Suppression of Free Speech at MIT: "On Pacifism" and the Ban on Written Revolution

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is caught up in its biggest free-speech scandal¹ since the 2019 disinvitation of Professor Dorian Abbot from giving a lecture on astronomy because he had once published an op-ed against illegal racial discrimination in admissions.² This time the victims are on the Left: the MIT Administration has suppressed a pro-Hamas student magazine for saying that nonviolence protests were just virtue-signalling and students should think about taking more drastic action. It wasn’t incitement to violence, just a boring, theoretical argument that nonviolence had failed, with a few vague words about the need for giving up on pacifism and doing something violent instead. The article was standard marxist talk, and nobody should have been surprised that revolutionary socialist students who support the terrorist group Hamas and the riot support group Black Live Matter think that violence for the right cause is justifiable. MIT’s response is pure and simple suppression of an undesirable political view.

Prahlad Iyengar, an electrical engineering PhD student, wrote an article titled "On Pacifism" for the student magazine, Written Revolution.³ Immediately, the Administration suppressed the magazine and started disciplinary proceedings against him. According to the official student newspaper, The Tech,

On November 1st, Written Revolution editors received an email from Dean of Student Life David Randall informing them that their publication had been banned and censored:

“At this time, you are directed to no longer distribute this issue of Written Revolution on MIT’s campus. You are also prohibited from distributing it elsewhere using the MIT name or that of any MIT-recognized organization.”⁴

A story from the station WBUR from November 14 gives a few more details:

The latest issue of the publication, Written Revolution, included the article “On Pacifism,” which featured imagery and language that “could be interpreted as a call for more violent or destructive forms of protest at MIT,” according to an email sent by MIT Dean of Student Life David Warren Randall to the editors of the magazine.⁵

Inside Higher Education tells us,

The student conduct office indicated that his article “On Pacifism” violated a policy that prohibits “threats, intimidation, coercion, and other conduct that can be reasonably, objectively construed to threaten or endanger the mental or physical health or safety of any person.” A separate email sent the same day said he would be restricted from campus access on an interim basis until further notice. . .

Two students who had distributed copies of Written Revolution prior to its ban told Inside Higher Ed they were approached by a campus police officer and asked if they were distributing “banned fliers.” They were sitting and chatting in an area of campus where they had distributed the zines before they were told not to, but had no copies on them when the officer approached. . .

In response to a request for comment, an MIT spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that the institution cannot comment on specific students or disciplinary cases.⁶

I can imagine articles that would give cause to suppress a magazine, but it isn’t enough that they advocate extremist positions. Advocacy of extremist positions is exactly what free speech is all about. Free speech isn’t about protecting advocacy of mainstream positions.⁷ Rather, the exceptions to absolute free speech come when speech is part of a separate criminal act. If Prahlad had written an article explaining how to assassinate MIT President Sally Kornbluth, with details about her regular schedule, her security detail, particular days that would work best, and whether a head shot was more advisable than a heart shot, that would be criminal and should be suppressed. It is not criminal to say “Somebody should shoot the President” but it is criminal to participate in a serious attempt. This has all been hashed out for 100 years or more in American and English law. The article “On Pacifism” comes nowhere close to being criminal.

Nor is it a bad thing to support violence. Pretty much everybody supports violence. Certainly people like me who are pro-Israel support violence. I think it is very good that Israel responded violently to the October 7 attack. I support specific acts of violence and killing, and I am quite willing to accept the deaths of children as inevitable collateral damage. I also support the use of violence against Prahlad Iyengar. By this, I mean I support his arrest by the police when he violated their orders last spring. An arrest is, as far as violence goes, just like a kidnapping. Person A tells person B to come along with them or to be forcefully restrained and carried off. But if violence has to be used against someone who breaks the law, I fully support it. We are in a feminized society where people like to pretend that violence is always bad and nonviolence is always good, but that is just special pleading and genteel delicacy. The actions of the Israeli Defense Force and the MIT Police are more violent than anything Prahlad Iyengar is likely to do. The difference is that their violence is justified. The police are different from the criminals, even though both carry guns.

