The College Fix

Pro-Palestinian group calls decision censorship, ‘intimidation’

The student newspaper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently retracted an anti-Israel opinion column, saying it had “major factual inaccuracies” and led to “hostile” actions toward a professor mentioned in the piece.

“This retraction was made after The Tech Editorial Board identified major factual inaccuracies in the piece, and was done in consultation with our faculty advisors and the subject of the piece, CSAIL Director Daniela Rus,” the editors wrote in a recent notice.

“Our decision was made in light of increasing hostile rhetoric and action against Professor Daniela Rus and her laboratory,” they wrote.

The retracted article, “Daniela Rus, The People Demand: No More Research for Genocide,” was republished at Mondoweiss on Dec. 21.

In a note above the republished piece, the MIT Coalition for Palestine, which wrote the op-ed, accused The Tech of censorship.

It said the piece contained “publicly verifiable facts” and should not have been retracted.

“We refuse to be intimidated by MIT. Professor Rus takes money from a genocidal army to do research with military applications …” the coalition wrote at Mondoweiss. “Retractions and suspensions cannot change these simple facts.”

However, according to The Tech, the op-ed included a number of errors:

Listed below are corrections to the factual errors in the piece, which were identified with the direction of Professor Rus:

The grant that supports Professor Rus’ research is funded by the U.S. government; the grant is intended to support research conducted in partnership with U.S. allies. The research work is done in collaboration with the University of Haifa, under a contracting partnership between the U.S. government and the Israeli Military of Defense.

The work conducted under the grant research is basic science on the mathematics of compressing data using coresets, and is not deployable for use in drones with the applications claimed by the C4P.

An unrelated project under Professor Rus’s laboratory, which is funded by separate sponsors, is primarily used for field deployments to monitor whales for sustainability research.

The student editors issued an apology to Rus and followed it up with a second announcement ending the publication of all submitted opinion pieces “until further notice.”

“The Tech Editorial Board has identified critical flaws in the standard operating procedures of our Opinion section that we feel must be corrected before we continue to publish articles from this section,” the notice, signed by Publisher Ellie Montemayor, stated.

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IMAGE: MIT Coalition Against Apartheid/Instagram

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