The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, already facing scrutiny for its reaction to anti-Israel demonstrations, is the target of an impending gender discrimination lawsuit brought forth by a group of male alumni. The group, FairAdmissions@MIT, is accusing the prestigious university’s leadership of rejecting qualified male applicants to its hallowed undergraduate program in order to admit less-qualified women in the name of gender parity.

According to the group’s website, it aims to “compel MIT to adhere to both federal law and its own nondiscrimination policy by ending its decades-long undergraduate admissions practice of discriminations against qualified male applicants in order to gender-balance incoming classes.” 

“MIT’s admissions policy should be sex-blind and based on individual merit, accepting the objectively best applicants rather than assembling a pool of good-enough applicants and then social engineering an entering class such that it collectively conforms to the ideological, political, social, and personal preferences of MIT’s admissions officers.”

As the nation’s premier institution that focuses overwhelmingly on hard sciences, technology, engineering, and math, MIT has long faced criticism from both sides of the thorny debate about the underrepresentation of women in elite science and engineering programs.  In 2006, Larry Summers, the president of nextdoor Harvard, resigned due in part to a firestorm of criticism he faced when he commented that this gender disparity was due to a “different availability of aptitude at the high end.”

The group of aggrieved men preparing to sue MIT reference MIT’s own discrimination policy, which states that the institution is “committed to the principle of equal opportunity in education and employment” and “prohibits discrimination against individuals on the basis of race, color, sex.…”

In a statement to a college news outlet, the College Fix, one member of the group who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation for organizing the litigation stated that the purpose of the group is “a return to meritocracy.”

FairAdmissions@MIT’s president and spokesman, Mark Perry, told the Sun that “it is statistically certain” that MIT discriminates “against more highly qualified male students and gives special preferences to less qualified female students.”

Mr. Perry pointed to data from other engineering schools, including “Rochester Institute of Technology, Illinois Institute of  Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Kettering University.” At those schools, he notes, “the gender balance is much different than MIT and much more male-intensive, with male students shares of 66 percent, 63 percent, 61 percent, and 79 percent, respectively, at those four schools.”

This makes it likely that the gender parity found at MIT is “contrived, unnatural, and socially engineered,” he added. Compared to the other engineering schools, MIT’s exact ratio of male to female admitted students is around 49-51. As of 2022, the school admitted 661 men and 676 women. 

The individual representing the group speaking to the College Fix added, “The entire political center of the institution has shifted so far left, and this is directly correlated,” he said. “The point is to treat applicants as individuals, not as members of an identity group.”

In a statement to the Sun, an MIT spokeswoman, Kimberly Allen, said, “MIT’s goal is to admit and enroll the best students from around the world, and we firmly believe that our admissions and financial aid practices comply with all laws.”

The group cites admissions data released by the institution as part of federally mandated statements on its website. Between 2022 and 2001, the prestigious engineering school had an acceptance rate for women hovering around twice that of men. In 2022, MIT received 12,179 female applicants. It admitted 5.6 percent of the applicants, amounting to 676 women. The school admitted a nearly identical number of male applicants despite receiving significantly more applications: 661 of the 21,588 male applicants were admitted, amounting to a far lower 3.1 percent acceptance rate

The lawsuit by the alumni group comes in the wake of criticism of the university for its response to anti-Israel demonstrations on campus. As the Sun has reported, the university declined to discipline student activists, some of whom were not American citizens, out of fear it could create “visa issues.” Most recently, a Jewish lecturer in computer science at the university,  Mauricio Karchmer, resigned on January 3, citing the hostile environment. 

Mr. Karchmer stated on Linkedin: “During a time when the Jewish and Israeli students, staff and faculty were particularly vulnerable, instead of offering the support they needed, the broader MIT community exhibited open hostility towards them.” 

In an article he wrote for the Free Press explaining his resignation, the renowned computer scientist pointed to an example of a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officer at the school, Sophia Hasenfus, who “liked an October 17 post on Twitter stating that ‘Israel doesn’t have a right to exist, it’s an illegitimate settler-colony like the US.’”