Yossi Sheffi
Subject: Unsafe at MIT
Bio: Professor of Engineering at MIT, leading scholar in supply chain management and Author of Unsafe at MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is Unsafe at MIT.
Our speaker is Yossi Sheffi who is a Professor of Engineering at MIT and is a leading scholar in supply chain management. He is the author of a new book entitled Unsafe at MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews.
I want to hear from Yossi about MIT’s failure to protect its Jewish and Israeli students from violence. I want to learn why MIT’s Administration managed the situation so poorly, and why MIT’s disregard for its own rules and regulations resulted in chaos.
Yossi, please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Yossi Sheffi:
I’m Yossi Sheffi a Professor of Engineering at MIT. Unsafe at MIT is my tenth book. My first nine were professional books in supply chain management, manufacturing, and logistics. This is a very different book. After witnessing what happened after October 7th and that people are now saying it wasn’t that bad at MIT? The book was to record a chronicle of events.
It was actually bad. There were threats, harassment, violence, doxing, swastikas on dorm doors, death threats, terror group symbols, and disrupting classes and research labs.
The other thing is the lack of MIT administration response protecting Jews. One can only imagine if I would have walked in the corridor of MIT wearing a white hood. I would have been arrested. When I interviewed students for the book, they were PTSDs. It was very hard for me to get them to open up.
We had to organize and fight for the truth, insisting on basic factual reality in an academic setting. That civilians were massacred, that women were raped, children abducted, the hostages taken and murdered. Those were not fabrication or Zionist propaganda, as some activists claim while tearing down hostage posters along the main MIT corridor.
Second, Israel was no longer criticized for specific policy. It was redefined as uniquely illegitimate, a settler/apartheid state with only guilty colonizers. The logic erased the moral category of innocent and made violence not only permissible, but righteous.
Third, we also had to fight against the total breakdown of law and order on campus. This was where MIT failed most clearly. Rules governing demonstrations, access to buildings, harassment, disruption of education and research were broken repeatedly. Enforcement was nonexistent. Administrators privately acknowledged the violation while publicly insisting that their hands were tied. It was not more apparent than during the MIT President’s appearance in Congress, talking about genocide as depending on the context. She’s the only college president who survived.
Finally, we had to fight the BDS campaign, the boycott divestment sanction campaign on academics. It was presented as a non-violent tactic of conscience. In practice, it was insidious. It aimed to sever research collaboration to isolate Israeli scholars and pressure MIT to treat Israel as a pariah state. To isolate Israeli scholars, to make collaboration with them costly and eventually render their presence on American campuses untenable.
We have two responses. First we organized faculty, Jewish students and staff in lunches twice a week, where we exchange information and give advice how to fight. This continues every Monday with 100 participants. Now the other response became what’s called Kalaniot, an Israeli red flower, an organization to counter the academic BDS strategy. We raised a few million dollars to bring Israeli scholars into MIT. There are 12 of them on campus coming for postdoc or academic visits. They have to work in somebody’s lab. There’s a connection with some MIT researchers, and this connection will stay after they go back. There are now similar organizations in Dartmouth, Harvard Medical School, and Penn. We have now a national Kalaniot organization.
Larry Bernstein:
What you did in writing this book was a sociological analysis, talking to people in the truth-seeking process. What’s also interesting is that we haven’t seen works by other sociologists on this topic. It took someone from the engineering school in supply chain management to act as a sociologist.
Yossi Sheffi:
Sociology is a part of MIT’s School of Humanities and Social Science. This is one of the centers of anti-Semitism at MIT. It’s usually the social sciences more left-leaning, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. The faculty get swept in this New York Times, CNN, media description of Israel. I
Students most of them are just idiots. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Why did they join all this? Because it’s the same reason that certain youth join gangs. Because you join a gang, you feel belonging. You are in a community. You buy on this and you just don’t want to listen to anything else. And some faculty absolutely were swept away in this. I didn’t expect sociologists to do much.
Larry Bernstein:
What was extraordinary was the campaign that began against the Jews at MIT and other campuses beginning on October 8th. It only took a day.
The Jews were backfooted, but the anti-Semites were ready to go. How does a group get organized within twenty-four hours to be prepared to go with anti-Semitic demonstrations? Some say that it related to money coming from the Middle East, but it doesn’t feel right to me.
Yossi Sheffi:
We don’t know. But as you say, the money side is one assumption. But the amazing thing to me is there were posters ready on October 7th in the evening at MIT. They were ready with talking points, posters, and organized demonstration. October 8th, IDF soldiers were still fighting in Sderot, in the kibbutzim, in the Negev. Nothing happened in Gaza and there were still demonstrations against Israel. There was clearly a lot of bubbling up of hatred towards Israel.
