BY MICHEL DEGRAFF
Editor’s note: This post was originally published on the afternoon of Friday, January 30, 2026, then unpublished to provide time for AAUP staff to consult about its accordance with an editorial policy that states, “Posts should not focus primarily on specific ongoing disputes involving individuals and their colleges or universities or AAUP entities—including chapters, conferences, or affiliates—unless they address rare cases of national significance and emphasize their wider implications.” The post is now being re-published on Monday, February 2, 2026. The MIT AAUP chapter has been invited to publish a response. Opinions expressed in Academe Blog posts represent the views of their individual authors, not the positions or policies of AAUP.
When “Collective Academic Freedom” Becomes a Pretext for Violating Academic Freedom and Free Speech
Across the country, faculty members, myself included, are suffering repression driven by the “Palestine Exception” to free speech. Given this, and inspired by AAUP National’s strong defense of academic freedom and freedom of expression nationwide—particularly concerning Palestine-related advocacy—we often seek support from local AAUP chapters. Unfortunately, we too often encounter silence or, worse yet, justifications that mis-interpret AAUP principles, thereby undermining the very freedoms these principles are meant to safeguard.
My own case at MIT raises a question that should concern AAUP chapters nationwide: When does an appeal to collective academic freedom become a pretext for refusing to defend an individual faculty member’s rights to academic freedom and free speech?
MIT Linguistics rejected my “Special Topics” elective seminar, Language and Linguistics for Decolonization and Liberation in Haiti, Palestine and Israel, which I had proposed for fall 2024. This rejection, detailed in a Mondoweiss article, was unprecedented in my nearly three decades at MIT.
In spring 2024, the Chair of MIT Linguistics and the Directors of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies formed an ad hoc committee to review and ultimately reject my proposal. This action followed a very heated private conversation in December 2023 when the Chair strenuously objected to my use of terms like “settler-colonial,” “resistance,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” when discussing Palestine and Israel. During that conversation, he cursed at me—“You must be out of your fucking mind”—and accused me of antisemitism. This was a first for me in my relatively long career at MIT.
In another first in my career at MIT, the ad hoc review committee rejected the seminar as an MIT Linguistics course, citing vague concerns such as a lack of “curricular fit,” “outsourcing” to guest speakers, and “lack of expertise.” None of these concerns were valid. They rejected my proposal despite my decades of award-winning scholarship and teaching on language, colonialism and power, and in contrast to the routine approval of my and others’ prior seminars creating expertise and advancing knowledge in new areas.
After my use of MIT email and op-ed essays to publicly protest the decision, the Dean of MIT’s School of the Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences accused me of “misconduct.” He then cancelled my annual raise. Eventually, he removed me from my academic home of twenty-eight years.
One expects a local AAUP chapter to defend a faculty member in such circumstances. Instead, the MIT chapter declined to intervene. Its president argued that departments possess collective academic freedom to determine their curricula, and that this collective right takes precedence over an individual faculty member’s academic freedom.
This interpretation is deeply flawed.
The AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles and its later policy statements recognize that academic freedom operates both individually and collectively. While departments do have authority over curricula, “collective academic freedom” is not a blank check for departments to suppress disfavored viewpoints, especially in the case of an individually taught elective seminar, one in the category of “Special Topics” designed to cover topics outside the regular curriculum.
Professor Joan Scott, co-author of the AAUP’s statement on The Freedom to Teach, has kindly clarified this distinction in email correspondence. The “collective” dimension of academic freedom, she emphasized, concerns situations such as multi-section or jointly taught courses with shared syllabi. It does not apply to a “Special Topics” course, like my proposed seminar, for which a single faculty member is individually responsible for the content. In such cases, individual academic freedom governs.
Indeed, individual academic freedom depends on a collective environment that protects it—not on a collective authority that extinguishes it.
This troubling inversion of principle echoes the historical period documented by Ellen Schrecker in her book No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. During the Red Scare in the early 1950s, claims of “institutional autonomy” and “departmental judgment” were frequently used to justify the firing of “academic radicals” whose political views were considered controversial or dangerous.
Universities, in claiming the right to protect their reputation, maintain cohesion, and set curricular standards, often masked ideological policing. Much like the current situation at the MIT Chapter of AAUP, the language of collective responsibility was then deployed to override individual rights. Schrecker’s work demonstrates that academic freedom was undermined, not only by external political pressure, but also by internal compliance and procedural rationalizations.
The clear lesson from the McCarthy era is that collective academic freedom must function as a shield for intellectual diversity, not as a weapon against dissent. When a department invokes its collective authority—especially when under political pressure—to exclude disfavored perspectives, it risks repeating this destructive history.
The danger of misusing “collective academic freedom” becomes especially acute under the Palestine Exception. Across the country, administrators, legislators and pro-Israel students and co-workers have weaponized Title VI and accusations of antisemitism to chill speech about Israel and Palestine. Faculty members are investigated, courses are scrutinized, and outside groups file lawsuits to intimidate institutions.
In this context, silence from AAUP chapters is not neutral. It is complicity. It has consequences. Chapters need the courage to apply AAUP principles consistently.
The Palestine Exception thrives not only on overt repression and fear—Canary Mission-like—but also on procedural maneuvers: secret reviews, ad hoc committees, vague concerns about “fit,” “expertise,” “libel,” etc.,” that justify inaction. When AAUP chapters adopt these logics—however well-intentioned—they risk becoming inadvertent allies in the erosion of academic freedom.
In my conversations with faculty comrades across the nation, these stories are becoming much too common. They point to a structural problem: AAUP chapters may hesitate to defend colleagues when the topic is Palestine or when political or personal allegiances interfere, even while affirming abstract commitments to academic freedom.
