[899] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
dean jones' white paper
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Wally)
Thu Oct 4 16:17:59 2001
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Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0110041049420.2672-100000@sub-zero.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 15:48:39 -0400
Reply-To: "Documentation at http://web.mit.edu/beland/talk/talk.html"
<MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU>, Wally <wally@sub-zero.mit.edu>
From: Wally <wally@sub-zero.mit.edu>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
Hello sir --
I'm Wally Holland '01, now a grad student in CMS, and a fellow whose
disappointment with his alma mater grows daily.
Just wanted to mention two things:
1) I honestly can't imagine anyone else doing the good for MIT that you've
done; you've ended up being a remarkable president in many ways, and I
congratulate and thank you for it. Your talents are uniquely suited to
your role as CEO; as far as the rest of the world is concerned, you're
doing the finest of jobs running this business. However...
2) ...do you read mit-talk@mit.edu? Or occasionally glance at it? Or
listen into reports of angry students heckling at town hall meetings? Or
pay attention to groups like ILTFP and MITchoice, who spent more hours
building resistance to Bacow's housing plan than he *ever* spent talking
to students about it?
Every student who's gone from 'I Love This Fucking Place' to 'I LOVED This
Fucking Place' is a student who'll one day be wildly rich and who'll one
day give her money to someone else.
You must believe me, and hundreds (and silent thousands) of other
students, when I say that MIT is *not* a better school than it was when I
came here, and that its greatest assets are being pissed away by an
administration whose drive to 'unify' and 'make it new' has had a
distressing, homogenizing effect.
Spectators cheer for your performance at MIT; justifiably so. Students
have a far chillier view of the last few years, and *informed and
reasonable criticisms* that might lead to real improvements in student
life.
Your best advisors are sitting right under your nose -- capable men and
women not dulled by tenure or normalized by public-relations pressures,
with the superhuman energy that made this school what it is.
<Beat.>
If nothing else, at least enforce higher teaching standards in tenure
considerations. That's one of MIT's biggest problems, in my opinion, but
the students never notice, as _they're content to teach themselves._ Which
seems drastically at odds with MIT's party line of not letting students do
much else for themselves, and less each day.
Humanist and harried,
Wally Holland '01
ps. That you capitulated to the Krueger's obscene demand for money is, in
the end, a decision that only you could have made; and of course, the
students don't know anything about that decision-making process (which is,
for any number of reasons, probably how it should be). Better for your
business to quietly pay them off rather than face trial, public lawsuit,
the dragging out of a closet full of skeletons.
But in a just world, your decision would have been national news, and both
you and the Kruegers would have been publicly excoriated for back-room
dealings that violated the good faith between the administration and the
student body. I do not envy you your role in the fallout from Krueger's
death, nor do I wish to keep flogging this particular dead horse. But you
must realize that you and I and the vast majority of the MIT community had
nothing to do with his death -- and yet your decision to purchase silence
made whipping boys of the entire school.
A public airing of the factors surrounding the decisions of that time
(instead of a hand-waving 'things are complicated, kids' response such as
the students have largely endured), an explanation of the departure of the
*entire high-level administration* that served at the time of Krueger's
death -- *those* would be good-faith gestures, and you'd have the respect
of many a student (and alum).