This hatred was against Jews and Israel, same thing.
Larry Bernstein:
In the book, in one of your interviews of a French Jewish student, he said that in France, those that hate Israel also hate Jews and they’re open about it. But here, you ask Americans, they say, “No, I love Jews, I just hate Israel” — creating this distinction between anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism.
Yossi Sheffi:
It’s just a cover. I don’t believe it. To me, anybody who understands Judaism and the role that Israel plays in Jewish life, understand that Zionism and Jewishness are coupled together. Look,
If I were in Israel, I would not vote for Netanyahu. But this does not mean that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist. This does not mean that Hamas is not a bloodthirsty terrorist organization. They’re trying to attack Israel in different ways. Attacking Jews, attacking content, attacking academics.
Larry Bernstein:
In your book you want to create a historical document as to what happened. You hear now what happened is it was a nothing burger; there was never any threats. This has been hyperbolic in its description. Jews were never at risk; Jews were never harassed. This was a very peaceful and loving demonstration against genocide. Tell us about what happened.
Yossi Sheffi:
The technical engineering term for this point of view is bullshit. That’s why I wrote the book, because I felt that it has to be documented by people who were there. There were about dozen students who left MIT because their parents were afraid for their life. They didn’t finish their PhD, their studies, they had to leave. Another way that was infuriating was the comparing of anti-Semitism to Islamophobia. There was no Islamophobia, it’s nonsense.
But what happened to Jews — one example. There was this demonstration on what’s called Lobby Seven, the main entrance to MIT. There were a demonstration and counter demonstration, and one of the Jewish students fell down, he just stumbled, and fell on a leg of one of the Palestinian supporter women and she fell down too. This was then caught on camera. Everybody was videoing everything, and they said, this is an example of Jewish violence. His name was all over the campus. There were death threats against him. This type of violence, threats and harassment went totally out of control.
There were faculty calling a student by name, an example of a Zionist mind infection. Things like this happening for a year and a half over and over again.
Another example, this big demonstration, — the administration closed the main entrance to MIT. The administration said whoever doesn’t get out of here by noon is going to be expelled. The Jews left. The demonstrators stayed the whole day there. Then the MIT did nothing. Despite written warning, you’re going to be expelled if you don’t leave, they didn’t leave.
Larry Bernstein:
The book paints a picture that what we had was a failure by the administration to follow its own rules and regulations.
Yossi Sheffi:
They were weak, afraid, and not equal to the task. Sally Kornbluth, the President, talking about calling for genocide of Jews — it’s depending on the context, it’s not against the MIT rules. And the chairman of the board issued a letter of support. Really?
Larry Bernstein:
The Chairman of the Board of Penn also gave a letter of support for Liz Magill, who was the President of Penn, but the trustees voted against her and had her removed. What is special about MIT that when someone says something so out of bounds that they’re parodied on Saturday Night Live, the Chairman and the President withstand a vote of confidence?
Yossi Sheffi:
The trustees of MIT are not interested. It’s a group that likes to have on the resume that they are trustees of MIT. The group is not doing its job. They go with the president and there’s no accountability. It was a very weak board.
Larry Bernstein:
MIT is a very unusual American university. It has meritocracy-based admissions. It is probably the world’s leading engineering school in STEM. Why is this a problem at MIT?
Yossi Sheffi:
You’re describing MIT of 30 or 40 years ago. You are describing MIT before identity politics, before woke, before the idea that we hire by merit. I wish. To apply for a faculty position at MIT, you had to write a DEI statement. What does it have to do with your engineering qualification? There are still unbelievably good researchers at MIT — in mathematics, in physics, in chemistry, world-class engineering department. However, there is also a School of Humanity and Social Science, the School of Urban Planning and Architecture. These are different people.
Now talk about the students a whole generation of people who are uneducated. I should tell you that MIT is now offering remedial physics course for first-year freshmen. Unbelievable. They don’t know history. Many of these people were burning American flags in these demonstrations.
Larry Bernstein:
And what kind of people were doing that?
Yossi Sheffi:
Students, some staff joined them. But the people who were desecrating Israeli, American flags look like MIT students.
Larry Bernstein:
I’ve had a couple of podcasts with Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt, and he is a big believer that you establish rules and regulations to create an environment for scholarship and education. When people act in violent ways or violate the rules, there are consequences, and the rules are enforced promptly and effectively. At Vanderbilt the Jews felt safe, and at MIT they exited. Tell us about a proper way to handle the situation.
