When it comes to serious issues like climate change, we are presented with a rigid binary. You are either a smart, thoughtful, educated citizen who knows without a doubt that the climate is collapsing, carbon dioxide (CO₂) is the culprit, and we must act immediately; or you are an uneducated, unsophisticated, pig-headed climate denier who can’t tell the difference between climate and weather.

As someone who wants to be a good, educated person, I knew full well the accepted narrative that the science of climate change is completely settled. Extreme weather, hurricanes, multi-year droughts, and record-breaking heatwaves mean we only have a few years left to radically reduce our CO₂ emissions or face extreme climate collapse. It’s daunting to even question the narrative.

So it was with some trepidation that I sat down with Dr. Richard Lindzen, Professor Emeritus of Meteorology at MIT, a lead author on the Third Assessment Report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (in)famous climate contrarian. He’s a threat to the climate narrative, and thus has been labeled a climate denier, fossil fuel shill, and fringe conspiracy theorist.

Yet if we genuinely value nuance, we must acknowledge that Dr. Lindzen is a foundational figure in atmospheric physics. He proposed the “Iris hypothesis“ in 2001, the idea that increased sea surface temperatures would lead to a reduction in cirrus clouds, allowing more infrared heat to escape and act as a natural cooling thermostat for the earth. As far as his theory was concerned, the scientific method played out successfully. It was treated as a serious scientific proposition, debated by other scientists, and ultimately unsupported by subsequent data. In normal times, that’s the cycle of science.

Where Dr. Lindzen really transgressed was when he started pointing out the uncertainty in climate models, which the political establishment were treating as absolute, unquestionable truth. Because he refused to agree that the “science is settled” the establishment began treating his Iris hypothesis not as a normal result of the scientific method, but as “proof” he was a crank.

Arithmetic is Very Helpful

When asked how young researchers can find the courage to defend the process of inquiry, he was blunt: “You are posing serious questions. But, the CO₂-Climate story is not serious science.”

Yet what I found was not a fiery contrarian or bitter exile. I found a profoundly calm theoretician who simply likes to do the math. I asked him how a normal person is supposed to navigate the terrifying narrative of the climate apocalypse without getting overwhelmed. His answer was surprisingly simple: “Arithmetic is very helpful.”

He recalled the media frenzy in the late 1980s. “Newsweek still existed then, had a cover, and it showed the earth on fire. It had the statement, ‘all scientists agree.’ Did people do their homework? When somebody made these claims... did they ever ask themselves, when we went to college, did we ever meet anyone studying climate? And the answer was no. But somehow, the world was suddenly full of thousands of the world’s leading climate scientists. It’s amazing to me that they could get away with the assumption no one would check.”

In the 1970s and 80s, Dr. Lindzen noted, “maybe there were a half-dozen universities that had something going on in this area. You didn’t major in climate. You studied rigorous, foundational disciplines like applied mathematics, physics, or meteorology.”

The explosion of dedicated, interdisciplinary climate studies programs is a relatively recent invention. He noted how political funding shifts abruptly alter scientific landscapes, recalling how earlier events, like Sputnik, led to the space race. Later, massive federal grant money flooded into the environmental space and the modern climate consensus was born.

He pointed out that if you actually run the numbers regarding global policies like the Paris Agreement, the panic evaporates into mathematical absurdity.

“It would tell you immediately that if western Europe and the U.S. decided to commit suicide, bury all their cities and people, it would have no impact,” while China, India, and Russia would continue their energy trajectories. “At which point, why should the limited things you are doing have an impact? It’s a symbolic gesture saying you somehow agree with the statement, even though you know what you’re doing has no consequences.

“Whenever you have the state, promoting fear and hate...that state probably does not have good intentions. And yet, people are very receptive to having hate and fear promoted.”

Science as Religion

If the math is that clear, why does MIT, which is full of some of the smartest people on the planet, not do the math and simply follow the base scientific process?

Dr. Lindzen attributes it to tribalism. “I’m impressed with the resilience of this issue. Despite the fact that virtually every prediction has failed... we do know there’s an exception to that, which is religion.”

For an MIT researcher, heaven is the laboratory. It’s the ability to secure funding, publish in prestigious journals, and remain in the respected priesthood of the academy. Hell is institutional exile. As Lindzen recalled about the pressure to conform in the late 1980s: “Someone I knew at NSF said, ‘Look, if you don’t get on board, you’re going to lose your funding.’

“The environmental movement changed dramatically. It was concerned before with ‘save the whales’ and species diversity, but the emphasis changed to the energy sector. The first attempt was a scare scenario for global cooling.”

When the scientific method is tethered to billions of dollars, the institution demands compliance. Brilliant scientists look at the professional punishment for speaking up, and the immediate professional reward for bowing their heads to the consensus.

Staying True to the Math

By the time Dr. Lindzen drafted a letter to President Trump in 2017 urging him to pull out of the Paris Agreement, he was already viewed as a massive thorn in the side of the climate consensus. The letter was the ultimate flashpoint. In response, MIT’s administration urged the department to sign a counter-letter supporting the consensus.

Dr. Lindzen’s colleagues—brilliant, highly capable scientists—came to his office in private. “At least two of the people signing on, the only two who actually worked on the problem, apologized to me,” Lindzen recounted. “They knew this was bad. One admitted he did something wrong, he doesn’t believe it. The other one said, well, isn’t it at least possible?”

Dr. Lindzen ultimately refused to let funding drive the math. “As a theoretician near retirement with limited need for funding, I felt little need to respond to pressure that I regarded as illegitimate. For a younger scientist—especially one involved in expensive observations—the situation is different.” He also noted, separately, that, “When you start out presupposing the solution, and insisting that everything go toward that, you’re taking the fun out of it.”

In his essay for the Claremont Institute, Dr. Lindzen quotes Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” As the policy debate shifts on climate change and scientists continue to conduct climate research, Dr. Lindzen has added to the conversation in a way MIT and his peers don’t always appreciate.

But true environmental stewardship requires knowing the actual, unvarnished truth about a wildly complex system. We cannot find that truth if the scientists tasked with observing it are terrified of professional exile. As for Dr. Lindzen, he can say that whatever happens, he followed the math.

This opinion piece originally appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education on July 31, 2026 under the same title.

Many scientists were among the 500,000 people who submitted comments to the Office of Management and Budget during the six week public-comment period following the posting of newly proposed rules on federal science funding that would drastically alter how grants are reviewed, awarded, and administered. In the future, this may be the touchstone event we recall and say, “Scientists finally arose from their civic slumber.”

One of us specializes in the math that describes molecules traveling through the human body. The other specializes in the math of what makes molecules tick. Like most scientists, we have spent our lives achieving an extraordinary level of expertise on a

technical matter—sometimes by ignoring the world around us. Neither of us was trained in science administration or national science policy. And yet, our professional careers are heavily influenced by both. While we have many colleagues who see themselves as above politics and abjure all political affiliations, we have come to believe that when scientists remain outside the arena that sets policy, i.e., the democratic process, they do so at their peril.

Over the past few years, some of us have become increasingly alarmed by the politicization of science administration and science policy. Politicization has come from both the left and the right. In 2024, one of us wrote about the perversion of science funding by the Biden administration, ostensibly to achieve its social-justice goals. Now, we have written a follow-up paper that calls out the dangers of the politicization of science funding that’s being embraced by the Trump administration, this time in the name of improving efficiency and reversing ideological distortions by the previous administration. Whether political control comes from the left or the right, the result will be the loss of our technological supremacy, with devastating consequences for industry and society

at large. Moreover, the volatility in how science is prioritized and funded is itself damaging to the scientific enterprise.

The politicization of science need not reach the extremes of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union—in which bogus, state-mandated agricultural science led to death and destruction—to do serious damage to science and public trust. Although less cataclysmic, U.S. history also offers examples of political influence distorting the scientific process. The case of stem-cell research illustrates how politicization can pit one political side against another to skew government policy and reward complicity within the scientific community. In the early 2000s, federal regulators imposed restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research. In subsequent years, unconditioned support for stem-cell therapies, often ahead of conclusive evidence, became a political litmus test on the left. With scientific scrutiny suppressed in the name of political alliances, wildly optimistic claims about imminent breakthroughs, such as treatments for heart failure, outpaced available data. Substantial

public funding was directed to these efforts at the expense of alternative approaches to cardiovascular disease. Subsequent investigations led to the retraction of several highly cited studies, making it clear that scientific rigor and oversight had been compromised.

Today, according to some surveys, only 28 percent of Americans have a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests, down from 39 percent in 2020. Trust in higher education is even lower; more than two-thirds of Americans say colleges are “headed in the wrong direction.” Much of the public has come to see science as just another cynical political grab for power and money. Politicization is partly to blame.

Politicization is distinct from politics and the political process, which are both part and parcel of a functioning democracy. The public elect representatives who, in turn, set the priorities for the allocation of public monies. That’s as it should be. Politicization, by contrast, is something both more subtle and more sinister. What made Lysenkoism so devastating in the Soviet Union was not just that the Communist Party set unrealistic agricultural goals or imposed disastrous policies such as collectivization. Rather, it was that the Communist Party claimed the authority to adjudicate scientific truth.

How can anyone—politics-phobic scientists hoping to remain above the fray—tell the difference between legitimate involvement in science policy and political interference in it?

We start by asking some basic questions:

1. Do political considerations drive and determine the outcomes of the research?

2. Are the funds allocated for only a certain group or class of investigators, but not available to others of comparable or superior qualifications?

3. Are investigators prohibited from employing the best scientific or technological tools or theories?

4. Is the language that can be used to describe the proposed research limited or monitored?

5. Is the process of identifying the best proposals for funding controlled by political appointees rather than scientists?

6. Is the process of awarding funds opaque?

Analyzing recent actions by the Trump administration through this lens reveals troubling instances of politicization of science funding. Most alarming, the Office of Management and Budget’s proposed rule would require all scientific awards and funding decisions to be

reviewed and approved by senior political officials. This would be an unprecedented step, upending a framework of scientific funding in which political leadership sets broad priorities, but the implementation of those priorities—that is, determining what specific scientific proposals would best fulfill them—is left to review committees composed of scientists.

Political officials lack the expertise to evaluate the merits of technical proposals. At best, they could do little more than rubberstamp the decisions of scientific panels and program officers. At worst, they could make deleterious, politically motivated decisions. Empowering politicians to adjudicate which scientific ideas to advance and which to nix evokes chilling parallels with Lysenkoism. Inserting political appointees into the funding process will institutionalize the politicization of science and transform scientific funding into a political football to be kicked in whichever direction the party in power happens to favor.

It cannot be overstated how radical a proposal this is: It would overturn a model of science funding that America has followed with overwhelming success since the end of World War II. Elected officials establishing budgets and broad priorities, and then getting out of the way to allow scientific experts to determine which specific proposals have the greatest scientific merit, are what have enabled the United States to become the uncontested world leader in scientific research.

But it is important to acknowledge that we scientists bear some responsibility for the political whiplash in science funding. We remained mostly quiet as ideological distortions of science picked up speed, undermining the principles of meritocracy and open inquiry, and subverting our key knowledge-producing institutions. We were too apathetic or too enmeshed in our own work to participate in policy discussions.

We urge our colleagues to come down from their ivory towers and engage. Instead of complaining about the system, we must educate ourselves about science policy and the workings of the federal government. There are certainly differing worthy opinions about the

prudence of using federal coffers—and how much of them—to pay for basic science research. But there are reasons why American science has been the envy of the world for the last 80 years and more. It is time for all scientists to engage.

The first article in this series described the shared governance framework MIT nominally uses to allocate authority among its governing board, administration, and faculty. The second examined the MIT Corporation. This third article turns to the faculty—the group most directly responsible for MIT’s reputation for excellence and, on paper, for stewardship of its academic, research, and educational mission.

MIT’s faculty are world‑class in research and teaching, yet the MIT Faculty Newsletter recently described faculty governance as “characterized by disengagement, inefficiency, and a lack of accountability.” This article explores that paradox: how MIT’s distinctive, committee‑driven governance structure both contributes to the Institute’s exceptionalism and fails to overcome a persistent lack of faculty engagement. As Benjamin Ginsberg noted in The Fall of the Faculty, professors at many universities have ceded their prerogatives to administrations for decades; MIT is not immune.

MIT’s Peculiar Governance Concoction

The Schools of Engineering and Science together employ roughly two‑thirds of the Institute’s faculty and educate most of its graduate students and undergraduate majors. MIT’s global reputation—Nobel Prizes, Turing Awards, Fields Medals, patents, and rankings—rests primarily on the accomplishments of these STEM faculty and the graduates they train. The faculty play, “many key roles in the governance of the Institute, including stewardship of academic and educational matters,” and they carry collective responsibility for degrees, curricula, academic standards, and educational policies.

MIT’s approach to faculty governance is unusual among major research universities. As one Faculty Newsletter essay put it, “our system [of governance] is a peculiar MIT concoction: a unitary faculty meeting with real power and influence, but which rarely draws more than 15% of the faculty, combined with a strong system of standing committees.”

Unlike many IvyPlus peers, MIT has no faculty senate or formal faculty association. Instead, faculty governance operates through two channels:

• Standing committees charged with specific domains, the most important of which are the Faculty Policy Committee (FPC) and Committees on Curricula (COC), the Undergraduate Program (CUP), Academic Performance (CAP), Discipline (COD), and Nominations.

• Monthly faculty meetings, open to all faculty, where any member may speak, introduce topics, and vote on motions, degree changes, and major policy questions.

A Faculty Newsletter article notes that, “about a quarter of the faculty serve on at least one committee at any given time,” suggesting broad potential involvement. The administration also operates standing committees on which faculty serve. On paper, this gives the faculty significant direct power with less bureaucracy than a formal senate.

Another peculiarity is that the MIT administration appoints the heads of academic departments. At many peers, department chairs are elected or chosen through faculty‑driven processes, whereas at MIT faculty influence is at best advisory.

How Governance Actually Works

In practice, the opportunity to participate is limited and unevenly used. There are more than a dozen faculty committees, but only about 40 faculty at any time serve on the most consequential ones. Promotion to full professor now typically requires some Institute‑level service., Because research and teaching demands mean governance participation competes directly with tenure pressures the Institute allows non-tenured faculty to devote most of their time to lab work, grants, and teaching, and to treat committees and meetings as optional.

The nominations process reinforces the disengagement. The Chair and Associate Chairs of the Faculty and all committee members are formally “elected” by the faculty, including via online ballots. In reality, a Committee on Nominations—whose members are appointed by the three faculty officers—solicits interest, vets candidates, and presents a single slate for an up‑or‑down vote. Alternate nominations are technically possible but historically rare. Elections thus function largely as ratifications of a pre‑selected slate chosen by a small, self‑nominating group.

