I begin this first column as Chair of the Faculty with a brief update on the work of faculty governance during the academic year’s first three months. We have, by necessity, been off to a running start.

Financial planning has been central: the new federal tax on university endowments, together with potential changes to federal research & development funding and indirect cost rates, are projected to reduce MIT’s annual General Institute Budget by approximately one-sixth – about $300 million per year. Because these developments have enormous implications for MIT, we dedicated substantial parts of the September and November Institute Faculty Meetings to presentations and Q&A by Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, Executive Vice President and Treasurer (EVPT) Glen Shor, and their teams, who have led the planning effort. Outside these meetings, the faculty officers have been listening carefully to faculty concerns about budget impacts, and we and the Faculty Policy Committee have spent considerable time in discussion with the Provost and EVPT, who have convened numerous information and feedback sessions across the Institute. This topic will doubtless remain a central concern in the months ahead. Faculty governance has no budgetary decision-making authority, but we will continue working to ensure that faculty concerns are heard, understood, and conveyed; that crucial facts and rationales are made available as transparently as possible; and that decision-making remains broadly collaborative.

On October 1, MIT and eight other US universities received the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. The Compact completely occupied our attention for the next week and beyond: seeking and hearing faculty views, reading and digesting analyses in public media, and communicating with the senior administration. President Kornbluth’s response to the Compact the morning of October 10 coincided with the quarterly meeting of the MIT Corporation. The chair of the faculty attends Corporation meetings, and I can report that all three sides of MIT’s triangle of faculty governance – the faculty, the administration, and the Corporation – are firmly and powerfully aligned in support of President Kornbluth’s response. MIT is at its strongest when we are so aligned.

The Institute Faculty Meeting is also the designated assembly for conducting official business of the faculty. In this year’s meetings thus far, we have heard reports from the Ad Hoc Committee to Review Faculty Newsletter Policies and Procedures, delivered by committee chair Susan Silbey, the Ad Hoc Committee on Academic Freedom and Campus Expression, delivered by co-chairs Peko Hosoi and Mike Sipser, and the Committee on the Future of the Arts, delivered by chair Peter Fisher and committee member Keeril Makan, as well as the annual report of the Committee on Discipline, delivered by chair Tamar Schapiro. All members of these committees have my sincere thanks for their important work. The faculty also voted to change the Rules and Regulations of the Faculty so that the December Faculty Meeting regularly falls during the last week of classes, rather than during finals week, and to accept the recommendations of the Ad Hoc Committee to Review Faculty Newsletter Policies and Procedures. One of these recommendations was for the chair of the faculty to appoint a Transitional Support Committee for the Faculty Newsletter. I have since appointed Krishna Rajagopal (Physics, past chair of the faculty) and Donca Steriade (Linguistics, past chair of the Committee on Graduate Programs) to this committee, together with Tom Kochan (Sloan, past chair of the faculty) as committee chair. The Editorial Board of the Faculty Newsletter, for its part, has constituted three committees – Elections, Production, and Policies & Procedures. I ask that all faculty support the Editorial Board and the Transitional Support Committee in implementing the full set of recommendations to secure for the Faculty Newsletter independence with accountability to the faculty.^[1]

As may be clear from the above account, key to the work of the faculty officers is communication – with the broader leadership of faculty governance, with faculty members individually and in groups across the Institute, with the senior administration, and with the Corporation. Indeed, every item on an Institute Faculty Meeting agenda is the result of a rich communicative history: perhaps within a committee, perhaps among a group of advocates for a motion, perhaps with a team of dedicated MIT staff supporting the work of faculty governance. And much important faculty governance communication happens entirely outside Institute Faculty Meetings. Therefore I will devote the remainder of this column to how we sense community priorities, resources, and concerns in the service of best representing the faculty, and to a brief review of specific mechanisms that are at your disposal for communication with faculty governance.

MIT has just under 1,100 faculty. This is an interesting number: easily small enough that each of us could, in principle, recognize one another (humans can recognize thousands of faces), but likely an order of magnitude too large for us all to be in one another’s core social groups (more like 150 people).^[2] This means that effective faculty representation cannot rely solely on the knowledge and core networks of the faculty officers. Rather, faculty governance is participatory by design, and at its best achieves the collective intelligence needed for effective representation and decision-making. Therefore, many of our mechanisms for communication involve convening groups of faculty, both for elected representatives to hear from the broader faculty and for faculty members to hear from one another.

