MIT Faculty Create MIT Council for Academic Freedom to Defend Free Speech

MIT professors have formed a new independent faculty organization, the MIT Council for Academic Freedom (MITCAF), to defend freedom of speech and academic freedom at the Institute. The MIT Free Speech Alliance welcomes MITCAF and hopes to work with it to encourage an atmosphere of open academic inquiry in which no topic is forbidden or suppressed. MITCAF is modeled on similar independent faculty academic freedom organizations at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. These organizations have formed in recent years as faculty have seen an erosion of academic freedom which is not being adequately defended by university administrations and faculty senates.

MITCAF will be an independent, non-partisan, all-faculty council distinct from official MIT organizations such as the Committee on Academic Freedom and Campus Expression (CAFCE). MITCAF, like MFSA, strongly supports MIT's 2022 Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom. MITCAF quotes from that Statement in announcing its purpose:

“We cannot have a truly free community of expression if some perspectives can be heard and others cannot. Learning from a diversity of viewpoints, and from the deliberation, debate, and dissent that accompany them, is an essential ingredient of academic excellence.”

MITCAF currently counts nearly 50 faculty among its members. Many of those faculty, we note, are among the more than 160 MIT Faculty members that signed the initial open letter calling on MIT to adopt the Chicago Principles following the Abbot cancellation in 2021, and a number of them served on the Ad Hoc Working Group on Free Expression in 2022. That committee produced the free expression statement endorsed by the MIT faculty in 2022 and by President Kornbluth in 2023. MFSA has also had the privilege of collaborating with several of MITCAF’s founding members. These include Michael Sipser and Anette (Peko) Hosoi, co-chairs of CAFCE, who participated in a session at MFSA’s 2024 conference; Professors Brad Skow, Alex Byrne, and Linda Rabieh, co-directors of MIT’s Civil Discourse Project; and Professors Kerry Emanuel and Robert Pindyck, who most recently appeared in our debate on climate policy.

MFSA applauds the founding of MITCAF, and we hope to see many more members of the MIT faculty join its numbers. We look forward to working with MITCAF to as they strive to reduce faculty self-censorship and restore broad academic freedom at MIT.