A longtime Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) linguistics professor’s campaign to challenge the rejection of a proposed course on decolonisation, Palestine and liberation has escalated into a prolonged dispute with the university over academic freedom, political activism and allegations of antisemitism.

Michel DeGraff, a tenured professor who has taught at MIT since 1996, proposed a course 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.”

The idea took shape in the months after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. DeGraff became a prominent faculty voice supporting pro-Palestinian campus protesters, some of whom used the slogan “from the river to the sea” to call for Palestinian freedom. The phrase has been viewed by some Jewish people as antisemitic.

According to The New York Times, an MIT panel rejected the proposed course, raising questions about whether DeGraff, a Haitian scholar specialising in Creole languages, had the expertise to teach it.

But DeGraff refused to accept the decision. He challenged the panel’s assessment in a series of emails, accusing the university of engaging in a “new McCarthyism”. He also complained to colleagues, deans and the university president in lengthy email exchanges, which he later made public.

He continued his campaign through social media posts and published commentaries before filing a federal lawsuit against MIT, accusing the university of suppressing speech about Gaza and violating his academic freedom.

“MIT should not be repressing my teaching in this way,” DeGraff said in an interview, describing the decision as a “violation of my professional rights”.

The university declined to comment through a spokeswoman but has denied his allegations in court filings.

As DeGraff’s campaign gained attention, so did criticism of his conduct. A former Jewish student sued him for harassment, while a US House committee staff report published last spring accused him of perpetuating “antisemitic conspiracy theories”.

Nearly three years into the dispute, DeGraff’s relationship with the head of MIT’s linguistics section, once a friend, has broken down. His colleagues have also grown weary of the controversy.

In most workplaces, employees who challenge their employers so publicly and persistently could risk losing their jobs. Tenured professors, however, enjoy protections designed to safeguard academic independence and make dismissal more difficult.

MIT administrators have nevertheless sanctioned DeGraff, accusing him of disruptive conduct and violations of university procedures and directives. He was removed from the linguistics section and assigned the less clearly defined designation of “faculty at large”, a title he places in satirical quotation marks in his email signature.

DeGraff said the university had denied him a scheduled pay rise and access to new mentees, and had blocked him from the department’s Facebook page. For the third consecutive autumn semester, he said, he was receiving a salary without being assigned a class to teach.

He is among several US academics who have recently become embroiled in disputes with their universities over speech and political expression.

Carnegie Mellon University announced in September that it was investigating a professor’s social media posts after allegations that she had celebrated the deaths of conservative figures. A University of Texas professor is challenging 16 months of paid administrative leave, which he believes is connected to his criticism of university leadership.

In another case, an arbitrator ordered San Jose State University to reinstate a tenured professor whom the university had dismissed over allegations related to her involvement in pro-Palestinian campus protests.

With university politics under intense scrutiny and institutions seeking to avoid confrontation with the Trump administration, DeGraff’s dispute has become one of the more protracted and contentious cases.

Chris Sharp, chief of staff at the Austin-based public policy organisation Cicero Institute, argued that some tenured professors use claims of academic freedom to shield their personal activism.

He said the concept was often misunderstood as an unrestricted right to teach or conduct research on any subject, rather than the freedom to teach and research within one’s area of expertise.

“Just because I have a Ph.D. in one thing does not make me an expert in everything,” Sharp said.

DeGraff’s supporters, however, view his campaign as an extension of his commitment to free speech, human rights and the role of language in shaping power.

“Michel’s great virtue is his persistence,” said Haynes Miller, an MIT professor emeritus of mathematics who is close to DeGraff and rejects the suggestion that his friend is antisemitic. “He doesn’t give up. If he sees an injustice he will attack it.”

DeGraff, 63, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He persuaded his parents to send him to the United States to study computer science, but later became more interested in Haitian Creole, his homeland’s language.

He said the language is frequently dismissed as “broken French” rather than recognised as a language in its own right. His doctoral thesis at the University of Pennsylvania was titled “Creole Grammars and Acquisition of Syntax: The Case of Haitian Creole”.

He joined MIT’s linguistics faculty in 1996.

DeGraff sees a connection between Haiti’s struggle for independence and the Palestinian people’s pursuit of freedom. That parallel, he said, inspired his desire to expand his research and teaching on the relationship between language, colonialism and liberation.

The proposed course took shape on December 5, 2023, after he watched MIT president Sally Kornbluth and the leaders of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania face questioning from Republican lawmakers at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism.

After MIT rejected the course, DeGraff developed the idea into a discussion series featuring guest speakers in autumn 2024.

That year, he also regularly joined students occupying part of the MIT campus during a three-week encampment demanding that the university sever its ties with Israel. DeGraff said he attended almost every day until police dismantled the encampment.

In late 2024, Agustín Rayo, dean of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, sanctioned DeGraff and temporarily removed him from the linguistics section.

In a letter shared by DeGraff, Rayo accused him of disruptive behaviour and of creating an environment in which people who displeased him could feel at risk of being targeted in public forums.

“Your speech rights do not place you above MIT’s rules,” Rayo wrote.

DeGraff also drew the attention of congressional Republicans. A committee report cited allegations that he had harassed a Jewish student, William Sussman, who joined a lawsuit against DeGraff and MIT in 2025.

Sussman alleged that DeGraff had targeted him on social media, portraying him as an example of a Zionist “mind infection” because he was Jewish. Sussman has said antisemitic harassment drove him out of the university.

DeGraff disputed that characterisation. He said the expression “mind infection” originated with an Israeli scholar who had used it to describe how Israeli schoolbooks marginalise Palestinians.

He denied being antisemitic and argued that criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic, a position he said had been recognised by federal courts.

Part of the lawsuit, including claims against DeGraff, was dismissed, although appeals remain possible.

In a statement, Sussman criticised MIT for continuing to employ DeGraff, saying, “The professor remains employed at MIT, where he continues to smear me.”

DeGraff’s removal from the linguistics section has significantly reduced his influence within the department, according to Miller.

“His impact at MIT is substantially reduced,” Miller said. “It is humiliating for him; it’s a symbolic thing as well as a practical thing.”

Last March, DeGraff filed a federal lawsuit against MIT, the congressional committee that named him in its report and the committee’s chairman. He accused the university of punishing him for his political activism.

“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.

MIT denied the allegations and asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit. In a filing, the university argued that DeGraff’s continued public commentary undermined his claim that the school had restricted his speech.

“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.

Despite the dispute, DeGraff remains scheduled to teach two courses in the spring that he has taught for years: “Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities” and “Black Matters: Introduction to Black Studies”.

Over the summer, he proposed another course based on his book, published last month, titled “Our Own Language: Harnessing the Power of Kreyol and Other Mother Tongues for Education and Liberation”.

Proposing new courses is a routine part of academic life at research universities such as MIT. In early September, an associate dean told DeGraff that the department would discuss his proposal but first asked him to provide a copy of the book.

DeGraff refused, arguing that the syllabus he had submitted should be sufficient for the review. Given the history of his previous course proposal, he wrote, “requiring an additional departmental review of the book itself therefore strikes me as ongoing discrimination and harassment”.

He copied senior university administrators, including Kornbluth, on the email.

DeGraff said the university rejected his latest course proposal as well, extending a dispute that has come to encompass not only his teaching but also the limits of academic freedom, the boundaries of scholarly expertise and the treatment of pro-Palestinian expression on US campuses.