Before, during, and after the Institute Faculty Meeting. The Institute Faculty Meeting itself is of course a forum for communication. Any member of the MIT community can attend (except during executive session), and there is an opportunity with each agenda item and with new business for any faculty member to speak on the topic. The meeting takes place in an auditorium, only one person speaks at a time, and everyone can hear. However, the time available at these meetings is necessarily brief, and not all communicative goals are well suited to a formal one-to-all format. Therefore we continue a long tradition of a more informal reception hosted in the Emma Rogers Room (10-340) by the chair of the faculty for the hour after the Institute Faculty Meeting. New this year, we are also hosting tea and cookies in the Emma Rogers Room for half an hour (3:00-3:30pm) before each Institute Faculty Meeting. Small group conversations just before and after the meeting deepen engagement with the business of the faculty and strengthen our social bonds. You are always invited; please join whenever you can.

Random faculty gatherings. We are delighted to continue, now in its 39th year, the tradition first suggested by Joel Moses and initially hosted by Jay Keyser of convening groups of typically 15-20 randomly selected faculty for lunches and dinners, hosted monthly by the faculty officers. Each event runs 90-120 minutes, with the first half being small group discussions and the second half a single round-table group discussion. There is no set agenda: these gatherings offer an open forum for participants to discuss concerns and priorities regarding Institute matters. These gatherings contribute to Institute decision-making in three ways. First, due to random selection, you are likely to meet colleagues you might not otherwise encounter, which strengthens the social fabric and collective intelligence of the faculty. Second, the faculty officers and indeed all participants hear and learn from each other. Third, the faculty officers prepare an appropriately anonymized summary of each discussion and share it with members of the senior administration. These meals are part of the texture of MIT faculty life; if your name is drawn, we hope you’ll join us.

Monthly faculty coffee and breakfast hours. We are also pleased to continue a more recent tradition, started by Chair of the Faculty Lily Tsai at the end of her term in 2023 and continued under Chair Mary Fuller during her 2023-2025 term, of monthly faculty coffee and breakfast hours at the MIT Museum. These breakfasts have typically brought together several dozen faculty to exchange experiences, concerns, and ideas, and simply to gather socially. The next coffee and breakfast hour will take place on Tuesday, December 9 from 8:30-9:30am. We gratefully acknowledge the MIT Museum and the Office of the Executive Vice Provost for the support to make these events possible.

Ad hoc communications. You are always welcome to contact the faculty officers by email, individually or together; you can easily reach the entire Faculty Officers Group (me, Associate Chairs Bevin Engelward and Erica James, and Faculty Governance Administrator Tami Kaplan) through the email address mitfog@mit.edu. Some matters are, of course, best discussed in person, so feel no qualms about sending a brief message asking for a meeting. More broadly, the work of faculty governance is carried out by our numerous committees and councils. Depending on the nature of the matter, we may point you to the committees most suited to address it. Please also feel free to reach out yourself to members of any committees you believe may be relevant.

A cross-cutting feature of the communication mechanisms described above is that they allow for exchange of information that is both bottom-up – reflecting concerns and views of faculty across the Institute, not limited to preconceived notions of faculty governance leadership about the most important topics – and granular, allowing faculty to characterize and contextualize their views as individually and deeply as desired. The response of MIT faculty to the Compact provided a remarkable example of the value of such mechanisms. Within days of the Compact’s release, the faculty officers had received input from faculty that was stunning in its volume, depth, and range of opinion. As I noted at October’s Institute Faculty Meeting, I have never witnessed such extraordinary passion and near unanimity from academia on an issue. This input gave us a clear understanding of the range of views – regarding both how to respond to the Compact and the reasons for doing so – as well as the strong center-of-gravity sentiment that it must be rejected. President Kornbluth’s response captured that center of gravity. Moreover, the free, open, and collegial expression of wide-ranging faculty views testifies to the vitality of our academic culture. To everyone who communicated with us: it was an honor to hear from you.

Beyond the above mechanisms, we continually seek to strengthen and deepen communication from, to, and among the faculty. We are your elected leaders, but faculty governance is at its best with collective engagement. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with your ideas, suggestions, and feedback. Thank you, and we hope to see and hear from you again soon. My term will be a great success if we each recognize more of our colleagues at the end than we did at the start – and perhaps a few of us just may push past those 150-person limits.

^[1] As noted by the FNL co-chairs in September, the Editorial Board election originally planned for spring 2025 was rescheduled for this fall. With my support and that of the provost, the target date is now February 1, 2026, to allow time for first carefully revising their nomination and election processes as recommended by the Ad Hoc Committee.

^[2] Recognition capacity estimates come from the face perception literature (Jenkins, R., Dowsett, A. J., & Burton, A. M., 2018, “How many faces do people know?”, Proceedings of the Royal Society B). Core social network size estimates come from anthropology and neuroscience (see Dunbar, R. I., 2024, “The social brain hypothesis – thirty years on”, Annals of Human Biology, for a recent commentary).

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