Faculty meetings are nominally the central locus of authority. The President, as an officer of the Faculty, presides and sets the agenda with the Faculty Officer Group. Quorum is only 30 faculty, a threshold set in the 1930s and never updated. Recent commentary reports median attendance of roughly 100–110 faculty out of about 1,100, but often less than 10%. Meetings are open to the MIT community, with a similar number of non‑voting staff attending. Routine business often proceeds with only a modest fraction of faculty present. Curriculum votes require a two‑thirds majority of those present, which can raise turnout for high‑stakes issues, but most decisions are made by a relatively small subset.

A 2025 Faculty Newsletter article argues that limited participation, combined with procedural complexity and inconsequential pre‑selected agenda topics, yields a system where “disengagement, inefficiency, and a lack of accountability” are the norm. This is MIT’s version of the broader pattern Ginsberg described: faculty formally have power, but do not often exercise it.

Case Study 1: Degrees, Gatekeeping, and Mission

One domain where faculty still exercise clear authority is the creation of new degree programs. Since the early 2000s, the faculty have formal guidelines requiring multi‑stage review and a vote of the full Faculty before any permanent undergraduate degree can be authorized. Proposals pass through CUP and COC, are reviewed by the FPC, and then brought to a faculty meeting for debate and a vote; approval requires a majority and minimum quorum.

Over the past two decades, the faculty has exercised its responsibility by approving multiple new undergraduate and masters degree programs across all departments. Even at the highest level, the PhD program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), created in 1988, was described as, “the first new doctoral program approved by the MIT Faculty in over 20 years,” and remains one of only two humanities doctorates at MIT. When the faculty approves a program, they are voting on what kinds of knowledge MIT will institutionalize and teach.

Case Study 2: When Faculty Governance Worked

A recent example of faculty governance functioning well is the Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom, adopted in 2022. After sharp controversy over campus speech and invited speakers, the faculty established a committee under faculty rules to draft a statement on free expression. The draft was circulated, debated, and amended at faculty meetings, then approved by faculty vote as a formal statement of MIT policy and values.

This process—faculty‑initiated, committee‑led, debated openly, and formally ratified—shows the governance structure at its best: direct faculty voice on a core academic value, exercised through the mechanisms the rules prescribe.

Case Study 3: When Faculty Governance Was Bypassed

The Schwarzman College of Computing, discussed in the second article of this series, is a clear case of faculty governance being sidelined. The College, a major new academic structure, was announced in October 2018 as a large gift and institutional commitment. The initiative did not first go through the normal route of faculty committees and meetings for creating a new academic unit. MIT’s Turing Award winners had urged a school of computing, and the administration developed the College in response. The Corporation approved the initiative, but faculty were consulted largely after the fact on implementation.

Here, administration conceived and launched a major Institute‑wide academic entity with faculty governance brought in mainly on details, not on the decision itself. Likewise, the MIT Mission Statement and MIT Values Statement were prepared entirely by the administration and were neither drafted by faculty‑chosen representatives nor approved by faculty vote. These episodes illustrate how MIT’s peculiar governance concoction can fail to protect faculty prerogatives even when protective structures exist on paper, as well as how the administration often defines MIT’s public policies with minimal faculty governance involvement.

Paper Authority, Exercised Rarely

Taken together, the structure and these cases support the Newsletter’s critique: MIT’s faculty governance has real authority on paper, limited engagement in practice, and a structure that can enable both faculty initiative and administrative bypass. A governance system that depends on faculty showing up cannot work well when most do not.

Much of MIT’s exceptionalism rests on its STEM faculty, but being world‑class in research and teaching is not enough at MIT: STEM faculty have a special obligation to engage in governance so that together they preserve, protect, and strengthen the Institute that STEM faculty built.

The fourth article will examine the role of the administration—how presidential and provostial offices, including the Office of Innovation and Strategy, define priorities and interact with the Corporation and faculty.

In a time of doubt about what constitutes a “great book,” Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War surely qualifies. As we confront new uncertainty about the global balance of power, it is not only students who read Thucydides. His masterpiece lay at the center of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos in January, Chinese President Xi Jinping invoked the concept known as the “Thucydides Trap” when he met President Trump in May, and numerous opinion essays have turned to Thucydides for guidance. While continued relevance is one mark of a great book, to say The Peloponnesian War remains relevant after 2,500 years fails to capture the book’s full power. That power was evident this past Spring in my MIT class, “Humane Warfare.”

I teach great books in Concourse, a small program at MIT where first-year students take their core math and science classes along with a core humanities class and a weekly seminar about fundamental questions. In “Humane Warfare” this year, fourteen undergraduates from a range of majors undertook a semester-long, close study of Thucydides’ work. It was an extraordinary semester; attendance was almost perfect and engagement never flagged. Students would argue over the latest plot twist before I even arrived in the classroom. The book’s startling effect on them prompted me to try to clarify what makes a book “great” and why studying such a work is so rewarding for all students but perhaps especially for those at MIT.

MIT students excel at the clarity supplied by quantitative thinking. They are also innovative and imaginative, especially when it comes to building systems, developing algorithms, and solving material or physical problems. These qualities, however, do not exhaust what it means to live well. As human beings, citizens, and future leaders, MIT students must also confront critical questions that do not admit of quantitative solutions, and they must learn to distinguish better from worse actions when addressing such questions. Helping us do these things is the hallmark of a great book.

Thucydides makes justice a central question of his work: is Athens or Sparta to blame for the 34-year-long war? But rather than answer that question, he invites readers to think about it with care and nuance. This is precisely what occurred in my class. Students began as vigorous partisans of Sparta. One might have expected them to sympathize with democratic Athens, but, not surprisingly, they disapproved of Athens’ enthusiastic pursuit of empire and accorded the moral high ground to Sparta for her professed commitment to treaties and law. They quickly discovered, though, that there was more than first met their eyes, and unfolding developments challenged their initial moral judgments. As they plunged deeper into the details of the war, learned about myriad contributing factors, and observed the various parties under pressures occasioned by war, they were much less certain about each city’s merits and flaws.

Let me share a few of the complicating factors. First, despite Sparta’s claim to defend the freedom and independence of cities, she struggles to practice what she preaches. Precisely because she prefers peace and quiet, Sparta is slow to gear up for action. For all her efforts to observe treaties, Sparta puts her own domestic concerns above responsibility to her allies. Those domestic concerns even lead her, midway through the war, to exchange Athenian subject cities she has just liberated in return for peace with Athens.

At the same time, there was more to admire about Athens than first appeared. At home, she embraces an open cosmopolitanism, respect for private life, and vigorous political activity. While she resists her allies’ attempts to renege on the terms of their alliance, she welcomes them into Athens, even permitting them to sue her in her own courts. Students came to see the dynamism, ambition, and love of honor that lead Athens to empire also make her willing to offer quick and vigorous aid to current and potential allies alike.

Moreover, for all her ambition and imperial adventures, Athens’ unusual ability to reflect on her actions, which emerges especially in the stark contrast Thucydides presents between an Athenian and a Spartan trial impressed students. In Sparta’s trial of Plataea, a vanquished Athenian ally, legalism masks a ruthlessness towards enemies. Sparta makes the impossible demand that the Plataean prisoners prove they have never harmed Sparta. On finding them guilty, Sparta delivers them to their mortal enemy, Thebes. Thucydides invites a deeper examination of the trial by presenting it almost immediately after his account of Athens’ trial of Mytilene, a free and independent Athenian ally whose leaders betrayed Athens by attempting to join the Spartan alliance. Having initially voted to sentence the whole city to death, the Athenian people, troubled by the idea of punishing everyone for the leaders’ conduct, vote the next day to reconsider the judgment. In a decision urged on them by a sober speaker who insists Athens act on the basis of not anger but, rather, a calm and clear-sighted view of her true interests, they ultimately punish only the leaders of the rebellion.

Thucydides thus leads the reader to consider how cities address the inevitable tension between justice and interest. He tells us that Sparta’s main concern in the trial was pleasing her ally Thebes—she acted in her own interest. Thucydides does not blame her for this, but readers are struck by Sparta’s insistence on the pretense of justice, where justice is construed as what is in Sparta’s interest. By contrast, Athens, at least in this instance, reconciles an interest in preventing future rebellions with a just concern that only the guilty be punished. Whatever else may be said about Athens’ unruly political atmosphere, she can accommodate debate about the justice of a brutal sentence and even be willing to rescind it.

To be sure, as the war proceeds, Athens’ ambition overtakes her concern for justice and honor. Thucydides shows this in a private dialogue between Melian leaders and Athenian envoys that precedes Athens’ destruction of Melos. If students learned Athens’ concern with honor produces her noble willingness to defend her allies, they also saw how easily that concern degenerates into a narrow pursuit of self-interest.

Guided by Thucydides’ presentation of the war and through discussion of various episodes over the course of the work, students gained a nuanced understanding of both Sparta and Athens and learned neither had a monopoly on justice. Moreover, through his rich account of the various characters in the work for whom we alternately feel sympathy, admiration, frustration, hope, anger, and sadness, Thucydides prompted students’ reflection on what constitutes an admirable character and what it means to act well or badly in human affairs.

Students modified their doubts about Pericles, whose account of Athens plummets from soaring rhetoric to muted defense after a devastating plague, as they encountered the less strategic, more morally dubious leaders who followed him. They noted the contrast between Alcibiades’ astonishing hubris in domestic politics and his moderate policy in war. They discovered in Hermocrates a less destabilizing approach to stirring national ambition. They lamented how Brasidas’ unrelenting concern with honor ultimately overcame his noble intentions. They examined good leadership by comparing the divergent outcomes of the bold Demosthenes with the cautious Nicias. In short, they learned that human beings are both rife with failings and also capable of wise and admirable action.

This slow, careful study of one great work provided students with the perfect antidote to the onslaught of information to which they are subject and for which they have little context and even less basis for judgment. By delving into a book produced by an extraordinary mind, students began to develop that judgment—to navigate between justice and interest, to celebrate human achievement while being mindful of the excesses to which success can lead, and to recognize that no action is cost-free. Such insights are the basis not of relativism but of humane judgment, which, for MIT students in particular, must accompany the extraordinary power that as scientists and engineers will likely be in their hands. A book that sparks and steers deliberation about justice and greatness needed to become both good and wise—now that’s a great book!

Tomorrow (July 28), I’ll be hosting a webinar for the MIT Free Speech Alliance with Jacob Mchangama, discussing the book The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom and his broader work in the free speech movement. You can register here.

Having spent most of the past 20 years in the free speech movement, I highly recommend The Future of Free Speech. It gives a good birds-eye view of modern speech trends in the free and unfree world alike, where authoritarian countries have become more authoritarian and liberal democracies less liberal and democratic. The U.S. remains the gold standard, but the book leaves me wondering if we have the political will to keep it that way.

Below are some of my key impressions and takeaways from the book, which I look forward to discussing with Jacob. I hope you’ll join.

Europe has Lost the Plot

This wasn’t news to me, but the authors have collected a formidable number of examples showing the lengths some countries have gone to fight extremism.

• In Germany after the October 7 attacks, Berlin’s police effectively banned all protests in languages other than German and English, breaking up even a Ukrainian protest outside the Russian embassy. Police also forced their way into a woman’s apartment to arrest her for posting the pro-Palestinian slogan “From the River to the Sea.”

• French president Emmanuel Macron used France’s “Law on Strengthening Republican Values” to ban nearly four dozen NGO’s by decree, and in the six months after October 7 prosecuted nearly 400 “apology for terrorism” cases. Among those that were investigated: A survivor of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, who called Hamas a “resistance movement.”

• In England, police tracked down and arrested a woman who derided the UK’s Minister and Home Secretary as “coconuts,” as in brown on the outside, white on the inside. (The woman was of South Asian descent, as were the two government officials she criticized.) Not only did they charge the woman with a racially aggravated offense, they charged several of her supporters with the same offense for using the same term to satirically protest her arrest.

None of this would pass muster under our First Amendment. More to the point: these efforts don’t work. Antisemitism, anti-migrant sentiment, and right-wing populism are all surging across Western Europe not in spite of governments’ efforts to curb extreme speech, but partly because of them.

Authoritarians are Happy to Follow Our Bad Example

I hadn’t fully appreciated that censorship by liberal governments gives cover to censorship by authoritarians before reading the book, which lays out the practices of free and unfree countries side by side, but you don’t have to infer the point since authoritarians are happy to make it explicit. Consider:

• Within days of the EU banning Russian state networks RT and Sputnik, Russia blocked online access to Western media, calling it retaliation in an “information war.”

• Rwandan president Paul Kagame used the country’s genocide denial laws to target political opponents, with officials citing Germany and France’s own Holocaust denial laws as precedent.

• Venezuela’s Maduro government unleashed its “Anti-Hate Law for Tolerance and Peaceful Coexistence” on critics, with a proponent citing Germany’s Network Enforcement Act as inspiration.

A lesson for Europe: if dictatorships are citing your repressive speech laws to justify their own, perhaps those laws weren’t a good idea.

America’s Lead is Slipping

The United States has great cards to play in the global free speech game. Our First Amendment is the envy of the world, and our Supreme Court has generally given it strong protections. Communications Decency Act Section 230 shields platforms from liability for users’ posts, further strengthening our internet’s protections. And yet this wasn’t much comfort, because as I read The Future of Free Speech I kept wondering if we have the political will to keep our position.

The book’s chapter on jawboning—governments unduly pressuring private actors to censor speech—calls into question American’s free-speech leadership. In the EU, jawboning is codified through the Digital Services Act, which requires platforms to remove “illegal” speech and pressures them into removing “disinformation” under threat of steep fines. Commissioner Thierry Breton’s attempts to use the DSA to bully Elon Musk and X make for one of the book’s most engaging accounts.

But the United States has its own recent history with jawboning. A unanimous Supreme Court ruled for the National Rifle Association, finding New York State had inappropriately pressured insurers to cancel its policies. Anger over the Biden administration’s pressure on social media companies to censor views on COVID-19 and elections helped propel Trump’s return to the White House.

And yet, jawboning has emerged as a favored tactic in the second Trump administration, used against higher education, TV networks, and app developers, among others. The authors rightly peg federal anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) legislation as key to shoring up First Amendment protections, but Trump’s own track record of frivolous litigation dims hopes of it passing while he’s in office.1

The issue, though, is bigger than Trump. Both the left and right both have major blind spots and liabilities on free speech. Where they do find consensus, free speech often loses. Just last month a bipartisan House majority passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, with age-gating requirements that would harm online privacy and anonymity—and therefore free speech.