I say this as someone who himself has been the target of leftwing violence. In 2019, during my second cancelling, some people, probably Antifa, came by my house after midnight with intent to paint fake blood on my front door. Or so it seems—for they dropped the fake blood and ran away when I turned on my bedroom light, not knowing that before that day I had not assembled my present arsenal of defensive and offensive weaponry. I wrote up the story at “Blood on My Doorstep”. It wasn’t that bad. I have also gotten death threats and threats of gross sexual attacks on my family during my two cancellings, but that’s not violence and I didn’t even report them to police. A conservative learns to live with such things, which are almost never serious. So it is not that I don’t know what it’s like to have to take precautions against left-wing cranks. It’s no worse— considerably better, in fact— than the precautions anyone living in a poor neighborhood must take against cranks and criminals of all persuasions.⁸⁹

But "On Pacifism” is tame stuff compared to actually going to someone’s house and defacing their door. Take a look at it. In his essay, Prahlad says he has now realized his past actions against Israel were futile virtue-signalling. He thought he was being brave in risking being arrested, and heroic for spending nights in an encampment, but it achieved nothing and, indeed, was just the kind of useless thing bourgeois democrats like for revolutionaries to waste their time on. Peaceful protest did nothing for Gaza and it would be silly to continue. Anyone who cares about Gaza needs to do more, so “It is time for the movement to begin wreaking havoc,” and, “We have a mandate to exact a cost from the institutions.” “We need to start viewing pacifism as a tactical choice made in a contextual sphere,” and, “We must act now.”⁸

What does “we must act now” mean? Who knows? I doubt Prahlad has any idea what he’s talking about. I’ve quoted his most alarming words, and they aren’t very alarming. He wants to do something dramatic, but he doesn’t know what. He’s like Shakespeare’s King Lear when he goes mad. Lear ventures into the stormy night with just the Fool and a faithful servant, tears running down his face and making dreadful threats to the ungrateful daughters who are treating him like a baby:

No, you unnatural hags,

I will have such revenges on you both

That all the world shall—I will do such things—

What they are yet I know not, but they shall be

The terrors of the Earth!

This kind of speech is unquestionably protected by the First Amendment. It cannot be suppressed by the government, it is not a threat, and it is completely legal. He is not saying, “Let’s go tomorrow and burn down the President’s House. See you at 11:30 a.m. sharp, and don’t forget the gasoline.” The First Amendment does not apply to MIT, so the Administration can punish the student who wrote “On Pacifism”, just as it can punish a student for saying he thinks capital gains taxes are too low— but to punish those things are to infringe on free speech.

Yes, “On Pacifism” argues for violence, but that is not the same as inciting violence. There is no imminent danger, and no specifics. Prahlad is making a calm, theoretical, case. He is not even trying to scare anyone-- his intended audience was his fellow revolutionaries, not the President of MIT. Indeed, it isn’t clear whether he would even reach his intended audience— do we really think anyone would read the articles in Written Revolution if we hadn’t made such a big deal of it? Recall, too, that any communist is, per se an advocate of violent revolution, and any supporter of Hamas is, per se, an advocate of killing women and children. Should we really exclude communists and anti-Zionists from the University? I think not. MIT is behaving unjustly and should be condemned by all lovers of free speech and open intellectual discourse.

[Note: Another version of this substack essay appears at Ras-Stack.]

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Footnotes

1. Since Prahlad is of Indian extraction, the story has become big news in India. The best article is the December 10, “The curious case of Prahlad Iyengar: From Janeu-dhari boy to radical pro-Palestinian activist who got suspended from MIT,” in Opindia.com. See also the Times of India, the Commune, India Today, and UnitedstatesofIndia Reddit. On a more intellectual plane, see the article by Professor Skow and Byrne in the MIT Faculty Newsletter.

