[930] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: What is the cost of academic and political freedom?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Wally)
Sun Oct 7 22:28:05 2001
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Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0110071434410.6117-100000@sub-zero.mit.edu>
Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2001 14:40:52 -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
In-Reply-To: <200110071707.NAA18902@linguistics.mit.edu>
> ...regrettably common in America's highly authoritarian universities,
> which place severe limits on freedom of speech...
Look -- not to sound like a spoilsport on this most go-go optimist of
lists, but whining about oppression of our freedoms by MIT is like saying
that McDonald's is fucking the consumer by not serving filet mignon. You
and your fellow students/faculty/staff are freer to speak here than most
anywhere else in America, to say nothing of (I choose my example partly to
irk) Taliban-controlled Afghanistan or heroically Communist Cuba.
People who denounce their employers (and those that support their
employers) in their workplace take their jobs into their own hands, and
should not be lionized. They should be *smart* -- and get other people to
speak for them, people who can speak with *even more* impunity.
In short: if you wanna change the world, don't start by trying to change
MIT. Fix the places that are almost irredeemably fucked, then worry about
America's universities. mit-talk@mit.edu will always be just that: talk.
W.
