This is my final column as chair, and these are typically a time for taking stock. Our institution, like most of American higher education and like many of the entities involved in American research, has entered a time of stark challenges. Once again, at a time when we may find ourselves checking multiple external news sources multiple times each day to understand what’s happening and try to anticipate what might come next – this is a challenging moment to write.
But it’s certainly possible to look back two years and review some of what has happened in governance. Our group of officers – Peko Hosoi, Elly Nedivi, and I – came in with a sense of areas that we thought deserved some concentrated effort; other long-term projects that were handed on from previous groups of officers; and (at least in my case) a level of realism that the service required of us might prove to be very different than the projects any of us expected or hoped to do. So in this column, I’ll come back to the concerns that this group of officers brought as we came into our roles – articulated in my first column, back in September/October 2023 – and see what has happened.
Communications: In the first weeks of July, 2023, a series of early conversations with associate provosts, a dean, and a couple of vice presidents made clear that all of us felt that internal communications needed to be elevated in our collective attention. Simply put, faculty at MIT need better access to channels that will provide them with information, allow them to exchange information, and elevate their questions and concerns. That understanding was validated over and over during the last few years. If ground-level experiences, priorities and preferences don’t get articulated to decision-makers in a way they can understand, decisions will be poorer – and less well-accepted. If I tell you something on a channel that you don’t pay attention to, you won’t know it, and may even come to feel you are being kept in the dark. Information needs to flow in a way that respects our time and matches our habits of attention – and also responds to an increasingly rapid cadence of pressures on the institution.
This question doesn’t have a single solution, but I think it has emerged as strategic for the Institute as a whole, and this is increasingly recognized. It will certainly not become less pressing given the rapid pace of hard decisions and hard times that I think we can all see coming. For these, the model of small advisory groups to the senior officers may give a useful mix of rapid consultation and diverse perspectives. (By the time this issue appears, I expect to know more about avenues for faculty input on decision-making.) We also continue to have our eye on campus spaces as venues for community and communication; parallel studies by the Corporation Joint Advisory Committee and the Committee on Student Life have elevated concerns about the lack of dining and gathering spaces on central campus.[1] Meanwhile, the Communications Office has been working on recommendations from the Council on Family and Work to develop an intranet for the MIT community – we may see that in AY 26.
We have also been working on suggestions for governance as a channel of communication between the faculty and the administration, engaging a dedicated study group as well as talking to colleagues at other institutions and drawing in ideas from committees and councils we visit.
One council suggested they and other School councils could generate questions and topics for our agendas, which would be welcome. Another suggestion aimed at encouraging more faculty to come to the microphones and speak: departments might assign a member to raise topics or ask questions on behalf of our colleagues. (I think we’ve all observed that speaking for the first time in a meeting requires considerable activation energy.) Members of the Faculty Policy Committee have expressed interest on reporting out to their School councils at intervals. We’ve also engaged in some skills building on parliamentary process. In AY 27, monthly meetings will move from 10-250 to the 8th floor of the Schwarzman College, a somewhat smaller but more flexible space that will also provide the opportunity to hold receptions immediately outside the meeting space. [2]
Management of the information faculty produce internally also falls under this heading. Several recommendations and desiderata have emerged for the governance website to make its information more readily discoverable, especially the work being done by various faculty committees and other such groups. Standard practice for committees charged with making recommendations on a given topic has been to visit FPC before (often) presenting at the faculty meeting. Yet often this practice isn’t satisfying as a way of providing institutional awareness and memory: presentations at FPC may generate rich discussion and feedback, but are not visible to the community; presentations at the faculty meeting are typically brief, offer limited scope for discussion, and will not reach beyond the 10% of faculty who attend either virtually or in person. Other studies, even the officers may learn about only by chance. One promising suggestion has been to improve findability by training an LLM on the information contained on the faculty governance page – including committee charges, reports, and meeting minutes. That idea resonates: many topics we care about either have someone charged with working on them or have been extensively studied in the past, but if that work is hard to find, connections are far less likely to be made and work will have less impact. A one-stop shop for all public documents produced by faculty committees and advisory groups would be welcome – currently, reports live on the pages of senior officers to whom committees or advisory groups pertain.[3] To be clear, we have few current resources to execute on these goals. When we do, the payoffs will be noteworthy.
Freedom of Expression: We have been and continue to be in a very challenging time for matters of expression. But the officers and I began our term with a recently adopted statement, a series of recommendations for next steps, and a new president ready to elevate this topic. In fall of 2023, we formed and charged a Committee on Academic Freedom and Campus Expression. This group of faculty, staff, and students, led by Mike Sipser and Peko Hosoi, has been an invaluable resource, consulting informally on many small and large topics and posting recommendations on topics of broader concern; after an engaged process of discussion and consultation, their most recent recommendations on guidelines for protest and demonstration are now being considered by Academic Council. CAFCE has periodically reported out, published recommendations on specific topics, and indeed built a website to serve as a central resource for the community.[4] CAFCE has also had a less visible impact; in a turbulent time on campus, it has been a vital node for putting faculty, administrators, staff, and students in the same room, providing them with common information, and engaging them in problem-solving together. All of us benefit when these cultures do not proceed in isolation from each other. Another benefit may equally be less visible from the outside: when a committee like CAFCE exists, it is always “in the room” when decisions are being made, often literally, but almost always in spirit. They will complete their work and make final recommendations this summer, including on whether to appoint a more permanent group in their stead.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Let’s be clear here that we’re not talking about “illegal DEI,” however that’s defined, but about MIT’s traditional and long-standing interest in finding and welcoming talent wherever it can be found, and regardless of how it comes. The physicist Richard Feynman’s autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, takes its title from the response to his social gaffe at a Princeton tea party; by contrast, MIT has been a place where someone with talent in physics was not going to be made a bit less welcome if they were uncertain whether to take milk or lemon in their tea. But there are other kinds of sorting mechanisms that we do need to keep thinking about, because they generate interference with the ones that matter to us. Landmarks like Clarence Williams’ oral history, Technology and the Dream (2001), can serve as reminders both of our institutional history of grappling with challenges of belonging and of forms of solidarity that have sometimes been destabilized over time. Among other past reports, I’ve also been rereading Edward Bertschinger’s report on “Advancing A Respectful and Caring Community” (2015).[5] Over the last two years, there have been many of the uncomfortable but perhaps transformative conversations Ed describes, bringing to light where we have not yet fulfilled our aims and, again, bringing disparate perspectives and information together. The long view provided by texts like these helps orient on where we’ve been and where we need to go.
Considerations of a welcoming environment, of course, apply only once someone has come to MIT; they don’t touch the question of whether that person has a chance to get here in the first place. During our terms, we have also spent a considerable amount of time thinking about the students who might be missing from MIT’s applicant pool and digging into questions about how to connect.
Financial aid is one part of the picture; MIT’s recent announcements were widely publicized in the media, and that in itself seems to have reached families who didn’t previously think that they could send their children here. Education is another piece of the picture. Disparities in access to mathematics education at the K-12 level have emerged as one of the true barriers for students who might otherwise have the kind of talent to succeed and to contribute – indeed, lack of access to calculus seemed like a barrier not just to individuals but to whole schools and whole communities. The issue of access to math preparation struck us as an important place to intervene. MIT has promising foundations from which to attack the problem: a well-differentiated set of introductory math and physics classes with a lot of data on what students at different entry points need, a math department already engaged in conducting a number of outreach programs, and extensive experience with on-line learning. Not all of the ideas that emerged from our inquiry have borne fruit; however, I believe the next few years will see several concrete initiatives on access to math preparation, and these may allow future groups of faculty officers and committees to have a different conversation.
Other projects: As we approach the handover to a new group of officers, Roger Levy, the incoming chair of the faculty, has been meeting with the Task Force on the Undergraduate Program, its co-chairs, and the new Vice Chancellor for Education David Darmofal, to assure a smooth transition in the Task Force’s interface with governance. Looking ahead to the possibility of novel and potentially complex proposals, the educational committees and their staff will be meeting to review the degree proposal process this summer. Returning to faculty meetings, another project that I hope to complete before June 30th will supplement the explainers on parliamentary process that now live on the governance website by documenting where and how MIT’s local practices differ from Robert’s Rules (e.g., we include a summary of discussions and presentations in our minutes). We hope that richer documentation will help to level the playing field for engagement, as well as providing guidance for future officers.
Another initiative set in motion by an earlier chair, Rick Danheiser, deserves mention as an innovation in our governance. During his term, Rick worked with Diane Greene, then chair of the Corporation, to investigate additional mechanisms of engagement between the faculty and the Corporation. Recommendations by an ad hoc committee of faculty and Corporation members resulted in an initial pilot of several practices that have now been regularized.[6] These include informal small group meetings between Corporation members and randomly selected groups of faculty that take place around the quarterly Corporation meetings; a regular speaking slot at quarterly Corporation meetings for the chair of the faculty; and the option for the chair to meet with the Executive Committee by request. We have gotten generally positive feedback from the small group meetings. I’ve also found value in sharing faculty perspectives and concerns at the quarterly meetings and at the Executive Committee. (Corporation Chair Mark Gorenberg has been a repeated visitor to the Faculty Policy Committee as well.) At a moment when many institutions have seen dispute and distrust between boards and faculty governance, these channels of communication and a tenor of mutual respect have been a notable asset for MIT. I think we share an understanding both that MIT is at its best with transparency and critical self-reflection, and that we have been in the position to set the bar in areas we care about as an institution.
I look forward to returning to the faculty full-time. As a faculty member, I want to be on any team that’s at work making community and thinking about the future of education. And I want to be in Kresge when students are cheering on their peers like rock stars, whether what’s on stage is engineering product design or jazz vocals. This is a community to cherish: in its brilliance, its passion, its inventiveness, its weirdness, its sheer exuberance. Despite our strengths, it feels vulnerable at every level. America’s deep political divisions threaten to “erode all that MIT, universities and the US have fought to build.”[7] This moment will call on us to lead in many ways if we value what our predecessors have passed on and what we too have helped to create.
[1] The 2023-24 annual report from CSL can be found on the faculty governance site: https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/AnnualReportStudentLife23-24_FINAL.pdf.
[2] For examples of meetings that mattered, see (for instance) the summary in “Governance and How to Use It: Some MIT Case Studies,” MIT Faculty Newsletter, Sept./Oct. 2024, XXXVII.1.
[3] One report that merits elevation comes from the Faculty Advisory Council to the Vice Provost for Faculty; the report lays out a strategic plan for the office based on extensive faculty input, with recommendations about faculty advancement, community and culture (including conflict and grievance resolution), and recruitment and retention:
[4] CAFCE recommendations can be found at https://cafce.mit.edu/recommendations/. Their resource page is https://free-expression.mit.edu.
[5] https://iceo.mit.edu/reports/.
[6] For details and committee members, see Rick L. Danheiser, “A Look Back and a Look Ahead,” MIT Faculty Newsletter, May/June 2021, XXXIII.5.
[7] Yossi Sheffi, “The More Challenging DEI – A Befitting Role for MIT,” MIT Faculty Newsletter, May/June 2021, XXXIII.5.
