Indian-origin scholar suspended by MIT for pro-Palestine essay with ‘troubling statements’
Updated: Dec 11th, 2024
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| Prahlad Iyengar, MIT student |
An Indian-origin PhD scholar was suspended by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) over a pro-Palestine essay he wrote in the college magazine last month.
Prahlad Iyengar, a student from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was suspended till January 2026.
The MIT administration reportedly said his article “On Pacifism” contained images of posters from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is a terrorist organisation.
The college determined that the article contained “several troubling statements” regarding the history of violence and non-violence, particularly in mid-20th-century anti-colonial movements. It noted that “these statements could be interpreted as advocating for more violent or destructive forms of protest at MIT”, as per reports.
However, a group in Cambridge named MIT Coalition Against Apartheid said that Prahlad is now appealing the decision to the chancellor at MIT on Wednesday to revoke or reduce the “unjust sanctions” against him.
The group mentioned that it has launched a campaign to put pressure on MIT’s administration to stop criminalising students who “stand on the right side of history’.
What did the lawyer say?
Iyengar’s lawyer, Eric Lee shared a statement on social media in November stating, “While MIT claims that the article ‘could be interpreted as a call for more violent or destructive forms of protest at MIT’, Iyengar neither calls for violence nor suggests that students at MIT engage in violent activity.”
The statement also declined the presence of any “inclusion of symbolism from a US-designated terrorist organisation containing violent imagery”.
“MIT has not explained how the inclusion of such images violates relevant MIT policy by threatening or endangering any person on campus, as the policy specifies; nor does the article’s content provide any objective basis for concluding that any person could be threatened, intimated or coerced by it,” it added.
Notably, students at MIT have been involved in pro-Palestine protests this year.
In April 2024, an Indian-origin student Achinthya Shivalingam was arrested and banned from New Jersey’s Princeton University in the US for an alleged involvement in the encampment of pro-Palestine protesters on campus grounds.
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