[1008] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Media Lab write-up in Forbes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Drew Starr)
Wed Jan 23 14:53:46 2002
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Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 14:36:45 -0500
From: Drew Starr <drew@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
Looks as if the Media Lab UROPs will be losing their perks (And maybe jobs?)
Sign Of The Times
MIT Media Lab Tightens Its Belt
Matthew Herper, Forbes.com, 01.08.02, 12:14 PM ET
During the go-go '90s, with the Internet booming, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Media Lab stood like a white beacon for a shining,
high-tech future filled with gadgets, gizmos and seemingly endless funding.
Its legions of techies have eagerly spent money donated by corporate
sponsors since the lab opened its doors in 1985.
The money--an annual budget of about $40 million--went not only to sometimes
wild ideas like "smart" potholders, dice, chairs and animal building blocks,
but also apparently to fund some dot-com-style largesse. So perhaps with
dot-coms going out of business, it doesn't come as such a surprise that
Walter Bender, MIT Media Lab's executive director, told staff and students
to tighten their belts in a Jan. 5 e-mail.
"As we've discussed over the past month, the Media Lab community needs to
make some changes to deal with our burn-rate problem," wrote Bender, who
succeeded Lab founder, Internet guru and now Lab Chairman Nicholas
Negroponte.
Among the things Bender says won't be paid for out of the laboratory till:
cell phones, limos, first-class flights and furniture. (It's not clear
whether this applies to new chairs and couches that "think.") Also, he
emphatically states: "Internal meetings will NOT have lab-supplied food."
"I realize that some of the guidelines outlined below might cause
frustrations or difficulties for you," Bender wrote, "but I believe that
they are necessary to restore the financial health of the lab."
That the Media Lab was having some trouble is not news. It recently laid off
29 staffers, drawing protests from some of its own graduate students. But
why is the Lab unhealthy in the first place? Unlike other academic
institutions at MIT and elsewhere, the Media Lab gets the bulk of its money
from corporate donors. Among them: IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people), Intel
(nasdaq: INTC - news - people), Gillette (nyse: G - news - people),
ChevronTexaco (nyse: CVX - news - people) and LEGO.
From the beginning, the Lab has been a place where MIT students go to be
creative and to be well rewarded. Undergraduates flocked to the Media Lab
because their projects got funded. Often, they would be paid better than
their peers in more conventional fields of engineering and science. Starting
salaries for paid undergraduate researchers will remain the same--generally
about $8.75 an hour. But those students can receive raises, and Bender wrote
that the top range of the pay scale could decrease 10% to 20%.
"Historically, we have enjoyed the ability to pay at the high end of MIT pay
scales, and we may have needed this to keep students from working at local
dot-coms," Bender wrote. "We no longer have the competition nor the
resources to be a top-paying lab."
In fact, the lab no longer has the resources to send students to conferences
to present their papers. Now, formerly jet-setting students are not only
banned from using lab funds to take first- and business-class flights, they
are limited to taking a single trip each year.
From the beginning, the Media Lab was a monument to technical optimism--or
maybe hubris. Its very building, designed by MIT alum and world-famous
architect I.M. Pei, was a symbol of elegance and waste. On the outside, its
tiled surface resembles nothing so much as a bathroom.
But inside, it is almost entirely empty, with a giant courtyard stretching
up through its center--just because it looked cool. Maybe if that space had
been filled with offices, the Lab wouldn't be spending money constructing a
new building next door. And perhaps without the expense of the new building,
the Lab wouldn't need to lay off staff now. At one point, Bender says he
actually suggested filling some of the atrium -- which is four stories
high -- with office space instead of moving staff out of the building. MIT
nixed the idea.
The Media Lab still has a place, but it may, during the economic downturn,
see itself overshadowed by more concrete research--by tangible products like
drugs. But some of the Lab's research has always transcended mere gadgetry.
For instance, the Media Lab recently created a new center specializing in
quantum computing headed by field guru Neil Gershenfeld and included Isaac
Chuang, who did groundbreaking work in the field while at IBM. That could
allow scientists to someday crack the codes that keep computers safe--and to
make even better codes.
But the Media Lab's heyday may be over--along with the wide acclaim that
luminaries like Negroponte and artificial intelligence guru Marvin Minsky
received. At MIT, as everywhere else, everything old is new again.
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