The Future of Free Speech Runs Through AI

Not surprisingly for a book released in 2026, AI looms large in the conversation, with two dominant concerns: who controls AI platforms, and how their models are trained.

Chinese models such as Deepseek represent one extreme: powerful, cheap (and therefore attractive to foreign buyers) and thoroughly trained on Chinese Communist Party talking points. Just try asking them anything about the internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang or the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

In America, meanwhile, just as this book was hitting bookstores, the Trump administration threatened to seize Anthropic’s technology after it refused to give its unrestricted use to the Pentagon. They also temporarily banned export of its Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models, forcing Anthropic to shut them off worldwide.

AI might be the next stage on which the U.S. and China battle for global influence, but a less visible battle has barely begun over whether the models we use daily will trust their users, or be laden with guardrails around nebulous concepts of hate speech and disinformation, which the authors call “preventive safetyism.”

If there’s one sentence from the book the future of free speech hinges on, it might well be this:

The greatest risk to freedom of expression arises if preventive safetyism becomes embedded in legally binding standards that specifically mandate heavy filtering of prohibited content, based on categories such as hate speech, disinformation, defamation, abuse, offense, and the like (as opposed to speech-neutral regulation aimed at avoiding catastrophic risk, such as the development of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons).

More Free Speech Reads:

This is a repost of an article originally posted in The Dispatch on August 7, 2025, with new artwork from the author.

Things are going badly for universities. They are in the crosshairs of an erratic and aggressive government willing to threaten anything in its path. While the government may have succeeded at securing promises for needed reforms at Columbia University, it did so by delaying or canceling scientific research funding estimated at between $400 million and $1.2 billion. But even delays that are resolved have their own costs. While a deal will restore this funding, some worthy scientists have lost their jobs and some worthy scientific research projects will not recover. To protect the sciences going forward, radical change to the composition of universities is warranted.

How do academics view the root causes of their own precarious situation? Consider a gathering of professors across multiple disciplines for the annual meeting of Heterodox Academy in June of 2025. HxA, as it is known, is a group devoted to fostering the necessary environment and tools for airing of conflicting and unpopular (“heterodox”) views—provided they are expressed civilly. And yet, even among this group, whose members are not prone to marching in lockstep, there was remarkable consensus that the public’s distrust and the government’s ire are directed primarily at faculty in the humanities because of their often single-minded insistence on identity politics, equity of results over merit, and abandonment of the Western canon.

The best argument I heard at the HxA conference in defense of the humanities in today’s university was: “We cannot afford to lose all of that important cancer research.” Come again? Translation: The humanities are going down and taking the rest of us—grant-funded scientists who focus on medical research or the physical sciences—with them. This begs the question: Do we scientists need them? Or, more to the point, must the fate of the sciences be tied to that of the humanities?

Since January of this year (2025), the sciences have been hit with delays of some federal grants and cancellations of others; proposed reductions in indirect rate costs; and draconian budget cuts for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) going forward. Keep in mind, it is the humanities that have sinned. Why else would the Trump administration’s settlement with Columbia call for an internal review of Middle East programs or new Jewish Studies faculty slots though economics or political science or international and public affairs? They aren’t demanding an internal review of the Physics department or of Cardiology. But if the humanities have sinned, why has the government targeted the sciences for funding cuts? As Willie Sutton purportedly remarked when asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” Most universities have divisions or departments of the humanities, social sciences, law, business, medicine, and hard sciences. But it is the latter two that bring in the bulk of federal dollars, in the form of NIH and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants.

The more funding science and medicine departments accept, the more leverage the government has to force changes at their universities. I am strongly in favor of shrinking bloated university bureaucracies and reforming or eliminating university entities that have gone over the cliff for social justice activism. But I am also a career biomedical scientist whose work depends on NIH grants, and I am less sanguine about my grants serving as the main component of the government’s leverage to force such changes.

Some will claim that scientists’ hands are not clean, that we endorse rampant DEI, that we misuse science funding for bizarre investigations. But such instances are a few fleas on the fur of a noble hound. We in the hard sciences do work that is largely apolitical, and we are more oriented toward much-needed objective evaluation of data and merit than many of our brethren in the humanities. Yet the scientists, and all their life-giving and technology-producing work, are being punished for the sins of others because we all live under one roof. I cannot see a compelling reason for our continued cohabitation.

There is nothing that says that universities must or have always included all disciplines. My graduate alma mater (now named Case Western Reserve University) is the product of a 1967 federation (and ultimate merging) of what was the Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University. The idea of a large, prominent entity had been under discussion for many years, and may have been driven by the desire of city leaders to put Cleveland “on the map.” Nowadays, Case Western is consistently ranked in the country’s top 100 universities.

But not all unions are good or last forever. In January of 2000, America Online (AOL) and Time Warner merged to secure dominance of the entertainment and digital domains. But only a few years later, access to the internet became widely available for cheap, and AOL’s dominant position in controlling access via dial-up became worthless (AOL’s market capitalization went from $192 billion to around $3 billion in about eight years). When the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, AOL was dead weight that pulled down the stock price of the combined entity until there was nothing left to do but de-merge (called “spinning off” in business terms) in 2009.

More was at play in the AOL/Time Warner debacle than one division’s failed business model: There was a widely reported clash of cultures between the aggressive AOL leaders and the more staid executives of Time Warner. In the university, we also see a clash of cultures. Scientists at research universities run labs that are funded by government grants. To secure those grants, the scientist proposes a circumscribed set of experiments with verifiable (or more correctly, rejectable) hypotheses. Objective truth as it applies to such narrow lines of inquiry is attainable. But objective truth cannot be achieved in the humanities—nor is it the point. Professors in the humanities are trained in a completely different paradigm and culture. Writing about art or history or religion seems to elude any possibility of objectivity that is central to the scientific process. If you are a Calvinist, there may be only one proper way to read the Bible. But that is not the same as there being one objective meaning of the Bible for all of us.

From a practical standpoint, scientists with research labs are running small businesses. The goal of the lab may be a search for scientific truth, but the great bulk of the lab director’s time and focus is dominated by a search for funding, not truth or politics. An investigator in the sciences has little time for writing political position papers or worse, political screeds. Such writings would yield no benefit to one’s reputation as a scientist, nor to the funding and survival of one’s lab. We are trained to write objectively about the results of our experiments: The data are what the data are. In our grant proposals and in our peer-reviewed papers we report those data so that others can evaluate them as well as our interpretations. We must even note data that were excluded (as “outliers” based on objective criteria).

Objective reasoning is an important skill. We as a society depend on those who are trained to state clear hypotheses and analyze data objectively. Pasteur and others gathered data that confirmed the germ theory of disease. You may not like “elites” or the French, but you’d be a fool to let your doctor or dentist operate on you with used, unsterilized instruments.

There are undoubtedly scientists who abuse their positions and their funding to promote their politics. But they are a small or even vanishing minority. My experience from more than 30 years in science research is that my peers take their objectivity seriously. In my four-year stint on a review panel for NIH from 2016 to 2020, for example, I observed a group of 30 scientists of different specialties argue ardently, sometimes quite heatedly, but always civilly, about the merits of each grant we had to review. Never once did anyone impugn a grant on political or ideological grounds. We stuck to the value of the proposed science, the feasibility of the proposed experiments, and the potential benefits that would derive from them. Yes, scientists have sometimes been forced to include DEI statements and sometimes to use bizarre, woke language in papers or grant proposals. (I, myself, have been advised to write, “a person who smokes” rather than a ”smoker” in a grant proposal. Huh?) But I would argue that these are mostly actions taken by reasonable people to escape the scrutiny of NIH or university-based language-police.

No matter the level of ideological capture in either, though, sciences and the humanities are organized differently, operate differently, and have different raisons d’être. It is almost as if the respective faculties are different species. Jewish law has something to say on this. It prohibits the yoking together of oxen with asses, because animals of different strengths and different strides should not be forced onto the same team. But the principle can be applied more broadly. In the modern American university, the sciences have historically been “yoked” to the humanities. Who are the oxen and who are the donkeys may be in the eyes of the beholder, but there is no doubt that at this moment, we in the hard sciences and medicine are suffering needlessly for being yoked, organizationally, to our counterparts in the non-quantitative and often ideologically captured humanities departments. Our strides and our strengths are incompatible.

Does this mean that scientists should strive to be illiterate or ahistorical? Of course not. We need to be able to read and write and absorb lessons from history and politics and ethics. But we don’t need to be part of a larger university to do so. For those topics that students need to learn but for which no scientist professor is prepared to teach, our Institute of Technology and Medicine can hire qualified instructors. But they need not be the world’s expert on Shakespeare or Poe to teach writing or English literature to undergrads. And for those polymathic students who want to learn their physics from a famous physicist and their Hobbes from a leading Hobbesian, there can still be such a thing as cross-registering at the nearby Institute of Humanities.

To be clear, I have dear friends who are historians and writers and journalists. They are brilliant, and I delight in their knowledge and in their perspectives. But we do not collaborate on my research on drug development or Parkinson’s disease or cancer, because frankly, they would have nothing to contribute. And we certainly do not need to be employed by the same organization. I am not against history or literature any more than the rabbis were against oxen. In fact, I am a fan of both history and literature. But not every species of academic or their fates must be yoked together.

We are at an inflection point in the public’s valuation of the academy. For good or ill, we academics must each make our own best case for our continued existence and for whatever resources we seek from the public. There is an efficiency and a clarity that can come from unyoking the sciences from the humanities. Let the market of public opinion assess each discipline on its own merits and let the practitioners of each discipline be allowed to make their own case for their continued value. That seems only fair. I am confident I can make my most persuasive case for a university of science, engineering, and medicine, if the humanities are not housed under my roof.

The first article in this series described the shared governance framework MIT nominally uses to allocate authority among its governing board, administration, and faculty. This article examines the first of those three: the MIT Corporation. Understanding what it actually does, as distinct from what it is chartered to do, is essential to understanding who really runs MIT.

A Board Unlike Any Other

MIT was chartered by the Massachusetts legislature on April 10, 1861 and governed from the start by an external board of trustees — the model standard for American research universities. The Corporation’s chartered responsibilities include approving strategy and budgets, exercising fiduciary responsibility, and — most consequentially — electing the President.

The MIT Corporation currently has approximately 79 active members — more than double the average board size at the other twelve Ivy-Plus universities — and the most complex membership structure among its peers. Its five member classes include Life Members (up to 25, serving until age 75), Term Members (up to 25, on five-year terms), Alumni/ae Nominees and Recent Graduate Members (both nominally selected by outside parties but vetted and approved by the Corporation), and eight Ex Officio members — including, distinctively, the Governor of Massachusetts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, and the Secretary of Education. By tradition, almost all trustees are MIT graduates. It also helps, in practice, to have been a significant donor.

A Self-Perpetuating Body with a Small Inner Circle

The Corporation completely controls the selection of its own membership through the Governance and Nominations Committee (GNC) — a committee of the Corporation itself. Governance scholar Richard Chait has noted that “self-perpetuation without term limits” produces a governing body that is wholly independent and effectively unaccountable for its actions and inactions — an insulation that contrasts sharply with the accountability faced by public university trustees and by directors of private corporations.

A board of nearly 80 also cannot function as a deliberative body. The full Corporation meets only four times per year. Real governance happens in the Executive Committee — roughly 12 members — which sets agendas, makes committee appointments, and acts between quarterly meetings. As The Tech put it in 2012, “Because the Corporation is so large … the Executive Committee is the practical manifestation of the Corporation’s oversight responsibility for MIT.” Alumni who imagine 79 distinguished leaders deliberating over MIT’s direction are imagining something the structure does not support.

Three Cases: The Corporation in Action

The Schwarzman College of Computing (2018). When MIT announced a $350 million gift and a $1 billion total commitment to create a new College of Computing, the president and senior team had conceived and developed the initiative; the Corporation blessed it as a fait accompli. Faculty consultation happened primarily after the announcement — drawing criticism from faculty who felt the decision had been made before they could weigh in — and the Provost’s letter framed subsequent engagement as input on implementation, not deliberation.

The Jeffrey Epstein Investigation (2019–2020). When press reporting revealed that the Media Lab had accepted post-conviction donations from Jeffrey Epstein, the Executive Committee retained Goodwin Procter LLP to investigate. The resulting report revealed that Executive Committee Chairman Robert Millard had been approached by Media Lab Director Joi Ito in 2016 to help solicit Epstein donations. Millard declined but, per the report, “did not believe it was appropriate for him, as Chairman, to interfere or say ‘no.’ That was the responsibility of the administration.” The investigation was scoped as a factual reconstruction, not a governance audit, and produced no reform recommendations. Its final finding — that “MIT Still Lacks A Formal Policy For Accepting Donations From Controversial Sources” — was left without a remedy. The Corporation, with ultimate fiduciary responsibility, had overseen years of institutional inability to finalize such a policy without intervening.

The Hockfield Budget Cuts (2008–2009). Following the financial crisis, MIT’s endowment lost roughly 20% of its value. The Corporation set firm financial parameters; by fall 2009 the administration had achieved $58 million in savings, exceeding the target. The fiduciary function worked as designed — though the Corporation’s directive addressed the size of the reduction, not its strategic shape. The administration, on its own initiative, made the strategic decision to reduce administrative unit budgets more steeply than academic ones.

The Visiting Committees: MIT’s Genuine Differentiator

Whatever its limitations, the Corporation has developed one mechanism that genuinely sets MIT apart: the Visiting Committee system, established in 1875. Thirty committees cover every academic department and several Institute-wide functions, engaging approximately 425 distinguished participants drawn from the Corporation, MIT alumni/ae, and presidential appointees from industry, academia, and civic life. Each committee meets every two years, hears from department heads, faculty, and students, and delivers reports directly to the President, Provost, Chancellor, and the Corporation. No comparable institution maintains visiting advisory bodies of this scale, regularity, and integrity. The system injects outside expert judgment into the Corporation’s view of academic quality, partially compensating for the insularity a self-perpetuating board would otherwise produce.

What the Corporation Does — and Doesn’t — Do

Five observations follow from the structure and the cases:

• Real but bounded oversight. The Corporation performs its fiduciary function reliably when the challenge is financial, and selects the president effectively — if not without controversy.

• Strategy belongs to the administration. The Corporation approves strategic initiatives, budgets, and major policies — but the administration conceives and drives them. The administration decides; the Corporation ratifies.

• The Executive Committee is the real board. Between and within quarterly meetings, a committee of roughly 12 exercises effective board authority over the full 79-member body.

• Self-perpetuation has consequences. With the GNC controlling all membership, the Corporation reproduces its own culture. The Epstein case illustrates the pathology: a Chairman aware of a governance problem in the making deferred rather than acted, because the structure trained him to see oversight as someone else’s job.

• The Visiting Committee system is the Corporation’s most valuable contribution to MIT’s exceptionalism. Biennial departmental reviews by outside experts inject breadth and accountability where a self-perpetuating board would otherwise produce insularity.

The Corporation’s most important contribution may be the Visiting Committee system it has sustained for 150 years. Its most important limitation may be a self-perpetuating design that makes it more responsive to financial crises than to cultural and values pressures — which may prove equally consequential to MIT’s future.

The third article in this series examines the role of MIT’s faculty in the Institute’s governance — its unique structure, what faculty actually control, and how it compares to faculty governance at peer institutions.

Previous entries in this series:

This is the last of our five-part series, “DEI at MIT.” Earlier installments describe the work of MIT Alumni for Accountability (MAFA), a group of MIT alums who became alarmed about unmanaged mission expansion, undocumented administrative costs and unmeasured benefits of DEI and its successors at MIT. In 2023 and 2024, MAFA conducted extensive research, relying on materials available to the public posted on MIT-related websites. They reviewed thousands of pages of information related to DEI and its successor, “Belonging, Achievement, and Composition” (BAC). The work product is found at mafadei.com, which consists of an ideological and historical narrative, the taxonomy schematic consisting of hundreds of entries and in particular an Addendum with estimated cost data updated to early 2026.

MIT’s review of its DEI apparatus had, in fact, begun before President Trump’s second inauguration. In January 2024, President Kornbluth asked Institute Community and Equity Office (ICEO) staff to assess where the university was succeeding in supporting its community and where improvement was needed—an 18-month evaluation process that MIT grad Karl Reid, hired as MIT’s inaugural Vice President for Equity and Inclusion in March 2024, was charged with leading. That process was cut short when Reid announced his resignation on February 7, 2025, amid the new administration’s anti-DEI executive orders and investigations. In an interview with The Tech, Reid cited a desire to return to his professional roots in national STEM pipeline organizations. Upon Reid’s departure, the ICEO temporarily reported to Vice Provost for Faculty Paula Hammond.

A decisive step came on May 22, 2025, when President Kornbluth wrote to the MIT community announcing that the ICEO would be “sunset,” and that the vice-presidential position overseeing it would be eliminated. She also announced the discontinuation of the Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, and Composition (SAPBAC), the elaborate institutional framework with thirty-plus metrics and school-by-school action plans that MIT had unveiled in September 2022. In her letter, Kornbluth acknowledged “real appreciation” for existing diversity programs but cited an internal review finding “a broad desire to rethink how this work is done in practice.” She framed the pivot explicitly: “community is best built locally rather than top down,” and introduced the Wellbeing, Engagement, Belonging, and Support (WEBS) nomenclature. A standing committee, led by staff but including students and faculty with “a clear channel to senior leadership,” would replace the central coordinating office.

The serial renaming that has accompanied this institutional history—from DEI to BAC to WEBS—is a textbook instance of what Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker called the “euphemism treadmill.” Pinker coined the term in a 1994 New York Times essay, writing, “The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are in charge: give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name.” The mechanism is straightforward: a contested concept is given a neutral or positive label to reduce friction. Over time, critics recognize that the new label describes the same contested activity and the label itself acquires the same opprobrium as its predecessor until a new label is then sought. At MIT the treadmill has completed three full turns in little more than a decade, yet, as our analysis of the 2026 data demonstrate, the substantive programs and personnel have largely survived each rebranding intact.

The Residue: WEBS, 2026

As noted in prior articles in this series, “Peak DEI” in June 2024 included approximately 180 full-time equivalent (FTE) personnel devoted to DEI/BAC activities, with an annual personnel cost conservatively estimated at over $36 million. Updated data as of January 2026 show approximately 90 FTEs still devoted to successor activities, at an estimated annual personnel cost of approximately $23 million, broken down as roughly $12.4 million in salaries, $4.2 million in benefits, and $6.6 million in overhead. The apparent reduction from 180+ to 90 FTEs and from $36 million to $23 million requires careful interpretation, for several reasons.

First, the largest source of the FTE decline is the disbanding of SAPBAC committees, councils, and working groups. Under SAPBAC, virtually every MIT school, department, lab, and research center had convened one or more such bodies, comprising numerous faculty members, administrators, and staff who were counted as fractional FTEs for committee service. When MIT disbanded SAPBAC, those units were dissolved and the individuals who participated in them primarily as a SAPBAC obligation do not appear in the 2026 data.

Second, as has been the case at universities nationwide following the Trump administration’s executive orders, MIT significantly reduced the public visibility of DEI-related content on its websites. The Tech reported in February 2025 that the School of Science had removed its “Diversity and Inclusion” page, redirecting visitors to an “Academic Affairs & Community Engagement” site. Similar removals occurred at the Whitehead Institute, McGovern Institute, Koch Institute, and the Biology Department. Our research for the updated dataset confirmed this broadly: many positions cataloged in 2024 carried detailed job descriptions reflecting MIT’s embrace of DEI, but equivalent transparency was commonly absent for personnel identified in 2026.

Another example of program rebranding was the August 2025 merger of the Office of Minority Education (OME) and the Undergraduate Advising Center’s advising and student belonging function into a newly named Office of Academic Community, Empowerment, and Success (OACES). This allowed MIT to rebrand an office that raised legal red flags under the Trump administration’s interpretation of civil rights law, while expanding its stated scope—a textbook illustration of the treadmill at work. Moreover, it appears that a substantial amount of current successor DEI/SAPBAC content is now available only on MIT’s password-protected sites. We cannot determine how much activity continues behind the reduced public footprint; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Third and most importantly, the data show that approximately 85% of the roughly 34 full-time ICEO professionals listed on the MIT website as of April 30, 2024 remained employed at MIT in early 2026, typically in retitled positions. The ICEO was shut down in May 2025 with 14 staff remaining, 11 of whom appear to still be employed at MIT in redeployed roles. Across the Institute the new vocabulary is revealing: positions formerly titled “DEI Officer” or “DEIB (Belonging) Officer” have become “Community Building and Student Engagement Officer,” “Outreach and Community Engagement Program Director,” or “Wellbeing and Belonging” associate or assistant dean. WEBS, the new label has replaced BAC, just as BAC replaced DEI in 2022, and just as Pinker’s treadmill would predict. If one believes that personnel is policy, it is fair to ask what has fundamentally changed.

In Conclusion

Our conclusion is clear: the basic infrastructure for a resurrection of identitarian DEI programs remains in place at MIT in 2026, albeit on a smaller scale than at its 2024 peak. About half the personnel who carried out DEI/BAC functions at MIT remain employed at the Institute, many under different titles but with responsibilities that appear closely analogous to those of the peak DEI era. Given the right political climate, it would not be difficult for MIT to revive identitarian-driven DEI.

Questions regarding the purpose and results of these programs are now sharpened by fiscal reality. MIT faces a roughly $300 million annual funding shortfall attributable in part to Trump administration interventions, and has already instituted hiring freezes and budget cuts. Under these circumstances, a hard look at the costs and measurable benefits of WEBS and its predecessor programs is not merely an academic exercise. The programs have been formally decentralized, with WEBS responsibilities dispersed to local “community” units across the Institute—making aggregate cost measurements all the more challenging. The core questions posed in our original work of mid-2024 remain: Are WEBS initiatives actually making the campus more welcoming for members of the MIT community? Can actual costs be compiled in light of decentralization? And at a time of fiscal stringency, what are these people accomplishing that justifies this expenditure?

Thank you for reading our DEI at MIT series. Please visit MIT Alumni for Accountability for full details on methodology and data for 2024 and 2026. We invite you to dive into the numbers and welcome your comments on the numbers or any further information you have that could inform our analysis.

Adam Szetela describes the culture war battles in the publishing industry in That Book is Dangerous!, published by the MIT Press. He describes how the Young Adult (YA) space especially has been the site of several spectacular blowups over language, tone, and representation, causing multiple authors to cancel their own publications and issue groveling apologies to escape the merciless glare of Goodreads and Twitter cancellation campaigns.

Szetela gives us several of these accounts, but is more interested in unwinding the whys of this phenomenon. What are the structural problems this movement is trying to solve? What are the incentives for participation? How do these incentives affect the outward behavior of the participants? His patience walking us through the answers to these questions elevates That Book is Dangerous! from a standard culture war blow-by-blow to a title that helps unlock some of the confounding realities of our cultural moment.

Szetela focuses significantly but not exclusively on YA publishing. A few decades ago, it faced a real structural problem: the characters in its books were far less diverse than the rest of the country. From the desire for more diverse representation flowed the desire for more diverse authors, and from there the desire to make sure that nonwhite and LGBTQ characters were presented thoughtfully.

Representation dramatically improved, but in the process some unproductive practices became entrenched. Frequent are the accounts of non-white authors who bristle at the race essentialism of the industry, told that their voices aren’t “authentic” because they don’t fit into neatly defined notions of how certain characters should talk and behave.

Also unproductive is the hardening of the mindset that writers should not write characters of different ethnicities or gender identities, and the ruthless policing of those who do.1 One notable example is the case of black and queer YA author Kosoko Jackson, who canceled the publication of his novel A Place for Wolves following a backlash over, among other things, the fact that his novel, a same-sex romance set during the Kosovo war, featured an ethnic Albanian Muslim as its villain.

Ironically, only months earlier, Jackson had happily participated in a pile-on campaign targeting another YA author, Amelie Wen Zhao, who pulled publication of her book Blood Heir after online critics (nearly all of whom, it needn’t be said, hadn’t seen the advance text) savaged the book and the author as anti-black on the basis of the book’s treatment of one racially ambiguous character. That Zhao, a Chinese immigrant, intended the book as a critique of human trafficking in Asia carried no weight.2

These episodes happen because they take place in a system whose participants know they won’t be punished, and may in fact be rewarded, for even deplorable behavior. Sensitivity readers employed by the major publishing houses, of course, are incentivized to find insensitive speech or characterizations simply by virtue of the fact that they’re paid to do so. What’s more, publishers are open about how they’ve outsourced this work to their most extreme flank. Just look at this interview between the author and a major publishing house president:

The sensitivity readers that we're employing are at the very, very, very farthest edges of the cultural police. They are over-vigilant to a large degree. I've seen some editors push back hard against what they recommend. Nevertheless, it's great to have that. It's great to have the most extreme possible reaction to a book, which catches even the most apparently neutral points and casts a severe light on them.

Szetela rightly notes that this would be considered insane in any other industry: “One would not expect the World Health Organization to consult QAnon activists before they publish a report about vaccines.” Further, publishers should stop listening to angry people on the internet, as they mistake the rantings of a tiny minority for popular opinion and misalign their priorities as a result.

But that’s easier said than done, given the economics of the field. Space allotted for book reviews in traditional publications has dwindled, and publishers need the scale Amazon can provide after its decimation of the traditional retail model. Amazon, incidentally, owns Goodreads, the launchpad of so many unhinged cancellation campaigns against wrongthinking books. The influencers and BookTok-ers, alas, aren’t going anywhere.

Readers of Szetela’s book, who are likely not in the target audience of the YA publishers, might wonder why they should care. For starters, there’s plenty of evidence that this toxic discourse has filtered up into the world of publishing at large, as the meltdown over Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt shows.

Further, this dynamic replicated across a number of industries and its cumulative effect on our political culture is significant. When publishing was entering its “sensitivity era,” universities were becoming more censorious and conformist places, with newsrooms and major nonprofits coming apart as insubordinate, social justice-minded younger staff turned the power dynamics upside-down, leaving upper management terrified of their underlings. Public trust in these institutions cratered.

A related book is Musa al-Gharbi’s excellent We Have Never Been Woke, with publishing professionals as a prime example of “symbolic capitalists.” The social and cultural capital that accrues to their positions gives them a disproportionate influence over our cultural language and production.3

In his Washington Post review, Szetela zeroed in on one of the key aspects of the “Great Awokenings” al-Gharbi chronicles: “[T]hey do little or nothing for the marginalized people they are supposed to benefit. As the historical record shows, they mostly serve to create jobs, scholarships and other opportunities for symbolic capitalists.”

This appears to be Szetela’s greatest frustration with the publishing industry. More diverse representation in literature is an objective good, but when writers of color are aiding cancellation campaigns against other writers of color, who exactly is this system serving?

I’m curious to discuss with Szetela how the political economy of the sensitivity era changed in the year since That Book is Dangerous! was published. The political backlash against the excesses of the post-George Floyd protests was already well underway at the time of its writing, with book bans proliferating at state houses around the country. Yet the industry is presented as one in strange denial about the unpopularity of its worst excesses. Publishing houses, Szetela reports, responded to cancellations and social media meltdowns not by disempowering the loudest and most intolerant voices, but by doubling down. More publishers have required authors to hire sensitivity readers before publication, and others have added morals clauses to their writer contracts.

In 2024, Donald Trump ran explicitly against higher education, which made an easy target of itself with out-of-control protests and encampments that proliferated after the October 7th attacks on Israel. The subsequent years have been far from great for higher education, but many universities have at least used it as an opportunity to shed some of their more divisive practices. The publishing industry, however, does not loom nearly as large in the public consciousness, it’s not clear what would induce it to rid itself of some of these practices that effectively narrow the range of acceptable thought. Even the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins plays along, because, at least for the moment, it remains good business to do so.

What would it take for this to stop being good business? I look forward to hearing Adam’s thoughts, and hope you’ll join the discussion.

MIT is, by most measures, the world’s leading STEM university. Its graduates have founded companies, led agencies, and won Nobel Prizes in numbers that would be remarkable for an institution ten times its size. But ask most MIT alumni how the Institute is actually governed—who makes the decisions that shape its direction, its faculty, its mission—and you’re likely to get a blank stare. Alumni might name individuals with specific titles, but governance is more than the authority of individuals: it also depends on the organizational structures in which they operate. That gap between pride in MIT and understanding of how it works is what this series sets out to close. Does MIT’s governance help explain its exceptionalism or is it simply a necessary back-office function that runs quietly in the background?

How Universities Came to Be Governed the Way They Are

Unlike European models, whereby the students or the faculty governed the university, American colonial colleges such as Harvard (1636) and Yale (1701) were governed by external boards of trustees, appointed by legislatures or religious bodies, and by powerful presidents who wielded authority over what were in effect employee faculties. This model reflected the practical needs of patronage: someone had to hold the land, manage the endowment, and answer to the donors. American higher education arrived with trustees firmly in charge.

That began to change in the late 19th century. The rise of the research university, pioneered by Johns Hopkins in 1876 and rapidly adopted by Harvard, Yale, Michigan, and others, brought the European model of combining faculty-led education and research to American shores. As universities grew more complex and faculty became genuine research experts rather than generalist tutors, the intellectual case for faculty self-governance strengthened considerably.

The Doctrine of Shared Governance

The model of shared governance between trustees and faculty strengthened with the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915, in part as a response to a series of high-profile faculty dismissals by trustees acting unilaterally. Its 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure made a sweeping claim: faculty are not ordinary employees but professionals analogous to doctors and lawyers whose expertise in the creation and transmission of knowledge requires substantial autonomy.1 The Declaration held that the university, “is not an ordinary business venture, and academic teaching is not a purely private employment.” Faculty are trustees of knowledge on behalf of society, not mere agents of the boards that fund the institution.

By mid-century, the doctrine had matured into the canonical framework that most American universities still claim to follow. The 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, co-produced by the AAUP, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards, mapped a “shared governance” structure with three principal actors.2 Governing boards hold fiduciary authority over the institution. Administrations provide day-to-day executive leadership. And faculty hold primary responsibility for curriculum, research, faculty appointments, and related academic matters, with the understanding that the board and administration should override faculty judgment in educational decisions, “only in rare instances and for compelling reasons which should be stated in detail.”

This three-part framework of board, administration, and faculty remains the template for governance at virtually every major American research university, including MIT.

How MIT Is Governed: The High-Level View

The MIT Corporation is the Institute’s board of trustees and ultimate governing authority. It holds legal and fiduciary responsibility for MIT, approves major strategic and financial decisions, appoints and oversees the President, and sets the boundaries within which the administration and faculty operate. Its members include life members, term members, alumni nominees, and several ex officio positions including three officers of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The Administration is led by the President, who serves as MIT’s chief executive officer and the Corporation’s delegate for day-to-day leadership. The two most senior academic officers, the Provost and the Chancellor, report directly to the President. The Provost serves as chief academic and budget officer overseeing the deans of MIT’s five Schools and one College. The Chancellor focuses on student life, cross-Institute initiatives, and strategic planning. A growing tier of vice presidents, vice provosts, and deans completes the administrative structure.

The Faculty holds primary responsibility for MIT’s academic mission—the curriculum, standards for degrees, and quality of instruction and research. Faculty participate in governance through a system of standing committees and open monthly faculty meetings at which any faculty member may speak and vote directly.

Governance as a Lens on Excellence

Shared governance as an ideal rests on a sensible premise: the people with the most at stake in an institution’s long-term success—its trustees, academic leaders, and faculty—should have meaningful authority in the decisions that fall within their respective expertise and responsibility. Done well, it produces institutions with long time horizons, genuine academic quality, and a built-in resistance to the short-term fads and political pressures that can distort lesser organizations.

But shared governance can be captured, gamed, or simply allowed to atrophy. Trustees who defer too readily to management, administrators who accumulate authority at the expense of faculty, and faculty who disengage from governance processes are pathologies observable at real universities today, including MIT. In an era when universities across the country are under pressure politically, financially, and culturally, the quality of MIT’s governance matters even more. The articles that follow will examine each of the three principal actors in that governance system in detail. The goal is not to celebrate MIT’s governance uncritically nor to indict it. It is simply to understand it, because for those who love this institution, understanding how it works is the beginning of ensuring it works well.

The second article in this series examines the MIT Corporation, its composition, structure, and what makes it unusual among the governing boards of major research universities.

June is an interesting month, in that, much like May, all over the country colleges and universities are graduating hundreds of thousands of kids, around age 22 or so, and dumping them into the economy with some small level of prospect for actual paid work.

To celebrate the achievement of enough college credits accumulated to get an actual degree, value notwithstanding, we have “graduation ceremonies.” In some of those cases—most, I imagine—there is a guest speaker who comes to the ceremony and talks for a while about something or other.

I don’t actually recall who spoke at the graduation for my college degree in 1973. Reading those words, I felt obliged to research it, and quickly realized that the reason I forgot who it was had to do with the fact that it was the then-president of MIT, Jerome Wiesner. Wiesner did the speech every year then, although in recent years the role has switched to “invited celebrities.”

They don’t get an invited celebrity, however, to speak to entering freshmen, and I’m thinking that might be a good idea. Maybe a better idea, actually, at least if the celebrity has something to say. Because if I were a bigger celebrity, and some campus invited me to speak, I’d tell them, “Sure, but I’d rather speak to your incoming freshmen than your outgoing seniors.”

And I might say this:

“Dear MIT Entering Class of 2030,

“I was asked to speak at the commencement exercises in May, and politely declined the offer. I told the Deans that I had nothing helpful to share with the young people who had already graduated; they were a lost cause. But I also told them that I would be honored if they would switch my invitation so that I could address you all. I figured I could help a whole lot more then.

“I don’t have a long message, which is good, because that will get you more quickly into the cauldron that is a contemporary college education. And I promise not to use words like ‘milieu.’

“My theme for you is a motto that I hope many of you will adopt for the next four years, or however long it takes. That motto is this: ‘Conflict is the Architect of Our Lives.’

“For most of you, this is the first time you are responsible for the mundane things like getting to where you are supposed to eat on time; washing and drying your own clothes; telling yourself when to stop drinking; that sort of thing. Yet that is the easy part.

“The hardest part is the lesson that you can learn right now. Conflict is a regular part of life. Learn to deal with it. You’re going to find days when the dorm cafeteria is serving liver, or you can’t figure out why they scheduled you with back to back classes on opposite sides of the campus, or you don’t get a bid from the fraternity or sorority you wanted to join the most.

“I’m here to tell you that the same thing happens after you graduate. Your spouse may put something on the table for dinner you don’t like. Your company transfers you to North Dakota (or worse, California—have you seen the taxes there?). You don’t make the company softball team. And those are the trivial things.

“You probably don’t think college is going to teach you any of that, and you would be wrong. If you adopt the motto I gave you, it will all make sense. You can react to every little annoyance or inconvenience on campus by looking for the nearest ‘safe space,’ and there may be one. But you are simply putting off a lesson that will get learned eventually if you do.

“Every single one of those issues is a conflict—I was hungry but they gave me something I hate (apologies to those among you who actually like liver). And how you learn to deal with things as trivial as that is how you will learn to go out with a shiny new degree in four years and face the real world.

“Every conflict grants you a spectrum of options. You can fight—physically, in some cases. You can work to change the underlying reasons for whatever happened you did not like. Or you can tolerate it with a thicker skin. You can mobilize classmates.

“I want you to go home tonight, back to your dorm room, and find someone there you have not yet met. Ask them what Sutton was talking about when he said ‘conflict was an architect.’ And keep doing that until you find someone whose interpretation of my words was different from your own. Ask that person why he or she believes they’re right and you’re wrong.

“And while they’re explaining, you shut your mouth and listen. Try to understand what they’re saying and, if you don’t understand, ask them to help you understand. Then try to make your case as to why you felt the way you did.

“When you’re done, you will understand. You will understand that we grow, not by retreating into a cocoon where nothing ever goes wrong for us and no one ever disagrees with us, but by learning to deal with situations when they don’t break our way.

“Those of you who go on to study physiology, the science of how the body works, will learn that bones grow in a peculiar manner, where the ends are roughened and the little fibrils push out to make longer bone tissue. We are the same. We grow as human beings through every situation that raises a conflict for us.

“If we are mature, we learn to assess our options in each conflict and make a decision from that spectrum of options. If the option fails, we try another the next time a similar conflict ensues. And those situations, and our responses, collectively create the mature version of who you are.

“Those conflicts build you. They are the architects of the person you become. And now, as you begin your college years, you can make the first wise choice, which is to treat every conflict as a chance to grow and to learn. Do not avoid the conflict, embrace it. Consider your options and relish the fact that God gave you the power to make choices.

“Conflict is the architect of your lives. For Heaven’s sake, do not avoid conflict, or retreat into a cocoon, even if the college provides one for you. For if you embrace conflict, you will come out in four years actually able to understand that the world is made up of it, and you’ll be more than prepared to deal with it. And you’ll be admired for your rational disposition.

“And you will be a successful human being, which is all I can hope for. Thank you for listening.”

In today’s world, social media has effectively become our public square. If we care about the health of our constitutional republic, then protecting open discourse on these platforms is essential. Yet an alarming pattern is emerging across Big Tech regarding the potential influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). We looked at X in a revealing case study of CCP influence on discourse in the United States.

The United States is engaged in an intensifying strategic competition with China. The outcome will shape whether the global order leans toward democratic governance or authoritarian control. In that context, free and open discussion about China is not just a matter of principle; it is a matter of national interest. Without honest public discourse, it becomes far harder to craft effective policies to counter real-world threats.

I organize a news and politics discussion group with thousands of Chinese Americans and Chinese diaspora in the United States called MashongUSA. Several of us Chinese immigrant professionals, researchers, scientists, and engineers were interested in testing the perception that our social media content was being shadow banned. (See the MIT Uncanceled Substack post on the pressures from the CCP that Chinese students may face.)

The question we sought to test is whether X allows meaningful criticism of China. At first glance, the answer seems to be yes. Users who criticize the Chinese government’s treatment of its own citizens in China often receive normal or even strong engagement. But a different pattern emerges when the focus shifts to the CCP’s activities inside the United States.

A number of us who are focused on immigrant assimilation and civic integration have observed that posts exposing CCP operations in the United States, often referred to as the United Front (UF), consistently receive reduced visibility. The United Front has been described by Chinese leadership as a core strategic tool alongside military and economic power. The purpose ranges from traditional intelligence gathering to influence-building, network cultivation, and long-term positioning within foreign societies. These efforts can extend down into local communities, using a mix of incentives such as money, power and sex.

To test our theory that the UF is manipulating X to shadow ban immigrant communities in America, we conducted a simple comparative analysis. We tracked 500 posts from 10 accounts we identified as “suspicious”, each contributing 50 posts between May 1 and July 11, 2025 that frequently echoed narratives aligned with CCP messaging while presenting themselves as pro-democracy. We compared them with 500 posts from 10 accounts that openly discuss CCP influence and UF activities, identified as “non-UF aligned” accounts.

The data indicate that accounts raising awareness of UF-related operations received significantly lower visibility. Despite having fewer than half the followers, the suspicious accounts generated eighteen times more views relative to their follower base and eight times more views per post. Here’s the breakdown:

Views per Follower

• Suspicious Accounts (red bars): 569,600 followers, 75,973,600 views, or about 133 views per follower

• Non-UF Aligned Accounts (blue bars): 1,242,900 followers, 9,064,892 views, or about 7 views per follower

Views per Post

• Suspicious Accounts: About 151,947 views/post

• Non-UF Aligned Accounts: About 18,130 views/post

When comparing average and median views per follower, the 10 suspicious accounts (labeled as S) overwhelmingly outperformed the 10 non-UF aligned accounts (labeled as NUF). The disparity we uncovered in our limited analysis was worse than we thought at the time we set out to test our hypothesis.

We also looked at anecdotal evidence that reinforces the observed pattern. Some users of the non-aligned accounts have reported anecdotally that their original posts were copied word-for-word by other accounts that appear to be aligned with CCP narratives. Strikingly, these copycat accounts, often smaller than the accounts they are copying from, received dramatically higher engagement. In one case, a duplicated post reached over half a million views, while the original barely crossed 1,000.

Another example involved Grok, the AI system affiliated with X. We asked Grok to enhance a World War II-era photograph. Instead of simply improving the image quality, the system replaced the Kuomintang flag, the CCP’s rival at the time, with a CCP flag that did not even exist yet. In effect, the tool appeared to rewrite history in a way that aligns with CCP narratives, raising serious concerns about potential bias or systemic vulnerabilities within both X and Grok.

Our analysis points to a troubling conclusion: X may not be functioning as a truly open platform. While more robust analysis is necessary—such as to examine differences in retweeting rates that may be otherwise increasing amplification—our results suggest a substantial difference in reach that is difficult to explain without considering the role of algorithmic amplification or suppression. Content that critically examines the Chinese government’s activities on U.S. soil appears to face reduced visibility, while CCP-aligned content is widely amplified. X may be inadvertently or otherwise contributing to the growing issue of CCP influence within the United States.

“Lydia” Yang Liu (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Ph.D. in biomedical research, cell and developmental biology) is a scientist turned writer and blogger with 10 years of community organizing experience focused on helping immigrants integrate into American life.

Figure 1: Approximate distribution of subjects currently, TFUAP Report

On May 20th, as MIT was focused on graduation and most students were occupied with their summer plans, the Task Force on the Undergraduate Academic Program (TFUAP) released its final report, a proposal to change the undergraduate curriculum. The final was issued after taking comments on the draft released in February. The next step will be for faculty to vote on it at some point and if accepted, would be applied to the incoming 2028 or 2029 class.

The last time MIT critically examined its core undergraduate curriculum was in 1965. As with any major change, there’s controversy among the faculty. Some major changes include removing the Institute lab requirement; replacing a semester of physics with Probability, Statistics, and Machine Learning (PSM); eliminating the Restricted Electives in Science and Technology; adjusting the humanities requirements to ensure a focus on “values, ethics, and responsibility;” and adding a “teamwork intensive” requirement. I’m not going to attempt to summarize adequately what takes the task force 114 pages to explain, but I will offer some personal thoughts and encourage the larger alumni community to share theirs with MIT.

Figure 2: Approximate distribution of subjects in the proposal

My first thought is that change is good. A curriculum review is probably well overdue, as the current one is older than I. However, I must admit that my first reaction was suspicion. Having observed a decade or more of MIT going woke and implementing an ideologically charged Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bureaucracy, I’m worried about the increasing influence of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) on what should be a STEM-focused institution, enhanced by the humanities but not driven by them. What does it mean that at least one subject must be designated as having a “moral and civic perspective”? Having observed some questionable moral, ethical, and civic-minded behavior out of prominent SHASS faculty, forgive me if I don’t trust them to determine what is moral and civic.

And that’s coming from the rare bird that I am: an MIT alumna with a degree from SHASS, Course 17. (Extra points to you if you knew without looking that that’s political science.) I fell into political science after two years of meeting every requirement of the core MIT science and math curriculum only to determine that engineering was not for me. Policy is what drives me, not engineering. I’ve spent a career in energy and natural resource policy as a practicing political scientist, certainly not a typical path. But my MIT education has served me well, as policy without hard scientific and economic evidence is driven by emotion and ill-reflective of “moral and civic” perspectives. Besides learning how to write voluminous content to deadline, I learned how to apply statistics and use critical thinking in the policy sphere, something that’s often lacking in American public policy.

