Judge dismisses antisemitism lawsuit against MIT; says school did not promote attacks against Jewish students and professors but rather tried to stop them

MIT might have handled anti-Zionist protests on campus differently, but nothing the school did was designed to torment its Jewish students and professors - and in fact, the school took steps, if possibly not enough, to minimize hateful acts and rants against them - a federal judge ruled last week in dismissing a lawsuit by students and a pro-Israel group from California alleging MIT had helped turn itself into an antisemitic cauldron.

In his ruling, US District Court Judge Richard Stearns acknowledged the legal complaint by the students and StandWithUs "compellingly depicts a campus embroiled in an internecine conflict that caused Jewish and Israeli students great anguish."

But MIT officials were not sitting back passively watching it all happen or worse, allowing an anti-Semitic conspiracy to take root and fester on campus, he wrote. In legal terms, MIT did not show "deliberate indifference" to its Jewish students and professors, he continued, noting that MIT did take steps against students who went beyond accepted free-speech norms and called in police to dismantle a pro-Palestine encampment on campus.

Plaintiffs frame MIT's response to the conflict largely as one of inaction. But the facts alleged tell a different story. Far from sitting on its hands, MIT took steps to contain the escalating on-campus protests that, in some instances, posed a genuine threat to the welfare and safety of Jewish and Israeli students, who were at times personally victimized by the hostile demonstrators. MIT began by suspending student protestors from non-academic activities, permitting them only to attend academic classes, while suspending one of the most undisciplined of the pro-Palestine student groups. These measures proved ineffective when, in April of 2024, protestors erected the Kresge lawn encampment. MIT immediately warned students of impending disciplinary action, but its threat went unheeded when student demonstrators "surge[d]" and "breached" the largely evacuated encampment. When MIT's attempt to peacefully clear the encampment proved futile, it suspended and arrested trespassing students.

In hindsight, one might envision things MIT could have done differently. Indeed, some campus administrators elsewhere, as plaintiffs allege, reacted to the protests differently (and with more positive results) than MIT. But that is not the applicable standard. That MIT's evolving and progressively punitive response largely tracked its increasing awareness of the hostility that demonstrators directed at Jewish and Israeli students shows that MIT did not react in a clearly unreasonable manner.

He added:

The pain and hurt felt by plaintiffs and the Jewish and Israeli students that they seek to represent is genuine and fully understandable. But at bottom, the fault attributed to MIT is its failure to anticipate the bigoted behavior that some demonstrators – however sincere their disagreement with U.S. and Israeli policies – would exhibit as events unfolded. The transgressors were, after all, mostly MIT students whom the school (perhaps naively) thought had internalized the values of tolerance and respect for others – even those with whom one might disagree – that a modern liberal university education seeks to instill. To fault MIT for what proved to be a failure of clairvoyance and a perhaps too measured response to an outburst of ugliness on its campus would send the unhelpful message that anything less than a faultless response in similar circumstances would earn no positive recognition in the eyes of the law.

He similarly dismissed a charge that a conspiracy to deprive Jews on campus of their rights was at the heart of it all:

Plaintiffs fail to plead any conspiratorial agreement. They claim that MIT student groups (1) jointly announced rallies, walkouts, and the encampment; (2) had overlapping membership; and (3) recruited participants for (and participated in) the encampment. These allegations establish that student groups acted in concert to plan protest events advocating their shared views, but nothing in the [complaint] raises a plausible inference that the groups agreed to plan the events "at least in part for the very purpose of" depriving plaintiffs of their civil rights.

Decision first reported by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.