Award-Winning Retired MIT Professor Dumped Over Sexual Harassment Claims

Walter Lewin Image by MIT News Office

By Forward Staff December 9, 2014

Walter Lewin, an award-winninng retired Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, has been dumped by the university over claims he sexually harassed a student taking one of his online classes.

Lewin, who retired in 2009, has been removed from lecturing online after an investigation into the female student’s claims, MIT said in a statement.

MIT is also revoking Lewin’s emeritus professorship in physics and removing his lectures from an online library.

“Given Dr. Lewin’s long career on our campus and contributions as an educator, taking this step is painful,” Provost Martin Schmidt wrote in a letter to MIT’s faculty. “I believe that harassment occurred, that our response is appropriate, and that explaining this matter publicly is necessary.”

MIT officials interviewed both the student and Lewin as well as other online students, the university said.

Lewin joined the faculty at MIT in 1966. He collected many awards for his undergraduate teaching and in the digital age his famed lectures have reached millions, reported the campus newspaper The Tech.

“Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube’s greatest hits,” The New York Times wrote in an adoring 2007 profile

The Forward’s staff contributors are listed in our masthead.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO