Noam Chomsky

Background

Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father was an Ashkenazi Jew from Ukraine who immigrated to the United States in the 1910s. Chomsky was raised in an intellectually stimulating environment, along with his younger brother David. Several members of his extended family supported left-wing politics, and as a young boy, he was exposed to the ideals of socialism, anarchism, and Stalinism. Chomsky attended Central High School, where he distinguished himself as an exceptional student who excelled not only in academics but also in extracurricular activities. Chomsky began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, where he majored in philosophy, logic, and languages. During his university years, he met the Russian-born linguist Zellig Harris, who inspired a deep interest in theoretical linguistics in the young Chomsky. Chomsky earned his master’s degree in 1951 and attended Harvard University on the advice of Nelson Goodman to work on his doctoral dissertation. In 1952, he published “Systems of Syntactic Analysis” in “The Journal of Symbolic Logic.” Chomsky earned a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1955 after submitting his doctoral thesis on transformational analysis.

Chomsky joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor in 1955. In addition to his teaching duties, he was required to devote significant time to a machine translation project. His work was well-received, and he was promoted to associate professor within two years. Based on a series of lectures he gave to his students at M.I.T., he published his first book, “Syntactic Structures,” in 1957. His book presented many novel ideas that wowed the university’s senior faculty, so Chomsky and his colleague Morris Halle were requested to start a new graduate program in linguistics. Following the program’s success, he was promoted to full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in 1961.

Chomsky became more involved in political activism in the late 1960s, but it wasn’t until 1967 that he publicly began speaking out against U.S. foreign policy. In 1969, he published “American Power and the New Mandarins,” his first political book, in which he detailed his opposition to the Vietnam War. Over the next few years, he published several other political books, including “At War with Asia,” “The Backroom Boys,”, “For Reasons of State,” and “Peace in the Middle East?” As a result of his activism, Chomsky was arrested several times but nothing could stop his rebellious spirit. He traveled to Australia in 1995 at the request of the East Timorese Relief Association and the National Council for East Timorese Resistance to discuss Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor. His lectures were well received, and they were published as a book in 1996. East Timor gained independence from Indonesia in 1999, and his efforts were thought to have aided the cause significantly.

Chomsky left M.I.T. in 2002 and yet continued to conduct studies and give seminars as an emeritus professor. He endorsed the 2011 Occupy movement, giving talks at encampments and publishing works that documented its impact. Chomsky became a senior fellow on the advisory committee of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, an organization that campaigns for the global abolition of nuclear weapons, in March 2014. He took a short-term politics course at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 2017 and was later employed as a part-time professor in the linguistics department. In 2018, Chomsky signed the Declaration on the Common Language of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, and Montenegrins.