If I knew I was going to end up at political science, perhaps I would have chosen another school, but sometimes we don’t take the most direct path. I do know that my MIT core curriculum, my research in the Defense and Arms Control Studies Program, and, at the time, the quantitatively focused political science degree gave me the critical thinking skills needed to be successful.

I’m also concerned about the reduction in the physics requirement. While I far from enjoyed my academic year of physics at MIT, I would be less well equipped today without it. Despite my SHASS degree, I am firmly committed to MIT as the premiere science and engineering university in the world, period. The humanities and social sciences are designed to ensure undergraduates have a well-rounded education, but they are not the primary driver of MIT, nor should they ever be. We’ve seen ideologically driven race, gender, and other “studies” academics across the country without a similar strong background in physics, math, and science try to bully the sciences into accepting mediocrity. We should guard against any such incursions, especially at MIT.

All of which is to say that I’m keeping an open mind now as I digest the document, but I have a healthy dose of skepticism. Stay tuned to MIT Uncanceled for further thoughts on the proposed curriculum and information about the faculty vote as it’s announced.

Last month, the Academic Freedom Alliance issued guidance highlighting the threat that Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) pose to the freedom to conduct research at colleges and universities.

If you’re outside academia, you may not have even heard of IRBs (sometimes called Human Subjects Committees). But they wield consequential power over what research is pursued in our truth-seeking institutions, and as a result the knowledge the wider public gets to have and benefit from. Through overreach and mission creep, the arbitrary and often viewpoint-discriminatory processes employed by IRBs can too easily be used to suppress unpopular research, preventing consequential and potentially groundbreaking scientific endeavors from getting off the ground.

What is an IRB, and why do they exist?

An IRB is a committee at a college or university that reviews and approves any kind of research involving human subjects. The idea is straightforward: the IRB wants to make sure that nobody is harmed and that participants know what they’re signing up for when participating in a study.

If this sounds reasonable, that’s because it is. In fact, IRBs were established by federal directives in the U.S. after major ethical abuses in research. One of the most infamous was the untreated syphilis study at Tuskegee between 1932 and 1972, in which the U.S. government studied the effects of syphilis on black men for decades without treating them — or even telling them what disease they had.

In 1979, the federal government issued the Belmont Report, which laid out three core principles for ethical research:

1. Respect for persons: People must give informed consent.

2. Beneficence: The benefits of research must be weighed against the risks.

3. Justice: The burdens and benefits of research should be shared fairly.

These reforms also drew on earlier research ethics principles reflected in the Nuremberg Code, which were written in the aftermath of the Holocaust and in response to the medical atrocities committed by Nazi doctors.

IRBs, then, became an oversight mechanism for enforcing these principles at the local institutional level. Today, any institution conducting federally regulated human subjects research is required to have an IRB, and many other institutions voluntarily maintain similar review bodies.

These safeguards serve a vital purpose. No one wants a return to the days when researchers could experiment on people without their knowledge or consent, or inflict lasting harm on participants just to attain some desired research data.

So, what went wrong?

Why IRBs have become a problem

Like many well-intentioned oversight mechanisms, over time a significant number of IRBs have become object lessons in scope creep and unchecked authority.

What started as a system for protecting people from genuine physical and psychological harm has, at many institutions, ballooned into a bureaucratic apparatus that can delay, distort, or even derail research — sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with participant safety.

For example, many IRBs now have authority over research that poses no meaningful risk to participants. Simple surveys, or in some cases even the analysis of public records, routinely face scrutiny similar to that received by far riskier research. Aspects of studies that wouldn’t have warranted a second look a decade ago are now subject to intense review at our major institutions. In effect, bureaucratic hurdles are slowing or preventing research that has no meaningful risk of harm.

This has led some to argue that IRBs “subject researchers to petty tyranny,” and others to claim that they “have become nationwide instruments for implementing censorship” because of their ability to operate as bureaucratic gatekeepers: IRBs have the power to permit research that meets their satisfaction, and suppress data and prohibit publication for research that doesn’t. This is particularly true on hot-button, controversial issues.

Funnily enough, the expanding scope of IRBs over time may in part be explainable by more ethical research being conducted at colleges and universities.

In one of several studies, psychology professor David Levari and his colleagues asked participants to play the role of an IRB reviewer. Participants read a series of research proposals and then decided whether each should be approved or rejected. With the obvious caveat that these clearly weren’t trained IRB reviewers, Levari found that as the prevalence of genuinely unethical research proposals decreased over time, reviewers did not start to rate fewer proposals as unethical. Rather, they started rejecting ethically ambiguous proposals that they would have approved earlier on. In other words, even as research practices improve, IRBs may keep finding problems by unconsciously lowering the bar for what counts as problematic.

People wielding hammers will always find more nails.

Needlessly expanding scope isn’t the only problem, however. IRBs can also be weaponized to suppress or stymie research on unpopular or hotly debated topics. As former IRB chairs Jessica Hehman and Catherine Salmon recount, there are many well-documented cases where IRB review processes have been used to thwart research for ideological reasons — or to simply protect an institution’s brand.

Consider the case of Elizabeth Loftus and Melvin Guyer. In the late 1990s, at the peak of the “Memory Wars” — the sudden popularity and then debate over the eventually-discredited practice of recovered memory therapy — Loftus and Guyer embarked on a pivotal investigation into a Jane Doe case they believed overstated proof of recovered traumatic memory. In turn, their articles and investigation provoked prolonged institutional retaliation.

A central actor in the retaliation, it turned out, was the University of Michigan IRB, whose chair drafted a confidential memo that was leveraged to target both Loftus and Guyar. Both researchers were eventually cleared, but in the three years of investigation they — and in particular, Loftus — were subjected to the seizure of research materials, lengthy misconduct investigations, and threats of professional sanction. The shadow of these events still lingers decades later.

IRBs in some cases also appear to look out for themselves and their institutions more than those they are actually charged with protecting. In studies that have surveyed the researchers themselves — federally-funded principle investigators in one, criminology researchers in others — about their views of IRBs, many reported perceiving that IRBs are more concerned about protecting themselves or the university from liability than actually protecting human subjects.

The problem isn’t altogether new either. Back in 1985, psychology professor Stephen Ceci and colleagues found tentative evidence that IRBs were more likely to block research on politically sensitive topics than similar research on less controversial topics. They argued that some IRBs were reacting not just to participant risk, but also to worries about what the research might imply politically or socially.

And that’s where the academic freedom issues begin: IRBs began drifting beyond protecting participants and toward policing ideas.

FIRE and the AFA’s proposed solutions to IRB overreach

FIRE researchers have also seen or personally experienced IRB overreach firsthand.

In one case, there was an almost year-long delay by an IRB for a project looking at public records. We have also seen delays or punitive audits of benign survey research which involved asking faculty about their views on free speech and related topics.

FIRE researchers have also been on the receiving end of legal threats from faculty, as well as frivolous ethics complaints submitted by faculty to their IRBs. Just to give you a sense of how far IRB overreach can extend, these complaints were filed during the data collection phase, before anything was even analyzed. The goal was to suppress research — specifically, research questions — that these faculty members disagreed with, before any conclusions or findings could be reported.

If these patterns sound familiar, they should. IRB overreach is an integral part of what Greg and his Canceling of the American Mind co-author Rikki Schlott have referred to as the Conformity Gauntlet: the long series of ideological hurdles that independent-minded academics face at every stage of their careers, from graduate school admissions to tenure review. Central players in the Conformity Gauntlet, of course, are DEI statements, bias response teams, and secret disciplinary hearings. As we have seen, IRBs, too, can be captured by ideology and used as a checkpoint where nonconformist research or researchers can be pressured or silenced. No single hurdle is insurmountable, but when combined these barriers powerfully incentivize conformity and disincentivize open and fearless inquiry — the very thing universities should exist to protect.

FIRE has previously endorsed IRB reforms aimed at protecting academic freedom by guarding against this type of overreach. For example, when we discussed potential ways the National Institutes of Health could protect academic freedom through its grant agreements, we wrote:

NIH could help prevent the abuse of Institutional Review Boards. When IRB review is appropriate for an NIH-funded project, NIH could require that review be limited to the standards laid out in the gold-standard Belmont Report. Additionally, it could create a reporting system for abuse of IRB processes to suppress, or delay beyond reasonable timeframes, ethical research, or violate academic freedom.

The AFA’s new guidance goes further than this, endorsing ten reforms from a set of principles called the Mudd Code. Many of these proposals are similar to what FIRE has recommended in the past, and include things like transparency requirements, which would make it easier to identify if viewpoint discrimination had taken place; clarity on risk thresholds; clarification that IRB approval is not necessary for the re-evaluation of existing science; and the addition of a science advocate to the composition of IRBs themselves.

These reforms are aimed at preserving the important role of ensuring safe and ethical research practices, while also guarding against the kind of ideological and bureaucratic overreach that can too easily be used to suppress unpopular research.

While some of the AFA and Mudd Code recommendations fall outside FIRE’s narrow scope as a free-speech watchdog, we applaud them for bringing light to the threat that IRBs can pose to academic freedom. We also commend them for proposing concrete, principled reforms to address it.

Our institutions of higher education are places where difficult, groundbreaking, and important research should be done. That requires asking questions and dealing with subjects that might be uncomfortable and controversial. It also means grappling with results that may be politically or ideologically inconvenient. The truth remains true regardless of our concerns, and if we fail to discover it we will be compromising much more than we think.

Controversy arose recently when University of Michigan faculty president Derek Peterson veered from his pre-submitted remarks for the UM commencement exercises to pay special tribute to the university’s pro-Palestinian activists. He also recounted the accomplishments of trailblazing students and faculty from years past and exhorted the crowd to “[s]ing for the pro-Palestinian student activists who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”

This set off a whirlwind of controversy and compelled UM president Domenico Grasso to apologize to the community for the divisiveness, saying that Peterson, “deviated from the remarks he had shared before the ceremony” and that they, “were inappropriate and do not represent our institutional position.” Peterson contested this characterization in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the American Association of University Professors issued a statement saying that Peterson’s remarks were protected by his academic freedom.

I’m not so sure about the academic freedom argument here; I think a standard First Amendment defense is far more apt in the circumstance. In any event, I expect this controversy to be fairly short-lived. Calls for the professor to face employment consequences would likely violate his First Amendment rights, and I doubt UM will pursue them. (If they do, he should give my old employer a ring.)

The whole episode calls to mind a controversy at MIT’s commencement last year, when MIT’s student speaker diverted from her submitted remarks—much more substantially than Peterson—to condemn Israel and criticize MIT for its supposed complicity in Israel’s “genocide” of the Palestinian people. MIT responded by not only stripping her of her ceremonial duties at the next day’s undergraduate exercises, but by banning her from attending them as well. That raised some tricky questions, though ultimately we at the MIT Free Speech Alliance concluded MIT was within its rights to take the action it did.

We unpacked the incident and MIT’s response in a statement posted to our website in June 2025. We reprint the statement in full below. For another recent perspective on this issue, you can check out John Tomasi and Jeffrey Flier’s editorial in The Boston Globe.

MIT’s Commencement Controversy, and the Institute’s Right to Control its own Forums

MIT recently found itself at the center of a national controversy stemming from its recent commencement. After undergraduate class president Megha Vemuri veered from her approved remarks to deliver a speech condemning Israel and accusing MIT of complicity in a genocide of the Palestinian people at the all-university OneMIT Commencement ceremony, MIT stripped her of her role in the next day’s undergraduate graduation ceremony and barred her from attending. This turn of events understandably raised questions about free speech and censorship. In the end, however, MIT was within its rights to take the action it did, albeit with some questions and considerations it should take into account in the future.

As has been widely reported, Vemuri’s remarks include declarations that, “the MIT community that I know would never tolerate a genocide” as well as charges that “[w]e are watching Israel try to wipe Palestine off of the earth, and it’s a shame that MIT is a part of it.”

Speaking directly afterward, MIT President Sally Kornbluth mostly ignored the divisive nature of Vemuri’s remarks. Shortly following the ceremony, however, MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles informed Vemuri that she was barred from the next day’s undergraduate graduation exercises. The Boston Globe wrote:

“Participation in Commencement activities is a privilege,” Nobles wrote in the email, which was obtained by the Globe. “You deliberately and repeatedly misled Commencement organizers. While we acknowledge your right to free expression, your decision to lead a protest from the stage, disrupting an important institute ceremony, was a violation of MIT’s time, place and manner rules for campus expression.”

With Vemuri barred from the undergraduate ceremony, the remarks she was scheduled to deliver were instead delivered by the class’s vice president.

MIT’s response to Vemuri’s speech has provoked a range of reactions from the community, some critical of the university, others critical of Vemuri, with yet others calling for disciplinary action against the speaker. Vemuri, for her part, accepted the result (“I see no need for me to walk across the stage of an institution that is complicit in this genocide,” CNN reports her saying) while criticizing the action as overkill.

There are certainly circumstances in which Vemuri’s charge would be correct. Had MIT approved her speech as delivered, or had MIT maintained a general practice of not vetting the text of student remarks, Vemuri would have quite strong grounds for complaint. Charges of hypocrisy against MIT would be warranted, and the Institute would have no one to blame but itself for any backlash.

That’s not the case at MIT, however, and likely not at most institutions. Commencement exercises are in significant part the university’s own expression, and they are tightly stage managed as such, hence Chancellor Nobles’ criticism that Vemuri “deliberately and repeatedly” misled MIT over the content of her remarks. While there is a clear right at MIT to communicate the message Vemuri conveyed to students in nearly any other circumstance, there is no corresponding right to be granted a platform at MIT’s commencement, even if the platform is customarily given by virtue of your position in the class. MIT is free to attach strings to the privilege, and to withdraw those privileges to those who refuse to hold up their end of the agreement.

A few notes bear mentioning. First, while attention has focused in particular on Vemuri’s anti-Israel message, the viewpoint of her speech should ultimately be immaterial to MIT’s response. Had Vemuri used her address to advocate for the destruction of Hamas and the open-ended occupation of Palestine, criticism would have come from the opposite direction, but the fundamentals would have been the same. The issue is not the views being expressed; it’s the speaker misleading the institute and exploiting their privileged position to deliver a political broadside at a traditional university ceremony. MIT cannot premise its actions here on the speakers’ views if it wishes to apply its policies in a principled and consistent manner.

