in his email signature inside satirical quotation marks.
He said he had been denied a scheduled raise, access to new mentees and blocked from the department's Facebook page.
For the third fall semester in a row, he said, he was being paid while not teaching a class.
He is still scheduled to teach two spring classes he has taught for years, "Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities" and "Black Matters: Introduction to Black Studies".
His personal relationship with the linguistics section head, a one-time friend, is broken, and colleagues said they were exhausted by the controversy.
Haynes Miller, an MIT professor emeritus of mathematics and a close friend, said the removal substantially reduces DeGraff's impact at the university. "It is humiliating for him; it's a symbolic thing as well as a practical thing," he said.
How the dispute began
The idea for the first course came to DeGraff on 5 December 2023. He had watched Kornbluth and the leaders of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania questioned by Republicans in a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. The proposed course was titled "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 of Haiti and Beyond".
DeGraff, a Haitian scholar and expert in Creole languages, was a leading faculty voice siding with pro-Palestinian protesters.
Jews saw their rallying cry, "from the river to the sea", as antisemitic.
An MIT panel rejected the course over questions about whether he had the expertise to teach it.
He disagreed and protested the decision in a flurry of emails decrying it as part of a "new McCarthyism". He also wrote to colleagues, including deans and the president, in long email chains that he made public. He objected on social media and in published commentaries.
After the rejection, he turned the concept into a discussion series with guest speakers in fall 2024. That year he also joined students who occupied part of campus in a three-week encampment demanding that MIT end ties with Israel. According to him, he was there nearly every day, before police shut it down.
Harassment suit and House report
A US House committee staff report last spring accused DeGraff of perpetuating "antisemitic conspiracy theories". It pointed to accusations that he had targeted a Jewish student for harassment.
That former student, William Sussman, joined a lawsuit against DeGraff and MIT in 2025.
Sussman said DeGraff had targeted him on social media as an example of a Zionist "mind infection" for being Jewish and that antisemitic harassment had driven him out of the university.
DeGraff said the term had come from an Israeli scholar who has used it to describe how Israeli schoolbooks marginalised Palestinians.
He said he was not an antisemite and that federal courts had said criticism of Israel by itself was not inherently antisemitic.
Part of the suit, including the claims against DeGraff, was dismissed, though appeals are possible.
Sussman criticised MIT in a statement saying, "The professor remains employed at MIT, where he continues to smear me."
Wider context
DeGraff is one of several professors in disputes with their schools over speech.
Carnegie Mellon University announced in September that it was investigating social media posts from a professor accused of celebrating the deaths of conservative figures.
A University of Texas professor is contesting his 16-month paid administrative leave, which he believes is related to his criticism of school leadership.
An arbitrator ordered San Jose State University to reinstate a tenured professor it had fired over allegations related to her role in pro-Palestinian campus protests.
DeGraff's friends say his campaign comes from deep concern for free speech, human rights, and his understanding of language as a means to exercise power.
"Michel's great virtue is his persistence," said Miller. "He doesn't give up. If he sees an injustice, he will attack it."
DeGraff's Background
DeGraff was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and persuaded his parents to send him to the United States to study computer science.
Once there, he became more interested in Haitian Creole, which he said is often derided as "broken French" and not a real language.
His PhD thesis at the University of Pennsylvania was titled "Creole Grammars and Acquisition of Syntax: The Case of Haitian Creole".
He joined the MIT linguistics faculty in 1996.
DeGraff sees parallels between the Haitian struggle for independence and that of the Palestinian people.
"That is what brought me to want to further my research and teaching about these connections," he said.