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.

In the fall of 1987, released from teaching by a Guggenheim Fellowship and invited to China to lecture as an American feminist intellectual, I visited there for two months, lecturing in six eastern cities: Beijing, Xuzhou, Hefei, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Guilin.

MIT has adapted its resource model whenever the world shifted around it. Post-Compact, we might do so again – exploring paced expansion over austerity to secure academic freedom, widen access, and strengthen our civic partnership.