Second, we note that MIT framed its action against Vemuri as a response to her violating MIT’s rules on “time, place, and manner.” MIT’s guidelines, issued and revised largely in response to the large protests and demonstrations that were common at MIT after the October 7 attacks in Israel, have figured heavily in campus free speech controversies over the past two years, and we’ve commented on them frequently. Many protests and demonstrations, while politically charged, complied with MIT’s regulations. Others, such as the occupation of Lobby 7 and the encampment on the Kresge Oval, clearly did not.

Vemuri’s address is, on some level, an atypical application of these guidelines due to the unique nature of commencement. Nevertheless, it’s understandably MIT’s position that commencement is neither the time nor the place for a diatribe against Israel and a condemnation of the Institute. Vemuri’s address, at the least, violated the spirit of the regulations, and MIT had every right to strip her of her remaining duties in response. Barring Vemuri entirely from the undergraduate ceremony is potentially another matter. It’s not clear that MIT held this out as an explicit potential consequence to student speakers; if MIT wasn’t explicit about that before, it should be now.

What does seem clear, though, is that MIT judged this a sufficient enough violation that it could take the action it did without initiating the disciplinary process. This brings us to our final point: MIT has not apparently delayed the receipt of Vemuri’s degree, meaning that there is presumably no open disciplinary action against Vemuri and that she has graduated from the Institute. Many have criticized MIT for this, but that’s ultimately the university’s prerogative.

A contrasting example is how New York University responded to a similar controversy this spring, when a student speaker, similarly to Vemuri, deviated from his agreed-upon remarks to condemn the war in Gaza. Though his treatment of the subject was apparently briefer than Vemuri’s, NYU condemned his remarks, and a spokesman stated that “[t]he University is withholding his diploma while we pursue disciplinary actions.” Many have called on MIT to do the same, though it’s unclear the precise grounds on which NYU pursued its disciplinary charges.

There are lessons for MIT to learn for the future. If it wasn’t already clear about the potential consequences for flouting one’s role in its commencement proceedings, it should be now, and this outcome should be explicitly held out as a possibility for future participants. It should reaffirm its commitment to free expression in all other areas of university life, and enforce its time, place, and manner regulations fairly and consistently so as not to appear partial. It should examine those instances in which it failed to abide by its free speech obligations, such as with its wrongful suppression of the Written Revolution publication last year (a publication for which, incidentally, Megha Vemuri was one of the editors).

We don’t wish to see the range of acceptable opinion narrowed at MIT; opposition to that mindset, after all, is a major part of why MFSA was founded. Students have the right to criticize Israel and MIT, as well they should. But MIT also has the right to determine how it wants itself presented at its commencement, and we agree with MIT that its commencement ceremony is best seen as an opportunity to unite, rather than divide, the community.

Further reading:

This is the fourth in our multi-part series quantifying the impact of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) at MIT. The last article described how DEI reached its peak at MIT. Despite efforts to rebrand it to Belonging, Achievement, and Composition (BAC) and provide metrics, accountability and public transparency remained elusive. In this article, Steve Carhart, the spokesman for the ad hoc group MIT Alumni for Accountability (MAFA), describes how the group took a microscope to the spiderweb of programs, offices, officers, and committees to come up with their cost estimates.

The administration’s failure to provide clarity about the effect of DEI/BAC on free expression and institutional accountability prompted a number of us to come together as MAFA to conduct an independent analysis of the basic question: what had MIT built? What did this newer structure cost, how large was it, and was it being evaluated with the empirical rigor MIT ordinarily demands?

Because MIT is a private university, there was no line-item public budget identifying the cost of DEI/BAC programs. Nor were we able to find a public account of the resources devoted to the thirty-plus metrics announced during the BAC rebranding. We therefore undertook an analysis of MIT and its affiliates based on publicly available information, including MIT websites, job titles, public salary data, MIT’s reported benefits percentages, and MIT’s reported overhead rates.

The results are striking. Subject to the caveats inherent in any such estimate, we calculated that at the June 2024 peak, MIT devoted approximately 180 full time equivalent (FTE) personnel to DEI/BAC-related activity. On a personnel-cost basis, we estimate that MIT was spending approximately $36 million annually in mid-2024, as well as several million dollars devoted to programs, events, and financial support restricted to specific identity groups. We’ll provide our full details and methodology later in this series, but here are the basics.

MAFA began by reviewing public MIT and related websites, published articles, and social media posts to identify individuals whose stated job titles, committee assignments, office affiliations, or responsibilities indicated work connected to DEI/BAC functions. Full-time roles were counted as 1.0 FTE. Part-time roles, such as committee or working-group participation, were assigned fractional FTE values based on reasonable assumptions. For example, six individuals estimated to spend ten percent of their time on these activities would together count as 0.6 FTE.

We have greater confidence in the full-time estimates than in the fractional ones, for the obvious reason that committee time and partial administrative responsibility are harder to measure from public materials. But that limitation cuts both ways. Our estimates exclude the time of MIT’s most senior leaders, including the President, Provost, Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, and Executive Vice President, even though they plainly devoted time to these initiatives. We also exclude non-personnel costs such as dedicated spaces, events, awards, conferences, presentations, performances, and administrative support. Our estimates were not an attempt to inflate the numbers; if anything, they are probably conservative.

To quantify compensation, we used public salary estimates by category. Faculty salary estimates were drawn from public sources based on federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data and checked against broader private university salary data. Dean and administrator estimates were based on available public salary information, Glassdoor data, MIT salary-grade information where available, and inflation adjustments when later MIT salary data were no longer public. We then applied MIT’s own aggregate benefits and overhead figures to account for benefits, office space, technology, utilities, support, and institutional infrastructure. Construction of these financial estimates was a process roughly analogous to the work of securities analysts to project financial results of publicly traded companies. The full technical details of our personnel and cost analysis, including names of individuals identified and spreadsheets covering costs are forthcoming in this series.

These figures should be understood in context. They do not represent data regarding any individual’s actual salary. Nor do they imply that any particular employee, faculty member, administrator, fellow, researcher, or student is overpaid or performing work without value. Our interest is institutional, not personal. We sought to estimate the resources MIT allocated to programs whose aims, terminology, infrastructure, and public presentation have changed repeatedly but have persisted to a substantial degree.

The taxonomy we came up with (to be fully revealed in our next and last article) also revealed a central problem of accountability. The DEI/BAC structure had become large enough to influence many parts of MIT but not transparent enough to permit ordinary external evaluation. The Institute announced goals, metrics, values, and plans, but we could not locate a public cost-benefit analysis, a comprehensive budget, a clear accounting of personnel, or annual public reporting showing whether the many announced BAC metrics had been achieved. Our efforts included private inquiries to MIT administrators whose responsibilities would obviously include knowledge of such data if they did in fact exist. For an institution built on measurement, evidence, and disciplined evaluation, this absence was conspicuous.

Peak DEI/BAC thus consisted of more than staffing. It was an administrative ecosystem. It had central leadership, school-level implementation, local-unit action plans, committees, reporting expectations, climate surveys, training, student programming, faculty-facing initiatives, staff-facing initiatives, and public messaging. It changed the language through which MIT described community, achievement, fairness, and institutional responsibility. It shifted attention from equal access and equal treatment toward outcome-oriented concepts of representation, composition, belonging, and achievement.

Whether these efforts improved MIT is a separate question. MAFA’s initial task was more basic: to identify the structure, estimate its cost, and classify its components. Our analysis shows that DEI/BAC had become a major administrative undertaking, not a marginal activity. It also showed why alumni oversight was necessary in the absence of any visible accountability to the faculty, administration, or Corporation. When a program becomes this large, it should not depend on slogans, intentions, or moral confidence. It should be subject to the same standards MIT would apply to any other major institutional commitment: clarity of purpose, transparency of cost, rigorous evaluation, and demonstrated benefit.

In our last installment, we’ll discuss how the numbers changed from peak DEI/BAC in 2024 until today and give access to the full MAFA methodology and taxonomy.

Taxonomy of DEI/BAC at MIT as of June 2024

This is the third in our multi-part series quantifying the impact of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) at MIT. Our previous article, From Access to Outcomes, traced MIT’s movement from broad access and equal opportunity programs into a formal DEI structure. This commentary begins in the period 2020 to 2024, when MIT’s DEI project became an institutional priority, expanded rapidly, and reached what we describe as “Peak DEI/BAC” in June 2024. Steve Carhart is a spokesman for MIT Alumni for Accountability.

The era of peak DEI began in February 2020, when John H. Dozier became Institute Community and Equity Officer (ICEO) and was tasked with unifying MIT’s historically decentralized diversity efforts. By the summer of 2020, stoked by national protests, there emerged a passionate movement to address and end perceived racism in all institutions. Former MIT President Rafael Reif addressed these developments in campus-wide statements outlining his view of MIT’s responsibility to respond.

In the fall Dozier, Deputy ICEO Maryanne Kirkbride, and Associate Provost Tim Jamison convened a steering team of roughly three dozen faculty, staff, students, and postdocs. They reviewed earlier reports, solicited feedback, studied data, and surfaced 170 ideas for action before releasing a draft strategic action plan in the spring of 2021. The draft included training for admissions staff and hiring managers, recruitment and yield activities for underrepresented graduate students, alliances with minority-serving institutions and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), mentoring programs using culturally responsive training, recognition for DEI contributions, a Wellbeing Lab, equity reviews in staff promotion and salary, and revisions to tenure and promotion criteria.

The expansion was not merely conceptual. In June 2021, MIT announced six new assistant deans for DEI, one in each School and the Schwarzman College of Computing, with Dozier serving as a dotted-line supervisor. MIT described these hires as “critical mass” for community-building work and to implement the DEI Strategic Action Plan. Departments and other units followed with committees, coordinators, faculty equity officers, working groups, and planning exercises. The other key appointment in this period was the elevation of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) Dean Melissa Nobles to the position of Chancellor, MIT’s senior non-academic administrator reporting to Reif. In this role, she directed the implementation of DEI programs in most non-academic domains such as the Division of Student Life, Office of Graduate Education, Office of Minority Education, and the Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office.

Controversy

From the outset, DEI at MIT was controversial even before it became a target of outside political scrutiny. Initial objections came not only from skeptics who opposed DEI as ideology or bureaucracy, but also from DEI supporters who believed it wasn’t enough. Some student activists and steering-committee members argued that the draft plan had been weakened by senior administrators. They criticized what they saw as closed-door changes, fear of upsetting faculty and donors, lack of transparency, and a plan that risked becoming “mostly performative” unless leadership accepted stronger, centralized standards.

From the other direction, faculty such as Professor Yossi Sheffi argued that MIT’s DEI thinking should include political and viewpoint diversity, warning that elite campuses risked becoming intolerant monocultures that ignored the views of much of the country. He did not reject inclusion as such but challenged the prevailing DEI framework for excluding ideological difference and failing to cultivate genuine engagement across national divides. Alumni criticism was catalyzed by the cancelation of a lecture by University of Chicago Professor Dorian Abbot instigated by DEI advocates upset with his unrelated article critical of DEI. Alumni outrage over the restriction of Abbott’s academic freedom was a major factor leading to the formation of the MIT Free Speech Alliance.

The criticism from both directions showed that DEI at MIT was controversial before it became a target of outside political scrutiny. MIT’s DEI project was caught between competing criticisms: too ideological and bureaucratic for some, too weak and decentralized for others.

Rebranding

From its hockey-stick growth in 2020, it was evident that DEI was a multi-headed hydra with little accountability and no discernable metrics for measuring outcomes. Presumably to address this and previous criticism, MIT rebranded its DEI program. By September 2022 when the final version was released, it had morphed into the Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, and Composition (BAC). While emphasizing that diversity, equity, and inclusion remained “front and center,” MIT’s official explanation was that “belonging,” “achievement,” and “composition” better reflected how the Institute thought about its community and values and “made sense in a way that seemed more genuine, more like the language of MIT.”

The rebranding reflected the pressures surrounding the term “DEI”, which had become contested, and politically charged. The substance remained recognizably DEI, but the vocabulary became more compatible with MIT’s self-image as empirical, pragmatic, and excellence oriented. Importantly, over thirty metrics were introduced, making it possible to measure results and hold administrators accountable for results or lack thereof.

“Belonging” preserved the concern with campus climate, with proposed metrics including participation in inclusive leadership programs, Quality of Life Survey responses, and research projects focused on systemic racism. “Achievement” preserved the concern with group outcomes, with metrics focused on retention, graduation rates, qualifying-exam pass rates, post-graduation outcomes, promotion, tenure, and retention rates, and salary measures. “Composition” focused on improving representation among graduate students, postdocs, staff, and faculty, and on strengthening recruitment of underrepresented undergraduates.

Through 2023 and 2024, criticism intensified around bureaucracy, cost, ideological bias, academic freedom, and the failure of DEI/BAC institutions—ostensibly established to ensure that all members of the MIT community are respected—to address harassment of Jewish and Israeli faculty and students after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel. There was great confusion in the broader MIT community concerning what this entire enterprise was intended to achieve and how the very substantial resources were being expended.

In an attempt to fill in the information gap, we came together as an informal group, MIT Alumni for Accountability. In our next installment, we’ll look at how we analyzed DEI/BAC and estimated the costs. We’ll dive into the massed gadgets of Auximenes shown in our taxonomy diagram, above.

The independent MIT faculty organization, MIT Council on Academic Freedom (MITCAF), held an all-hands meeting in Building 21 on March 3, 2026. Wayne Stargardt, president of the independent alumni-led organization, MIT Free Speech Alliance (MFSA), was invited to address this meeting. This is the message he delivered.

It is a rare privilege for MIT graduates to address the MIT faculty. In fact, it almost never happens. So when I was invited to speak with you, I decided to use this rare occasion to deliver a message to the MIT faculty that is long overdue. I am speaking to you as a presumptive representative of all MIT graduates everywhere, and to you as representatives of the faculty.

Four and a half years ago, MIT cancelled the presentation of a visiting scholar at a prestigious, MIT-sponsored lecture. This cancellation was an egregious violation of MIT’s traditional values and norms, which have always emphasized respect and tolerance for alternative, heterodox viewpoints, and perspectives.

At the time, no official representatives of the MIT community upheld these values or spoke out against the cancellation. The MIT Corporation remained silent. The MIT administration not only failed to voice support for MIT’s values, but at the highest levels it condoned the cancellation. Both the academic leadership and the official leadership of the alumni not only failed to uphold MIT’s values, they led the gaslighting of their respective communities about why the lecture was cancelled.

Only the MIT faculty stood up, in public and in principle, to defend MIT’s values and protest the cancellation.

Just a day after your Chair attempted to gaslight you about the incident, 15% of you signed an open letter defending MIT’s traditional values of academic freedom and free expression and demanding that MIT adopt a written commitment to these values.

