MIT suspends anti-Israel student group for holding unauthorized demonstration

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) president Sally Kornbluth speaks during a hearing of the US House Committee on Education on Capitol Hill, December 5, 2023 in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) president Sally Kornbluth speaks during a hearing of the US House Committee on Education on Capitol Hill, December 5, 2023 in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

BOSTON — The president of MIT has suspended a student group that has held demonstrations against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as protests over the war continue to rattle universities around the country.

In a video statement, Sally Kornbluth says the group, Coalition Against Apartheid or CAA, held a demonstration Monday night without going through the university’s permission process required of all groups. The protest was against the Israeli military’s possible ground invasion of Rafah, the city on the southern Gaza border where 1.4 million Palestinians have fled to escape fighting elsewhere in the monthslong war.

As a result, the group received a letter Tuesday advising that its privileges as a student group would be suspended. It will not get any kind of funding that student group’s normally get nor will it be able to use MIT facilities nor hold any demonstrations on campus.

“I want to be clear: suspending the CAA is not related to the content of their speech,” Kornbluth says.

“I fully support the right of everyone on our campus to express their views. However, we have clear, reasonable time, place and manner policies for good reason,” she says. “The point of these policies is to make sure that members of the MIT community can work, learn and do their work on campus without disruption. We also need to keep the community safe.”

The CAA, in a statement, demands that it be reinstated and calls MIT’s move an attack on its right to fight for what it says is “Palestinian liberation.” It also says that 13 student organizers have individually been threatened with permanent suspension from MIT.

The president didn’t address such disciplinary action against student organizers in her video messages.

“For over four months, the MIT administration has continued to silence our voices by applying unjust punitive measures to our actions,” the group says of its response to what it called “genocide perpetrated by the Israeli occupation in Palestine.”

“These attacks on our right to protest are not only suppressive but expose the moral failure and desperation of the administration,” the group adds.

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