An Alumni Magazine?

I started getting Scientific American while in High School. My first copy I purchased at a News Stand on Lexington and 52nd Street in May of 1960. I read if from cover to cover. In May of 2000 I terminated my subscription, I could not read a single paragraph in the now newsy rag.

Now skip to Alumni magazines. Their purpose is to communicate with the Alumni, some are good some are well not so good. I get a few and the one from Columbia is just fine. They get the point across without too much preaching.

Now to MIT. Some 20 years ago MIT gave up control, so it appears, to Technology Review. It was half tech updates and half Institute and Alumni material. I looked at it somewhat. Then the new management, from Silicon Valley dot com geeks took over. Barely look at it now at all. They preach their political screeds and try and compete with their flashy peers.

The new Technology Review editor, some fellow who spent time at a British publications and apparently with little of no understanding of MIT, writes:

Unfortunately, those who build technology, those who use and are affected by it, and those who create its legal, regulatory, and financial frameworks—its makers, users, and framers, to coin a shorthand—often aren’t choosing well. Makers are usually too focused on financial success; users cannot see how their lives are gradually but fundamentally changing; and framers rarely understand the inventions for which they are writing laws, rules, or checks. This leads to ill-informed decisions by all three groups. That’s why, along with the redesigned print edition of MIT Technology Review, we're also launching a new mission statement: “to bring about better informed and more conscious decisions about technology through authoritative, influential, and trustworthy journalism.” We think it’s no longer enough for tech journalism to merely explain technology and its ramifications. Rather, it should explicitly strive to make technology more of a force for good, by helping its makers, users, and framers reach better decisions. We’ll do that in a number of ways, including writing more about tech ethics and policy. But we’re also changing the notion of what a printed magazine is for.

Apparently this seems to mean that they will be expanding their political preaching with total disregard for the interest of the Alumni. So who is to make the decisions? The Editor, the writers, and are the people, the alumni out there now, so inept that we need another Brit hand me down to "tell us what to do". Have we been doing such a shabby job as is?

As they say, you cannot make this up. Arrogance along with ignorance is a deadly combination, especially if one is trying to raise alumni support!