MIT Shut Down Internal Grant Database After It Was Used to Research School’s Israel Ties
The Israeli Ministry of Defense has poured more than $3.7 million into developing warfare technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2015, according to a recent report from students and faculty organizing against the war in Gaza.
The findings come as MIT administrators are under growing pressure for censuring student publications criticizing MIT’s research and advocating for Palestinian human rights. The school has also faced criticism for barring student protesters from campus.
The report was published last month by the MIT Coalition for Palestine, which represents 19 student and faculty groups on campus, including MIT Divest, MIT Jews for Collective Liberation, and MIT Faculty and Staff for Palestine.
Coalition members used the university’s internal grant-tracking software to obtain granular new details about projects that have received Israeli military funding. Among the projects were partnerships to research underwater surveillance, missile detection, and drone algorithms.
“MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda.”After the student organizers began further probing grant information, the school took down the grant software used for the coalition’s research, said Rich Solomon, a member and MIT graduate student who worked on the report.
“MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda in order to silence and suppress this information,” Solomon told The Intercept.
The new report also details the extent of MIT’s partnerships with Israeli military contractors like Elbit Systems, which supplies 85 percent of Israel’s killer drones, and Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, that has sent millions of pounds of military goods to Israel since the start of the war on Gaza. The Israeli military also sponsored several of the MIT projects with funds provided by the U.S. Defense Department.
MIT spokesperson Sarah McDonnell did not respond to specific questions about the report but pointed to statements from the school’s president, provost, and chancellor condemning “harassment, intimidation and targeting” of specific professors and their research.
“We respect that there are a range of views across that group on any number of topics, and as a general practice our office does not comment to the media about the individually held and freely expressed views of particular students or alumni,” McDonnell said in a statement to The Intercept. “MIT and its leadership are committed to promoting student well-being, protecting free speech, and responding to policy violations as appropriate.”
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