Yossi Sheffi:
At the beginning, I was talking to the Provost at MIT. She was a PhD student of mine, just to tell you how long I’ve been at MIT. And said, “What do I do? How should we respond?”
I said, “It’s simple actually. You take one, two of the leading demonstrators who disrupt classes and go into research lab and do graffiti and ruin the place. You expel them. The rest will get the message.”
It’s not only Vanderbilt. When the encampment started in Dartmouth, the President called the police — not the campus police, she called the police. Suddenly it was gone. Acting decisively and quickly is the key to this.
The students after the event that I described in the entrance to MIT, when the students didn’t leave, they started shouting, we control the campus. And they were right. They did whatever they wanted with no repercussions. You don’t deal with it; it just gets worse and worse.
Larry Bernstein:
I live in Miami Beach. The head of the COVID ward is Dr. Ari Ciment. He’s on the Board of Trustees of the Hebrew Academy, which is a Jewish day school about a block from my house. Alan Dershowitz was invited to speak about anti-Semitism on campus.
The first question came from Ari’s daughter in the audience. And she said, “I’m a very good student. Should I apply to Harvard and other Ivy League schools? Because I just want to learn. I’m not really interested in fighting and defending myself. These universities are not interested in protecting me from danger. Should I limit my application process to schools like Dartmouth, Vanderbilt and the University of Florida, where Jews are welcome, or should I apply to places like Harvard?”
And Alan Dershowitz said she should definitely apply to places like Harvard, because someone has to fight for the Jews. How should Jewish children who are in the application process think about applying to schools like MIT, Harvard or Columbia, knowing that these administrations have been unwilling in protecting their Jewish students?
Yossi Sheffi:
I know personally children of MIT faculty professors who are not applying to MIT, even though they can go for free to MIT if they get in. There’s a big difference between American Jews and Israelis. What I did going against my own university is an Israeli act. And by the way, the university is fighting back. They are harassing me, they are trying to limit the distribution of my book. But screw them. I’m not changing.
I understand an 18 year old who says, I just want to learn. One of the most insidious things that happened to Jews is they were thrown out of study groups. Why is it bad? Because developing the new thing for Meta, for Google, is not something that an engineer does on his or her own. It’s always a team. When almost every MIT group was throwing out the Jews, then Jews have no opportunity to work in teams. You might say, so why don’t the Jews work together? There’s not enough of them.
Larry Bernstein:
My grandfather was a tenured Professor at the University of Vienna. His faculty appointment was in the medical school and in the Freud Institute. Immediately after the Anschluss, all the Jews were fired from the University of Vienna. In my grandfather’s memoirs, he paid the 90% wealth tax to get an exit visa and left. Many of his friends didn’t leave right away, and many ended up committing suicide or getting sent to death camps.
You have choices. There’s a book by Albert Hirschman called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. When you have policies like you described in MIT, what Hirschman said is that you can scream and yell to change. But at some point, you realize you have only one choice left. You can exit. You can leave MIT.
My grandfather wasn’t given a forced exit. Yossi, you are incredibly talented in your field. There are dozens of universities who would embrace you. Why did you choose voice? Why didn’t you choose exit?
Yossi Sheffi:
Because I’ve been at MIT 51 years. I have friends who are the best in their field and enjoy their company. Look, if I would have been 30 years younger, I maybe would have left. I’m 78 years old. I like where I live in Boston. MIT is my home. I grew up here professionally. At several points in your life, you realize that if you don’t do it, nobody else will. I chose voice and resistance.
There are lots of faculty who are reading it for the first time and realizing what was going on. So maybe things will get better, I don’t know.
Larry Bernstein:
The Trump administration, when it came in, fifteen months after October 7, immediately went to work in opposition to the policies of institutions like MIT and demanded change. I have close friends and relatives who said that what the administration was doing was wrong. That there was never a problem with the Jews, this was a lie, and that the administration was against academia . Jews did not need to be protected by the Trump administration. Jews could take care of themselves. Did the federal government need to get involved to protect the Jews, and what they did, was it appropriate?
Yossi Sheffi:
First of all, the situation is not better; it’s less in your face. The big demonstrations and the encampments don’t exist anymore. Not because of anything that MIT did — because all these agitators started seeing people snatched off the street by ICE. It’s not Sally Kornbluth, the President of MIT, with the bland announcement that there are consequences now. They were doing exactly what MIT should have been done: take one or two of the agitators and take them off the table.
The fact that some Jewish people say it didn’t happen — well, that’s why I wrote the book. One of the most frustrating things is watching Jews listening to this propaganda and believing it.