2. Some readers would prefer me to have written “because he had once published an op-ed against affirmative action”. The term “affirmative action”, however, is a euphemism for “illegal racial discrimination in admissions”. Every honest person always admitted it was
racial discrimination, the issue being whether it was good racial discrimination or bad racial discrimination. There was disagreement over whether it was illegal, disagreement which was somewhat resolved when the Supreme Court declared it illegal to discriminate against Asians in a 2020 Harvard case.

3. It is unseemly that someone named "Iyengar” would write an essay on behalf of militant Islam. The only holiday from India that most of us have heard of is Diwali, which is celebrated by almost all Hindus each October. It is not celebrated by the Iyengars. For them, it is a day of mourning. Two centuries ago, the famous Tippoo Sahib, the Moslem Sultan of Mysore, heard that some of the Hindus under his rule were in correspondence with the British at Madras. To teach them a lesson, on Diwali he rounded up the Mandyam Iyengar community living in the town of Melkote and massacred some 800 of them. He laid waste to the buildingsand left Melkote a ghost town, an example to the other Hindus in Mysore. It was rather like the October events in 2023. Also similar was that the Moslem ruler came to a bad end, killed at the Siege of Seringapatam by the British under Wellington (in fact, Wellington was personally the first to arrive and check Tippoo’s pulse to see if he was dead).

4. MIT told the magazine’s student editors, “You are also prohibited from distributing it elsewhere using the MIT name or that of any MIT-recognized organization.” I actually didn’t see the name “MIT” or that of the student organization in the online version of the magazine, which is not hosted on an MIT server. MIT can legally punish students who violate its dictates, I think, but only in the same way that MIT can legally punish any student who disobeyed a dictate not to bring copies of The New York Post onto campus, or a dictate that students may not read the Post even off campus. Private universities are not bound by the First Amendment. Just as the Wheaton College, a Christian college, can expel students for drinking, so MIT, a woke college, can expel students for being conservative— if it wishes to.

5. MIT won’t answer questions and the students won’t release emails. This leads me to think that both sides are ashamed of what would be revealed if we saw the documents. The emails would probably talk about Prahlad’s other offenses, and they would make it clear what MIT is punishing and how. MIT makes the standard false claim universities always do, that it can’t talk about disciplinary cases, and the students don’t call the bluff by saying it’s fine with them if MIT does talk about the cases.

6. What is going with the student author, Prahlad Iyengar, is unclear, since he and the Administration are in agreement that they don’t want to show us the documents that would tell us. It seems the Administration responded by banning him from campus and initiating new disciplinary proceedings against him in addition to previous ones related to his anti-Israel activities of the 2023-2024 school year. He had been put under interim suspension in May 2024 for not only being part of a pro-Gaza encampment contrary to MIT rules, but being one of the few people to refuse to leave after a final warning. As a result, he lost his monthly stipend and his campus housing and had to move off campus at that time. The Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards also emailed Prahlad complaining of a message he had sent to students working in a campus lab describing why a pro-Palestinian protest outside had mentioned the lab. His message criticized two professors for working on projects funded by the Israeli army and the Office said he “exacerbated the distress” of the student employees and accused him of harassment.

Personally, I would have expelled Iyengar for disobeying the rules about illegal encampments, which are very clear and reasonable time-place-and-manner rules like every institution has. I would not punish him at all for the laboratory email (unless it was more than just exacerbating the distress of snowflakes), or for writing “On Pacifism”.

7. Actually, free speech *is* about protecting advocacy of mainstream positions too, in the sense that “mainstream” is a word that depends on the context. Somebody who says that parents having the right to castrate their little boys is abominable is holding a mainstream position as far as the United States, the world, and all of human history, but it would probably be considered an extremist position in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. There, it would need protection on the grounds of free speech.

8. More fully, Prahlad says, in the least boring bits of his eight-page article (my boldface),

Fundamentally, a movement which is not nearer to achieving its goals one year later can not be considered a success. Here, I argue that the root of the problem is not merely the vastness of the enemy we have before us – American imperialism and Zionist occupation – but in fact in our own strategic decision to embrace nonviolence as our primary vehicle of change.