A NOTE FROM THE ALLIANCE OF CONCERNED FACULTY
Several days ago, members of the Alliance of Concerned Faculty were made aware of an event sponsored by the Israeli American Council to be held at 77 Massachusetts Avenue inviting people from outside of the MIT community to our campus. While one of the deep virtues of our university community is that it offers the space for peaceful expression of diverse voices and opinions, we were alerted of the concerns regarding outsiders in large numbers being invited to campus and the challenges that can bring to our community.
We have been heartened by the tremendous efforts of all members of the MIT community to ensure peaceful expression of diverse viewpoints, as was evidenced in our write-up of the event that occurred in the student encampment on April 26. These earlier, briefer encounters, where students of diverse opinions entered the encampment to make their diverging positions known, were valuable learning experiences for yesterday.
At times, the different events taking place felt unwieldy. MIT faculty officers and MIT Police had invited us, with many others, to be neutral and calming faculty observers and to participate and support our community effort of de-escalation and peace keeping. To signal publicly we were members of faculty undertaking this observer and support roles, we wore pink armbands or a piece of pink clothing. Some of us made it a point to mingle, introduce ourselves, and make conversation with anyone we didn’t recognize. Most of us settled on a plan to use our physical presence to signal that we were here, as observers, and would not brook escalation on our campus. We largely stood around the entrance to the encampment, at times lined up horizontally alongside MIT students to serve as a buffer between the encampment and outside protestors who lingered after the rally at Mass Ave was over.
Most participants were peaceful. Some instigators, wielding large Israeli and American flags, did eventually make their way over to the MIT encampment area. They sang various chants, waved their flags, some shouted angry accusations, and some even made some threatening gestures. There were certainly some moments filled with tension and discomfort. But those moments united us in a common purpose: To make an all-hands-on-deck effort to ensure that arguments didn’t come to blows.
Such an effort required sustained work across all members of our community, from students to our campus police, to faculty, staff, and administrators. As we know all too well, as both students and scholars, important challenges are hard work. And the work of building and sustaining community amongst our diversity is one of those vital challenges. Centering this truth is something important for us to wrangle with. Community isn’t always easy, but its joys and connective ties are forged in these moments. Although rarely framed it in these terms at MIT, such a thing as “social Psets” exist too, and these social problem sets take time, patience, hard work, and a lot of goodwill to navigate and resolve.
The events of May 3, 2024 constitute a realistic, typical, and necessary aspect of that resolution process. Things definitely got “heated” in more ways than one–the sun bore down on us, many of us forgot to wear sunscreen, and at times a protestor would angrily insist on entrance into the encampment–but together we managed to cool and calm things down.
We saw student marshals work hard to enact principles of non-violence to ensure peace and the protection of free speech. They shared the labor amongst themselves throughout the day, their yellow vests signaling training and commitment to maintaining orderly engagement that still offered space for free speech. They kindly and consistently offered us water to stay hydrated throughout the day. We heard songs, prayers, chants, and talks echo through the camp as students stayed together in that fenced-in space, continuing to pursue their principles and practice their multiple religious traditions while much swirled outside the barrier surrounding them.
We saw our MIT campus police navigate with wisdom and skill the on-the-ground challenges of crowds of people that disagree with each other. It was clear their aim was our own students’ safety, including protesters, counterprotesters, and observers. Sadly, this has not always been the case at other campuses and MIT police should be commended for demonstrating an approach that attends to the specific context of a university, one that balances student safety with a learning environment where engaging across different worldviews and lived experiences is core to our mission.
We saw upwards of 85 faculty show up through the day to care for the students, as faculty observers supporting and sustaining peaceful outcome of challenging situations and working hand in hand with chief of police, the teams from the Division of Student Life (DSL) and Student Organizations, Leadership, and Engagement (SOLE). Faculty present included those who have been active in the Alliance of Concerned Faculty, many who simply heard the call for faculty support at the event, as well as several faculty supporting the MIT Israel Alliance (MITIA) students. We all came out for a common purpose: to serve as calming witnesses, as observers, and as members of our community with a deep commitment to the safety of all our students and the values of free speech. By noon, many of us were remarking on how amazing it was to see so many colleagues wearing pink throughout the crowd, visualizing our presence. In these moments it felt like faculty, no matter what their personal positions on issues, found common ground in seeking to preserve speech and safety simultaneously.
We saw staff from the DSL, Student Support Services (S3), and MIT Episcopalian, Indigenous, Interfaith, Jewish, Lutheran and Muslim chaplains move through the crowds, making connections with students they have been working with, helping to share information across communities, and being attentive to the unique challenge of these moments on college campuses across the country. We also saw self-identified volunteer medics that came out on standby in case of need, and legal observers quietly documenting and attending to the issues that may arise in these moments.
As before, we saw spontaneous smaller conversations emerge all around. We saw faculty talking amongst themselves and with their students, staff connecting with so many members of the MIT community. We saw students not directly involved in the protests talking with each other, trying to understand and learn about the issues and background, as they came to see what was happening. We saw campus police talking to everyone and engaging effectively and efficiently with all stakeholders, from faculty to students, to coordinate how best to keep the peace.
Finally, and most importantly, we saw some protesters and counter-protesters also engage in discussions and dialogues across differences. We aren’t speaking here about the moments of profound tension when people are face to face and almost unable to speak (beyond a shout), but the conversations that often go unnoticed and don’t draw a crowd but matter deeply. It is not that in those moments that minds are necessarily instantly changed. Rather, what unfolds is the slow, hard work of learning to be in conversation with each other and remembering each other’s humanity.
That lesson, to hold our differences in the same space together with respect, is something we get to practice in moments like this. We need more of this, and certainly outside of these high-intensity contexts. We should be heartened by what was able to occur, the work of keeping our whole community safe even amidst a wide spectrum of differences. This good and hard work was accomplished by many people, in ways big and small, and it is something to be proud of. Indeed, the most profound dialogues, likely to stand the tests of time, are the ones that culminate after confrontations with productive tensions across difference.