What, then, is required?
First, clarity. AAUP chapters must understand that collective academic freedom does not authorize departments to suppress individually taught elective courses because of their political content.
Second, consistency. If AAUP National and its chapters can speak out about threats to academic freedom in other contexts elsewhere (as AAUP@MIT did for Columbia), they certainly can speak about threats at their own institutions.
Third, accountability. When chapters misapply AAUP policy in ways that undermine individual rights, there must be mechanisms for correction to be applied by AAUP National, sooner rather than later.
The stakes are higher than any single case. As political pressures on higher education intensify, including federal and parliamentary efforts to condition funding on ideological compliance (even in contradiction with judicial rulings), the integrity of AAUP principles becomes ever more vital. If “collective academic freedom” can be invoked by AAUP chapters to help silence scholarship about Palestine and Israel today, then it can be used tomorrow to suppress scholarship on race, climate, gender or any other politically contested topic—the MAGA way.
The defense of academic freedom and free speech begins at home. If AAUP chapters fail to uphold that standard within their own institutions, the profession’s most vital safeguard will hollow out from within. The choice before us is not abstract. It is immediate and practical: Will AAUP chapters stand as bulwarks against repression or will they allow the language of academic freedom to be repurposed to undermine it?
Michel DeGraff is a linguist, educator and human-rights advocate whose work focuses on liberatory linguistics. A member of the MIT faculty since 1996, he now serves as Faculty-at-Large in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences after being removed from the Linguistics section in 2024—an action he has challenged as retaliation for defending academic freedom and free speech. He is co-founder and co-director of the MIT–Haiti Initiative which develops open-access educational resources in Haitian Creole and advances equitable pedagogy in Haiti and beyond. He is a founding member of the Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen. Elected a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2022, DeGraff’s scholarship and activism examine how linguistic hierarchies intersect with race and power, and how language can be mobilized for decolonization and liberation. More at http://mit.edu/degraff.
I write as a colleague in Prof. DeGraff’s former department and as a former member of AAUP. In addition to the text quoted in the “Editor’s note” at the top of the page, your editorial policy also states: “Blog posts should not contain content that raises significant legal concerns. Posts should not include defamatory statements, meaning false or misleading statements that could harm the reputation of individuals or organizations.” Though the nominal target of DeGraff’s post is the MIT Chapter of AAUP, most of his text is devoted to repeating disputed claims about individuals and events in my department that most certainly can and surely will harm their reputation if they are believed. Nonetheless, to the best of my knowledge, no member of my department was ever approached for fact-checking purposes prior to publication. I cannot understand how this conforms with your editorial policy, much less simple fairness.
A video in which similar claims were repeated was earlier released on the AAUP’s YouTube channel under the rubric “Faculty on the Front Lines” — again with no attempt at fact checking that I am aware of. It was in the wake of that video that I declined to renew my membership in AAUP, and informed the local chapter of my reasons. That is why I am now a former member.
I cannot tell you how appalled I am at such harmful conduct from the organization that I proudly joined, thinking its mission is to support its members and protect them from abuse.
For the record, the only aspect of Prof. DeGraff’s teaching request that was ever at issue was whether his class should be offered under a Linguistics course number, not whether it was an appropriate class for MIT. This is a question about which reasonable people may disagree. From the very beginning, however, Prof. DeGraff refused to engage in any department-level discussion whatsoever of these matters, including the faculty meetings devoted to course planning. Instead, he almost immediately took his objections public, in an increasingly escalating fashion, with false charges of McCarthyism and censorship, personal attacks, and worse — a situation that continues to this very day, two years later, now apparently abetted by AAUP itself.
I write as a former post-doc at the MIT Linguistics Department, and a frequent visitor for many years. I have been following Prof. Michel DeGraff’s repeated accusations against his colleagues, Department Chair, Dean, and other officials at MIT, which he has been delivering in videotaped as well as written statements. The latest is the message above.
There seems to be an ongoing dispute between Prof. DeGraff and the MIT Linguistics Department, of which the former has written widely. The present piece by Prof. DeGraff is nothing but a personal story, rife with accusations, that masquerades as a tale of general interest. In it, he once again targets specific individuals (Department Chair, members of a departmental committee). And still, you decided to publish his missive in a manner that is not only inconsistent with your own rules, but also, shockingly contradicts your own statement that “Posts should not focus primarily on specific ongoing disputes involving individuals and their colleges or universities or AAUP entities.”
Moreover, while Prof. DeGraff is entitled to write whatever he wishes, AAUP’s official organ must at a minimum perform fact checking, and solicit a response from the individuals and organizations that he attacks. Your editorial note states that the local AAUP chapter had been contacted; yet, it includes no mention of a similar invitation extended to DeGraff’s Chairperson and colleagues. Your decision to publish this one-sided version is unacceptable, and in fact quite worrisome.
Let me note that fact checking here is not that difficult. While documentation concerning this sad affair appears on the web, a good place to start may be two letters, one written by several colleagues about a year ago (https://bit.ly/response-letter-mesa), and another, written by me (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Bimx3frczt2h83tZd4mHDGC153hoAE_Kz6kg1WKbFBE/edit?usp=sharing). Among other things, these documents reveal that Prof. DeGraff’s current piece merely rehashes his past accusations.
The threats that American academia and AAUP are currently facing are many. I believe that you have enough on your plate, and don’t need to engage in unfair and imbalanced actions, especially when they go against your own rules. I thus urge you to take immediate action, withdraw DeGraff’s piece (as you’ve already done once, by your own account), and reconsider republishing only after you perform proper fact checking, and solicit comments from those he has attacked.