Michel DeGraff
Michel DeGraff is a linguist, educator and human-rights advocate whose work focuses on liberatory linguistics. A member of the MIT faculty since 1996, he now serves as Faculty-at-Large in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences after being removed from the Linguistics section in 2024—an action he has challenged as retaliation for defending academic freedom and free speech. He is co-founder and co-director of the MIT–Haiti Initiative which develops open-access educational resources in Haitian Creole and advances equitable pedagogy in Haiti and beyond. He is a founding member of the Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen. Elected a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2022, DeGraff’s scholarship and activism examine how linguistic hierarchies intersect with race and power, and how language can be mobilized for decolonization and liberation. More at https://mit.edu/degraff.
What a Federal Court Taught Us and What Universities Must Learn About Anti-Zionism vs. Antisemitism
February 17, 2026