In a WSJ article the author notes:
The data point to a growing problem: According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, MIT ranks an abysmal 181st out of 203 universities when it comes to students’ belief that the administration will protect their speech rights. FIRE reports that the mistrust extends to MIT faculty: 38% say they don’t believe the administration would defend a speaker’s rights during a controversy. Forty percent of MIT faculty said they were more likely to self-censor as of summer 2022 than they had been before 2020. Among students, 41% aren’t confident in the administration’s ability to protect controversial speech. Those are disheartening statistics for one of the world’s best research institutions. If MIT faculty, who are at the cutting edge of science and technology, can’t count on their employer to defend open inquiry, it might prevent them from taking innovative risks. This, in turn, would stymie technological progress and the education of the next generation of innovators.
No surprises here. I have been opining on the expanding proto-Marxist administration. The classic example is the Kluge Lady approach to prohibiting alumni to enter the campus. Gates at the entry way, movement checked across every access.
They continue:
MIT’s Ad Hoc Working Group on Free Expression. The group was commissioned in January 2022 by then President Leo Rafael Reif to review free-speech policies and propose policy changes. The statement calls on MIT to embrace its tradition of “provocative thinking, controversial views, and nonconformity.” While community has the right to expect “a collegial and respectful learning and working environment,” the institution “cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious.” The statement affirms that debate and “deliberation of controversial ideas are hallmarks of the Institute’s educational and research missions and are essential to the pursuit of truth, knowledge, equity, and justice.”
In my opinion and in my experience MIT has unfortunately become more than woke, it has become an example of almost Stalinist extremes. It has Party Commissars in each Department managing the proper protocols for speech. Failure results in retraining. Moreover the Institute has replaced excellence with equity. The Institute reaches out to insure and equitable balance rather than exceptional excellence.
A new President will do nothing. Unfortunately.
Science, and to a degree engineering, is fundamentally a dialectic. There is a thesis, antithesis, synthesis and it starts over again. An exceptional academic environment MUST allow for this process to exist, moreover they must facilitate such dialectic exchanges. The presence of the Commissars, called Associate Deans, in each Department places a chill on such a dialectic. Equity denies excellence. MIT for a century was a place for excellence. Now, not so much perhaps.
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