Jews have a huge problem because the Jews were always leftist. I grew up leftist in a very liberal, progressive environment. Now the progressives came against us.
Larry Bernstein:
In the Trump administration’s consent decrees with Columbia and Harvard, they had a number of points that they demanded of the university, and I want you to comment. The first is that the university must enforce all their existing disciplinary rules consistently.
Yossi Sheffi:
MIT failed completely. Classes were disrupted. MIT allows demonstration of students, but in certain places, certain times. They just did whatever they wanted: Disrupted classes, disrupted research labs. This was absolutely against MIT rules, yet there was no response. Enforce your own rule? MIT did none of the above.
Larry Bernstein:
The second was they had to discipline against violence, assault, intimidation, harassment, vandalism, destruction of property, disruption of classes, occupation of buildings, and interference with university operations. Is this something that the federal government is making up, or does it reflect a meaningful breakdown?
Yossi Sheffi:
It’s absolutely true that MIT was not doing and being forced to do it would be a very good step forward.
Larry Bernstein:
MIT said that the reason they couldn’t discipline misconduct is that many of the individuals were not US citizens, but they could then be in violation of their visa and would be expelled, and therefore they could not apply discipline. Is that a legitimate reason to not enforce illegal conduct?
Yossi Sheffi:
Among many of the stupid things that MIT did, this takes the cake. Because yes, there were some foreign students who were the main agitators. Why do you want them in the United States to begin with? They were burning American flags. It was a cop out.
You gave them a warning; you told them what’s going to happen, they did it, they laugh in your face, and you just say, “Now I cannot do it because they lose their visa!” I hope they lose their visa. We were just aghast.
Larry Bernstein:
The next Trump consent decree requirement is to enforce protest regulations, enforce time, place and manner restrictions, ban the wearing of masks used to conceal identity during a demonstration, and prevent encampments and unauthorized building occupations. Is this something of a problem at MIT?
Yossi Sheffi:
Yes, categorically yes. This was total breakdown. The MIT has written rules for this. Nothing was enforced.
Larry Bernstein:
Finally, the last argument was to centralize disciplinary authority into the office of a president rather than allowing individual schools or faculty committees to control discipline.
Yossi Sheffi:
That’s exactly what happened. Even after the board suggested that the disciplinary process doesn’t work, MIT put together, as they always do, a committee with faculty that they knew where they stand, and the faculty committee said, “No, we are fine.”
Larry Bernstein:
The Trump administration pressured the university by cutting off funds. It’s a blunt instrument. There aren’t a lot of federal funds going to linguistics, but there are to experiments in the science departments. The science department never left the labs to participate in the demonstrations that gets hurt.
Yossi Sheffi:
It is unfortunate. I wish there was another tool. But to get MIT’s attention — and MIT is not handling very well, not at all. To first degree they’re cutting everybody the same. They should cut the School of Humanities. And the funny thing is that I told the president this at the time, when she still talked to me. That was before the book. But now she doesn’t return my email. When she goes to talk about MIT to Congress, to the administration, I said, “When did you talk about history of philosophy or linguistics?” You talk about science and medicine and engineering and AI, that’s what you talk about. So why don’t we go back to the time before we decide to be a general university and cut out some of these things.
They are caught up in the equity mindset that everybody has to be cut the same, which is absolute nonsense.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you have any suggestions on how to be philanthropic to universities but do it in ways that are supportive of the Jewish people?
Yossi Sheffi:
The best way I can tell you is support something like Kalaniot, because the strength of Israel is not natural resources, it’s science. It’s academia. The most effective way is to create contacts, just like Kalaniot at MIT and other institutions, that bring Israeli scientists for postdoc and visits, but putting them together in research labs with existing scientists so the connection between them stays after they go back.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast on a note of optimism. Yossi, what are you optimistic about as it relates to Jewish life at MIT?
Yossi Sheffi:
The Jews are now organized as a result of this. New students, new postdocs, new PhD students come to MIT, find a home immediately. All this organization came up after October 7th. There is a student MIT organization, and there’s help. It’s better than it used to be that has nothing to do with the administration. It may be better, but it has nothing to do with them. They were not doing any substantial changes. Nothing.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Yossi for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast was Appreciating George Orwell. Our speaker was Robert Colls who is the author of the Orwell biography entitled George Orwell: Life and Legacy.
You know his novels 1984 and Animal Farm but there is so much more to enjoy. Robert discussed Orwell’s important essays like Shooting an Elephant and a Hanging. And most importantly why Orwell is increasingly relevant.
Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Appreciating George Orwell, here.
