Congress Must Defund MIT Until It Gets Its House in Order

The ramifications of MIT President Sally Kornbluth’s failure to quell the outbreak of anti-Semitism on campus, frustrated by the active opposition of her own senior administrators, Deans, DEI officers, and radical faculty that blossomed under the appeasement policies of past president Rafael Reif, now threaten MIT’s federal funding. As well it should.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce sent a letter to MIT President Sally Kornbluth and MIT Corporation Chair Mark Gorenberg requesting documents and information regarding MIT’s response to numerous anti-Semitic incidents on campus and its administration’s failure to protect Jewish students and faculty. MIT’s damage control lawyers and consultants will no doubt do everything they can to delay the response and keep it as narrow as possible.

Regardless of the material they present, anyone delving into MIT’s sprawling website, following the Tweets of its most radical faculty, or reading the screeds published in the faculty newsletter by professors from its School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences will discover a Pandora’s Box of anti-Semitic, intolerant, irrational, and illiberal vitriol—vitriol as bad as that spewing from any Ivy League university.

Most telling is the way MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles sabotaged President Kornbluth’s effort to launch an anti-Semitism initiative in the aftermath of her disastrous appearance before Congress. Nobles transformed what could have been a genuine effort to turn the tide into yet another platform where virulent anti-Semites could preach their hatred of Israel, Zionism, and the Jews. “Stand Together Against Hate,” as this hijacked anti-Semitism program was named, is now focused on stemming the “underreported Islamophobia” that supposedly plagues the MIT community. One has to be impressed by the chutzpah documented in a recent open letter to President Kornbluth from the MIT Jewish Alumni Alliance.

It gets worse.

A mere day after President Kornbluth suspended the MIT Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA) in response to its violations of time, place, and manner restrictions on disruptive demonstrations, Nobles and her cabal invited the CAA’s chief student leader to speak at MIT’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Gala. There, under the guise of MLK’s call for mutuality, he deftly pivoted to preach intifada. At the end of his tirade, he invited MIT’s many attending senior leaders, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) officers, and faculty up onto the stage to chant anti-Israeli slogans in solidarity. All of this was recorded by a professor from MIT’s linguistic department under whom this student was radicalized, resulting in a video that he proudly posted on Instagram.

Only one thing will stop this, and that is to throttle the half-billion dollars of federal money that pours into MIT’s coffers each year. But how can the House leadership do this without being accused of being “anti-science?”

Easy.

MIT’s overhead rate on research grants from the NSF, NIH, DoD, and other federal agencies is 59 percent. That is, 59 cents on every dollar of taxpayers’ money Washington grants to MIT scientists is diverted from actual scientific research into the pockets of MIT’s bloated administration. This is what helped turn MIT into the university with the highest administrative cost per student in the country. A bill capping MIT’s overhead rate at 25 percent on all federal research funding would do wonders to drain this particular swamp.a

Reforms should begin with the cashiering of Chancellor Nobles and the entire administrative DEI leviathan built up under former president Rafael Raef. Mandatory DEI training on oppression and intersectionality has been infecting the minds of MIT students for years, turning far too many into Hamas sympathizers.

Alumni certainly can, and many are, withholding donations. But given MIT’s $23 billion dollar endowment, tightening the federal purse strings will likely have the most influence. Please call your congressman and demand action while there is still time to save the jewel in STEM’s crown.

Photo by Nature & rabbit75_cav — Canva Stock — Edited by Jared Gould