Students at elite universities are becoming radicalized

What a disturbing essay, “Why I Quit My Dream Job at MIT” by Mauricio Karchmer (Free Press, Jan. 9). Karchmer was born in Mexico to a Jewish family. He obtained a master’s from Harvard in the 1980s, followed by a PHD in computer science from Hebrew University. In 1989, he became an assistant professor at MIT, and after a career in the financial industry, returned in 2019 as a lecturer.

Karchmer says that he usually isn’t political, but after Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, brutally murdering 1,200 Israelis, he urged the head of his department to issue a statement of support for Israelis and Jews. All that was issued was an equivocal message expressing distress at the violence against civilians and concern for all involved. He was shocked that such a brutal terrorist act could not simply be condemned.

Then Karchmer relates that protests on campus started with students chanting “‘Free Palestine’ and ‘From the river to the sea’ with fury and at times glee, like they were reciting catchy songs instead of slogans demanding the erasure of the Jewish people. Even worse, faculty members started endorsing this behavior.”

Karchmer details a further deterioration of the situation until he decided he could “no longer be a part of a system that foments such antisemitism” and resigned.

I was in graduate school at MIT during the Vietnam War. There were protests on campus then too, but few actual MIT students were involved. We were too busy pursuing what Karchmer describes as once one of the best science and engineering educations in the world. It’s a tragedy, as Karchmer states, that students at MIT and other elite colleges have been radicalized to such an extent by faculty members in support of their highly progressive political beliefs.

— Carl Brady, Frederick