At the time, we independent alumni were just organizing MFSA and starting to voice our own protest over this violation of MIT’s values. We did not yet recognize how unique and significant this action by the MIT faculty was. With no faculty senate or other formal faculty body, the faculty organized themselves organically, from the bottom up, to protest the actions and messaging of the MIT leadership. This kind of clear grassroots defense of free expression almost never happens at other universities, and certainly not with such speed and resolve.

So today, as a presumptive representative of MIT graduates, speaking to you as representatives of that MIT faculty, I want to deliver one simple message: Thank you.

We alumni want to thank the faculty for their courage in taking a principled stand to uphold MIT’s foundational values of academic freedom, open inquiry, freedom of expression, and embrace of diverse viewpoints. Thank you for defending a key component of MIT’s exceptionalism.

Because of what you did, MIT’s values are now written down. Because of what you did, those values are now harder to ignore, easier to invoke, and clearer to the world. And because of what you did, MIT’s alumni know that when MIT’s core principles are at risk, the faculty of this Institute can and will stand up for them.

On behalf of the alumni: thank you for what you did then, and for what you are doing now, to keep MIT a place where free minds can do their best work.

Morris is a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at Yale. He is an alumnus of MIT, class of 1982. This is a slightly modified reprint of his piece—with his new, original artwork—that first appeared in the New York Daily News on April 24, 2022. It holds true today regarding the power of alumni to effectuate change at their universities.

Alumni possess wisdom and perspective that current students do not yet possess. They also have something that current students don’t: money that can be used to get the attention of university leaders. Sometimes alumni can make the greatest contribution to their alma maters by not contributing. For me, four decades after graduating from MIT, this is one of those times.

When did I first come to this realization? Volunteering for the alumni association at MIT a long time ago.

In 1979, I was a sophomore in college and highly susceptible to free pizza. The MIT Alumni Association (MITAA) suspected as much. They also knew that many pizzas make light work. So, they invited undergrads to call alumni for donations. Back then, people used telephones on desks. I signed up for the telethon.

The MITAA wasn’t about to let 18-year-old kids get near big donors. The people we called were strictly penny ante alum—not that there’s anything wrong with that. The staff probably figured they were delegating grunt work while also teaching us awkward nerds some life skills (“Ask if they have questions about MIT.” “Try small talk.”) Instead, I learned that it is the duty of alumni to give when they see good things happening, and the equally solemn duty to withhold from giving when they see their alma mater going off the rails.

In an age before digital records, callers were furnished with index cards bearing donors’ recent giving histories. We were tasked with persuading alumni to better their past donations, even by a little. If we did, our successes were announced to all our fellow telethoners.

My successes were small potatoes. One alum had consistently given $25, I persuaded him to elevate to $30. Then I was handed the index card for a seriously cold case: a grad who had not donated to MIT in any of the last 10 years.

I was not especially eager to call. When I did, a crusty guy answered and I raced through the minimal pleasantries. I explained the reason for my call, inanely asked if he had any questions about MIT, and hoped to escape unscathed. Small talk was out of the question.

“I haven’t given in some time,” Crusty confirmed the data on the index card.

“Yes,” I responded, not letting on about the card.

“Very disappointed with the president”, the voice continued. “Lots of students behaved badly. It was handled very poorly.”

“I see,” I replied, still avoiding small talk.

“The administration capitulated to the students,” continued Mr. Zero-for-Ten.

Historical note: Howard Johnson had been MIT president from 1965 to 1971. He was succeeded by Jerome Wiesner. Both presided over the divestiture of MIT from Draper Labs, where weapons-related research was done. Highly controversial at the time. I was not sure to whom Crusty was referring. I was aware of Wiesner’s publicly stated anti-war sentiments. But I’d also heard stories that while Johnson was still president in January 1970, protesters used a battering ram to break into his office and occupy it for two days. The stories were true.

In reading back issues of the independent student newspaper The Tech from 1970 and 1971, I have since learned that of the many involved in the break-in and occupation, 11 students were disciplined by an MIT disciplinary committee for entering the president’s office without permission. Seven were eventually expelled. Some were later reinstated. Weirdly, only the student who made the battering ram was charged in court. He was convicted and served a prison sentence.

“But you have a new president. He’ll be better. Let’s let bygones be bygones,” Crusty’s tone softened. He was referring to the fact that Paul Gray had succeeded Jerry Wiesner as president the previous year (1978).

I have since learned that Gray had been at Johnson’s office during the break-in. He later identified the student participants at their disciplinary hearings and testified against the battering-ram maker in court. Crusty seemed to sense that Gray would be more likely than his predecessors to hold the line against students behaving badly.

“I’ll give you $1,000.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Yes. Time to turn over a new leaf.”

“A thousand dollars? Thank you very much!” I nearly screamed into the phone. In 1979, MIT tuition was about $5,500. Today, it is $55,000.

Fast forward more than four decades. Now I’m the crusty alum. I have not received any recent calls from pizza-susceptible students, but there has been no end to the emails. This is my 40th MIT reunion year and there is a class gift to be funded.

But my alma mater has, indeed, gone off the rails on a fundamental issue. It is the issue dearest to me, as a career academic: The preservation of free and civil speech and debate in the academy. Like my predecessor, Crusty, whom I met through the help of the MITAA, I believe current MIT students behaved badly. Once again, the MIT administration (then of President L. Rafael Reif) excused them and capitulated to their uncivil behavior, to the detriment of education and the institution.

The episode that irks me has already been well-documented in the press. It was first brought to light by Yascha Mounk in The Atlantic. It was revisited by Kevin Cullen in the Boston Globe. Prof. Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago, a geophysicist, was invited by the chair of the Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Department at MIT, to give the John Carlson Lecture because of Abbot’s innovations in geophysics. Abbot accepted.

Abbot has also shared publicly his arguments on why the current obsession with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)—as too often implemented—can undermine the goal of attracting the most meritorious candidates to a job. Abbot and his colleague have offered an alternative rubric which they term, “Merit, Fairness and Equality.”

When MIT students learned that Abbot had been invited, they used the modern equivalent of a battering-ram—social media—to disrupt the plan and block off any possibility of civil exchange of ideas. In effect, the students at MIT were saying, “we will only acknowledge geophysics advanced by people of our ilk and approval.” Anyone who deviates must be doing “conservative geophysics” and therefore invalid. In a shameful move, the department chair, backed by the MIT president, rescinded the invitation to Abbot. One would like to think that this action gave Reif pause, given that his parents escaped the Nazis who, among their myriad crimes, tried to tarnish the work of Einstein and other Jews as “Jewish Physics.”

Student hooligans preventing open and civil exchange of information are not limited to MIT. Students at the University of Buffalo ran amok when Lt. Col. Allen West was invited to speak by a conservative student group on campus. West had been invited to UB to speak about race and American exceptionalism. When the event was scuttled, students and the community were the losers. Students robbed themselves and others of the opportunity to hear, first-hand, from a Black man who rose through the military despite racism. The university’s response was a disappointing statement after the event that seemed to cast the hooligans as equally aggrieved as the invited guests and hosts.

Nor is speech-canceling only the purview of undergraduates. Yale Law students, acting like spoiled brats, shouted down panelists invited to campus by the student chapter of the Federalist Society. The belated response of the Law School dean was tepid at best. This episode is especially instructive for its negative impact on education. The panelists were lawyers from normally opposing groups (conservative Alliance Defending Freedom, liberal American Humanist Association) who had collaborated on a case in the Supreme Court. The groups may have had different reasons for making common cause—the former was defending religious liberty, the latter was preserving free speech on campus—but surely law students at one of the nation’s top-rated law schools would want to learn from the principals about the intricacies of Supreme Court advocacy? The case in question, Uzuegbunam vs. Preczewski, is so revealing of the shifting and competing alliances on the Supreme Court that expert court chronicler Linda Greenhouse devoted more than three pages of her book Justice on the Brink to it.

What is happening at UB, Yale, MIT, and many other campuses is beyond regrettable. It degrades the honor and the value of a university education. I am concerned about all the episodes but my connection and obligation to MIT is unique. I have greatly benefited from my MIT education because of its rigor and because of the school’s status as the preeminent science and engineering university. If MIT becomes better known as a training ground for small-minded cancelers than engineers and scientists, the value of my degree will plummet. All alumni everywhere should be concerned about what happens at their alma maters, what impact it might have on education and on the ongoing value of their degrees.

Now to my duty as an alumnus. I cannot support an institution that knowingly compromises on free and civil debate in the academy. Once this principle, now under threat at institutions across the country, is sacrificed, universities become nothing but collections of politically correct partisan hacks with advanced degrees. In the spirit of Crusty I, I choose to signal my displeasure by abstaining from contributing to my 40th reunion class gift to MIT. Instead, I donated to the James Madison Program at Princeton which invited Abbot to speak following his disinvitation by MIT.

But I also recognize that life goes on. Reif is stepping down and there will be a new MIT president. Maybe then I will let bygones be bygones.

If you’ve been following the MIT Free Speech Alliance debate series, of which there have been six since our first in the spring of 2023, you might have noticed that there is no debate scheduled for this spring semester. That’s because for the first time we weren’t able to overcome the perennial core challenge of organizing these events: finding supporters of orthodox views willing to explain and defend those views in a debate setting.

MFSA debates are designed to model vigorous but civil discourse on controversial issues, supporting a culture of open inquiry while encouraging tolerance for diverse viewpoints. We believe this is especially important to counteract the cancel culture that had come to prevail at MIT under the prior administration. Recall that when the debate series was launched an alarming level of self-censorship and lack of administrative support for free speech had been documented in the MIT Institutional Health research report conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

The MFSA never takes a position on any of the issues we choose for our debates. Rather, we seek the strongest representatives for both the affirmative and negative positions to form two-person debate teams so that the chosen issue can be competently argued. Because we are focused on fostering public discussion, we conduct the debates using a modified Oxford Union format in which there is no audience voting on “winners” or “losers.”

We have systematically chosen debate propositions lying just outside the prevailing Overton Window, though not so far outside that we couldn’t be confident that a substantial portion of the MIT community would be interested in views challenging the prevailing narratives. We would then craft a proposition to clearly delineate the issue and invite the most respected professors, program administrators, or recognized experts we could find to participate.

You would think it would be easy to get experts willing to explain, defend, and debate established policies based on orthodox views, and that finding challengers would be the hard part. The exact opposite has been the case every time, beginning with our very first debate. This might be understandable in politics, when an incumbent officeholder refuses to debate a lesser-known challenger to whom he’d prefer not to give public exposure. But at an institution supposedly dedicated to seeking truth, it stands in stark contrast to the very telos of a university.

If you recall, the proposition for our first debate was “Should Academic DEI Programs Be Abolished.” We chose it because it was the issue that led to the cancellation of Dorian Abbott’s invited lecture—the event that triggered the founding of the MFSA. While the idea of abolishing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) may have been outside the Overton Window in the spring of 2023, it has since become the law of the land.

As reported by the College Fix, nearly 100 MIT DEI deans, professors, and administrators—all of whom were deeply involved with MIT’s rapidly expanding DEI programs—were invited to explain and defend those programs. None accepted. We had the same experience when we approached leading DEI operatives at Harvard, Boston University, and other Boston-area schools. We ended up finding two commercial DEI consultants willing to mount the podium to defend their profession.

This pattern has repeated itself in almost every one of our debates.

In the fall of 2023, we debated the proposition “Is STEM Systemically Racist?” Despite the fact that MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles has made eradicating this alleged evil her career crusade and it has been accepted by the administration as a foundational policy premise, no one at MIT would touch the subject.

In the spring of 2024, we debated the proposition that “Sex is biological and binary, and gender identity is no substitute for sex in social policy.” MIT Professor Alex Byrne had the courage to lead the affirmative team, challenging the orthodox view. But no one from MIT’s extensive, university-supported trans-affirming community was willing to explain and defend MIT’s gender policies. Professor Byrne has subsequently faced considerable professional pressure for his outspokenness.

It wasn’t until the fall of 2024 that we were finally able to persuade two prominent MIT professors to explain and defend the orthodox position that “Decarbonization is Worth the Cost,” a belief that deeply informs MIT policy. As you might expect, this proved to be one of the best debates we’ve hosted.

Unfortunately, our spring 2025 debate returned to form: no one from MIT was willing to explain and defend the proposition that “We Must Close the Gender Gap in STEM.” This despite the fact that striving for gender parity has been official MIT policy since Nancy Hopkins made front-page news with her celebrated tape measure, and the MIT undergraduate admissions office settled into a “holistic” admissions policy under which female applicants enjoy twice the admit rate of male applicants.

Again, in the fall of 2025, when we debated the proposition that “American Universities Are Too Dependent on Foreign Students,” MIT advocates of internationalism were a no-show even as the Institute battled the new administration in Washington seeking to curtail the number of foreign students crowding out Americans.

Undeterred, toward the end of last fall semester the MFSA Executive Committee decided that the spring debate topic should address the growing friction between Islam and the West. The existence of widespread Islamophobia on college campuses had come to be accepted as orthodoxy with little supporting evidence. Islamic immigration was also a hot-button issue in both the United States and Europe, and the Israel-Hamas war remained in the headlines.

The committee settled on the proposition that “Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy.” Recruiting began right after Thanksgiving, starting with invitations to the MIT Chaplaincy and every MIT scholar we could identify who was either an advocate for or an expert on Islam.

As usual, we got nowhere at MIT. We then spent the next three months combing the country for recognized Islamic scholars willing to debate the negative proposition that Islam presents no incompatibilities with liberal democracy. No luck.

Growing desperate as the clock ticked, we decided to raise the stakes and reframe the debate proposition as “Islamism is a clear and present danger to the United States.” Surely someone would step up to contest that. We received conditional acceptances from a couple of Islamic scholars and public policy advocates, but as soon as we disclosed the names of the well-known policy experts who would be arguing the affirmative side, they bolted.

Having run out of sufficient time to organize and promote the event, we threw in the towel. There will be no spring debate, and the future of the debate program remains unclear.

At our upcoming MFSA Executive Committee meeting, we will be discussing the idea of pivoting away from debates toward the frankly easier-to-manage and better-attended approach of inviting controversial speakers to campus to challenge the groupthink and prevailing narratives that have proven inimical to free speech, viewpoint diversity, and academic freedom.

If university intellectuals do not understand the foundations of their own views well enough to publicly defend them, have they not abandoned critical thinking? This would suggest that many orthodox beliefs pushed upon students and the public are either poorly understood or so fragile that they cannot withstand open scrutiny.

We invite MFSA members to reach out and let us know what they think.