A prominent professor has published a stinging indictment of the school’s administration post-October 7. But the ‘mob rule’ on campus led to one positive outcome.

Lior Alon, who served seven years as an officer in the Israeli Navy, is not easily unnerved. He took part “in operations that risked my life,” he told me in a recent interview. But as a mathematics postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the fall of 2023, three days after October 7 he was alarmed by the angry anti-Semitic calls for violence from protestors a few steps from his young daughter’s MIT daycare facility.

Interviewed by a Fox News reporter that evening, Alon said the dozens of students and outside agitators were “calling for an attack here.”

Hours later, he emailed MIT president Sally Kornbluth to describe the shouts he had heard for “one solution, intifada” as particularly disturbing to him as well as to other Israelis and Jews on campus. “We are truly afraid for our lives and the lives of our children, right here on campus,” he wrote.

Kornbluth replied that she appreciated his reaching out and shared his concern. “This matter has our full attention,” she wrote.

Not so, according to Alon and many Jewish students and faculty members at the prestigious university, including Yossi Sheffi, a native of Israel and prominent MIT professor of engineering for the last five decades. It was Sheffi who, after more than a year of frustrating and largely unsuccessful efforts by him and others to convince the administration to crack down on what he called “mob rule” on campus, decided in December 2024 to catalogue “a breakdown of everything MIT stood for.” The result is his 265-page self-published book, “Unsafe at MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews,” an insider’s stinging indictment of institutional failure based on more than three dozen interviews with students, faculty and researchers.

In the wake of similar antisemitic acts after October 7, a number of universities issued faculty-led, detailed reports to address the crisis on their campuses. MIT did not. So Sheffi took it upon himself. The author of nine books in his field, and the recipient of numerous awards as an internationally recognized expert in supply chain management, Sheffi said he wanted “to create a historical record of what happened” that would withstand future claims that the protests were within bounds.........

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