Epstein’s infiltration of M.I.T. shouldn’t even be much
of a surprise; from the Kochs to the Sacklers to the Saudis to sundry endowed
chairs and fancy corporate institutes, American higher education has long been
hooked on billionaires. The billionaires aren’t dumb — they go after the
universities because our idea factories have proven to be susceptible to all
their wealth. Giving money to higher education amplifies a billionaire’s
legacy. The money greases hiring decisions and shapes curriculums, and it can
ricochet across the wider culture for decades, even after the billionaire
himself has shuffled off this mortal coil. Note how Charles and David Koch used
higher-education philanthropy to push a libertarian intellectual agenda that
influenced policy wonk circles across the country. The Sacklers, meanwhile,
used their opioid-derived loot to insulate the family name from the horrors
that the family business was wreaking across the country.
Now I will suggest there is a great deal more here than
meets the eye. Before that one should read the MIT Tech,
the student newspaper, which had a piece by a person affiliated with the Media
Lab, the Poetry Project, who preceded the Times writer by a couple of days, and
who noted:
But billionaires don't deserve to have the final say on
arts and science funding in the first place. They don’t deserve to be the
people after whom libraries, art wings, or cancer research centers are named.
Big donors are a tiny subset of the population — and terrifyingly skewed in
terms of race, gender, and age — and it does our research no favors to be
beholden to a funding structure that requires catering to their impulses. In
fact, most billionaires don’t deserve their status at all, considering how the
livelihoods of the 1 percent have been built on the backs of slavery,
oppression, and tax evasion. Even the billionaires who aren’t convicted
criminals are guilty of the crime of being too rich in a country where around
40 million people live in poverty. We have become too used to seeing
billionaire names plastered in large font across our hospitals, our theaters,
our parks. The next time we walk past them, let us remember the staggering
injustices these big names represent.
First perhaps some history. In 1986 I was head of R&D
for NYNEX, now Verizon, and in that position provided a great deal of funds to
the new Media Lab. My focus was on Multimedia Communications, a melding of
computers, communications and media in the broadest sense. In 1989 I taught the
first course in Multimedia
Communications, at MIT, a reference still apparently in demand. I tried to meld
EECS and the Media Lab, but it was oil and water. The Media Lab was famous for
demos, whereas the EECS Department did fundamental research in a wide variety
of areas and focused on more classic approaches. Thus a cultural divide, deeper
than anything I could see. Thus, I have some modicum of bona fides in the area.
Funding then was primarily by grants and Government
contracts but commercial entities also provided some. But it was clear that
anything NYNEX gave would be used in a manner solely determined by the
researcher and not control of direction could be given. The theme was; give us
the money and then go away. That was even true for the Media Lab. In fact given
the funds I provided them over the early years NYNEX to my knowledge never even
received a thank you note. But that was the way academics worked.
Now as to the above allegations. Take money influencing
hiring. I would strongly disagree. Faculty make those decisions. Faculty select
those who they like, it is a self-replicating group think, which may from time
to time be stultifying, but it never appeared to me that any money could
influence that. Now as to the Koch donation, I again doubt that the Koch's
demanded cancer research be politically correct in accord with their principles.
In fact, I hazard to guess that there are few if any Republicans in the
building, no less hard-core conservatives. Self-selection at work. Further the
Kochs would not have a clue as to how to direct cancer research, no less than
Whitehead or Broad. They equally funded a broad-based facility for Cancer
research which gets its day to day project funding from a variety of sources,
many being NIH, NCI and others.
Next the animosity towards billionaires is rather senseless.
Rockefeller Institute is a major foundation contributing to major insights in a
wide variety of medical areas, none of which were directed by John D. The
funding often is for edifices and infrastructure, facilities wherein research
is performed.
Now this is not all benign. I have argued that MIT
has allowed for a restructuring of its EECS Department into what I shall
call a Pyramid, named for a pharaoh, who donated or made to be donated some
billion dollars. Thus, my alma mater may no longer be MIT but some pyramid for
some pharaoh.
There are now lots of these pyramids being built around the
country and many billionaire pharaohs paying for them and in turn having them
named for them for posterity. Fundamentally this is not a problem. What is the
insidious problem is that these new edifices demand significant finds to maintain?
Funds for research are just that, funds for the people and specific research
facilities. It may include an overhead and if one has lots of pyramids on the
campus the overhead explodes. Thus, funding becomes more limited and tuition
explodes. The alleged good works of the pharaohs and their pyramids is
overridden by the explosion of costs to maintain the pyramids. The Egyptian pharaohs
just died and closed off the pyramid, there were no maintenance costs.
When I was a grad student and junior faculty member, we had
old Building 20, the remnants of the WW II Rad Lab, a broken down wooden
edifice, infested with mice, leaky and God knows what else. It was not a
pyramid and its was named Building 20, that's all.
Perhaps we should consider returning to that, Course VI in
Building 20. No pharaohs, no pyramids.
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