Imagine, if you will, a university allowing the constant and pervasive harassment of African Americans. Professors targeting black students for harassment by name, students peeing on the windows of the black student center, and mass occupations of buildings and the quad protesting the existence of blacks.
It would never happen. Anti-black sentiment is well outside the Overton Window, and the federal government would come down like a ton of bricks, or even drop a Massive Ordnance Penetrator on the administration building.
— Will Sussman (@realWillSussman) July 2, 2025
Not so when it comes to Jews on the campuses of our elite universities. You may see a bit of tut-tutting, lectures about Islamophobia and antisemitism (what islamophobia–the “protesters” are out there SUPPORTING HAMAS AND IRAN!), and some muttering from intellectuals about how campus administrators should be a bit more proactive.
But consequences? Ha!
Well, Will Sussman, who was driven out of MIT by constant harassment from students AND a professor, is trying to fight back. Let’s hope he takes MIT for its entire endowment. Fat chance, but we can dream, can’t we?
Before Oct. 7, 2023, I was the literal poster boy for a PhD student at MIT. I was featured in a July 2023 profile in MIT News, which relayed my background and aspirations.
“Although he has just two years of graduate school under his belt,” it said, “Sussman is considering a career in academia.”
That career is no longer available to me. In January, I left MIT because of the antisemitism I experienced on campus. Now I’m suing the university.
The antisemitism didn’t start on Oct. 7. I joined the board of MIT Grad Hillel during my first year on campus because, as I told MIT News, “I think it’s important to demonstrate Jewish culture at a time when antisemitism is on the rise.”
Three months after the profile was published, Hamas terrorists waged the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust — and my fellow students at MIT celebrated, posting, “Victory is ours.”
As president of Grad Hillel, I had to cope not only with my own grief but also with that of my community members who sought support in the face of antisemitism that they encountered on campus. We witnessed our peers chant for violence against Jews, take over buildings, interrupt classes with antisemitic rants, and harass, intimidate and bully Jews for being Jewish.
This hostile environment was exposed to the world in December 2023 when MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, was called to Congress alongside the presidents of Harvard and Penn, to answer for the antisemitism on her campus.
She testified, now infamously, that calls for the elimination of the Jewish people can be antisemitic “depending on the context.” After that day, calls for the genocide of Jews continued, and the climate of terror on campus intensified.
It became increasingly difficult to focus on my computer science research. Students were arrested for unruly protest both inside and outside my office building. A man urinated on the window of the MIT Hillel Center. When demonstrators erected an encampment in the middle of campus, MIT Hillel was forced to move and postpone its long-planned annual celebration of Israel’s Independence Day.
With MIT doing nothing to curb the escalating antisemitism on campus, the situation spiraled out of control.
In November 2024, a tenured MIT professor posted online that a “Zionist ‘mind infection’ ” is being funded by “Jewish student life organizations” such as Hillel and Chabad.
When I pointed out that his message was extremely dangerous rhetoric, the professor began targeting me personally in X posts to his 10,000 followers. He did so over and over again. In his sixth post, for example, he referred to me as “an excellent case study.”
I sent the professor an email with a simple request: “Please leave me alone.” He then emailed the entire Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, including students and faculty, promising to use me in his upcoming seminar as a “real-life case study” of the Jewish “mind infection.”
The Jewish “mind infection.” My God.
Antisemitism was once considered a problem primarily concentrated among the less educated. That was never really true–my father, who is of Jewish extraction, was admitted into Harvard when it had a quota that limited the number of Jews who could attend, just as colleges now work to limit the number of Asians.
Now, antisemitism is concentrated among the elite, whose status depends more on signaling their virtue than flaunting their degrees, which are becoming a dime a dozen. Degrees still matter, of course, but now you have to display all the right hatreds too.
Academia is where this phenomenon is most on display, and college campuses are ground zero for some of the most vile displays of prejudice that can be found in America.
Still, the elites love them, and no matter how degenerate the universities have become, their defenders will go to bat for them.
Wesleyan president @mroth78 makes an important point. Critics of universities have valid concerns about intellectual diversity and more–but the focus now must be on preserving scientific research and protecting institutions from authoritarian assaults. https://t.co/6PHLhiny8T
— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) June 30, 2025
Punishing universities for illegal discrimination is considered authoritarian, apparently. Of course, some forms of discrimination are verboten, while others are quite fashionable. Antisemitism is at the top of the fashionable list, closely followed by anti-white and anti-male sentiments.
Kristof, one of the more sane New York Times columnists, recognizes that universities have a problem, but he can’t get his mind around the fact that ordinary people with a thousand times more moral sense than academics should be allowed to have a say in how institutions–which they fund, often unwillingly–are run.
The case for universities is based on the fact that they can have an outsized and positive impact on the well-being of everyone by distilling and then disbursing knowledge and wisdom. When they do the opposite, somebody has to hold them accountable.
As things stand, the universities have broken the social contract. They should pay a high price for that.
