[919] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
What is the cost of academic and political freedom?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marc F Rios)
Sat Oct 6 21:34:20 2001
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Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.30L.0110061853260.20654-100000@happiness-hotel.mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2001 18:56:31 -0400
Reply-To: "Documentation at http://web.mit.edu/beland/talk/talk.html"
<MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU>, Marc F Rios <mrios@MIT.EDU>
From: Marc F Rios <mrios@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
If you're employed by MIT, can you get fired for what you say in your free
time?
The answer, scarily enough, might be yes.
Last night I heard from a friend that an adminstrative assistant in the
chem-e department's building had been suspended from his job just
for this reason. He attended a Shell Oil recruitment meeting and brought
up the issue of their sponsorship of environmental and human rights
abuses. He did this after work, I was told, and he wasn't representing the
any MIT department.
I met the employee today and he talked in more detail
about what had happened. He heard that a group of students was going to be
attending the meeting to ask the recruiters questions about Shell's
environmental and human rights abuses in Nigeria, and see if students
would be willing to work for shell considering their record. He decided to
come and help. He distributed fliers made by the students;
the fliers detailed human rights and environmental abuses perpetrated by
shell in Nigeria. He also asked a question during the Shell recruiter's
discussion of social responsibility and environmentalism about why they
thought abuses were taking place. He didn't do anything that was
disruptive or even remotely impolite, and in his comments he never
indicated he was part of any MIT project or department.
The following day, he got a memo from his boss asking him to clean out
his desk, and give them his athena username and passwords. The memo
specified that he was being suspended specifically for
his activities the night before. He was also specifically told by a
supervisor in person that his conduct was unacceptable because it might
jeapordize MIT's funding.
MIT gets a lot of money from Shell, and it is really
unfortunate to see that MIT is willing to silence an employee by
threatening his job just so they can protect Shell from much
needed questioning.
We need to make sure this guy does not lose his job for exercising his
freedom of speech after hours against an MIT corporate donor, and make
sure this never happens again. Is MIT willing to intimidate its employees
into silencing their political beliefs and academic rights to ask
questions because they want to appeal to corporate entities? I
hope not.
I will post further information as I get it. I have not mentioned any
names at this time because of legal concerns.
-Marc
p.s. view the flyer that he was passing out at
web.mit.edu/aram/Public/shell/why-shell.pdf .
