As a 1981 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I have been appalled by the behavior of the president of the university, Sally Kornbluth, in the face of the antisemitism now infesting MIT, something that wasn’t there when I was a student. I echo all of the serious concerns raised by over 700 other MIT alumni who, on December 11, sent a letter to Kornbluth and the MIT Corporation, the board that runs the university, over the “continued failure of the MIT administration to address” this dangerous plague. Kornbluth has lost the moral authority to continue as the president of MIT.

In fact, in a tone-deaf move, the members of that board issued a statement on Dec. 7 expressing their full support for Kornbluth, which as the alumni letter correctly says, sends the wrong message to the “MIT community, and especially its Jewish members.” The statement says the board members “utterly reject” all “forms of hate” yet they refuse to take any action against those who have been spewing such hate on campus.

Of course, this tolerance for racist behavior is also no surprise to me, given MIT’s abandonment of basic principles of equal treatment of its students based on merit, regardless of their race or ethnicity, that started in the 1990s. That is when MIT started discriminating on the basis of skin color in its admissions policy. It even filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, aiming to justify such invidious discrimination, in the ultimately successful lawsuits filed by Asian American students against Harvard and the University of North Carolina..

The scandal involves Kornbluth’s dismaying and highly criticized testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Dec.........

© The Daily Signal