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by qwertyuiop924
3566 days ago
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That's fair enough. I didn't say the removal of 6.001 was bad, but many decried it as the death of MIT. But in short, you're saying that MIT may no longer be "where the future happens." That's quite possible. But at the moment, there's still an abundance of talent there. OTOH, the lack of an incubator is a problem. I guess what I'm saying is that you might be right, ut the future is pretty hard to predict. |
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Or maybe MIT is now starting to seriously revert to the mean, some of the future will most certainly happen there, just potentially quite a bit less.
I may have seen some of that in the '80s, certainly the midnight execution of the Applied Biology department by envious chemistry and biology professor administrators was a sign of some sort, especially since the fate of the latter should have been much worse than having their administrative careers ended. The faculty as a whole certainly viewed it as a betrayal, which is was in spirit and "law" (MIT has the institution of the Visiting Committee to keep units of it on the straight and narrow, they were of course ignored in this).
And this is part of a bigger trend, pure administrators are growing in vast numbers in US higher education, their costs are one of the biggest drivers in this clearly unsustainable trend, they're funded by ever more Federal dollars (even if laundered as loans, which the Feds entirely took over in 2010), and from money comes power, they're taking over US universities from the faculty. Who themselves are getting segregated into small numbers of high cost tenured and large quantities of low cost associates who care barely make ends meet, plus the old bane of graduate student instructors who aren't good at it.
MIT, at least for now, is not going to succumb to some of these trends, as long as associate professors are rare exceptions that prove the rule, like SF author Joe Haldeman, for classes are otherwise taught by tenured or tenure track faculty, and adequate teaching ability is required for tenure, as well as the minor detail of being #1 or #2 in your subfield (as judged, in part, by those Visiting Committees).
Similarly, like CalTech, there's a high floor on admitting undergraduates, they've got be able to do one term of the calculus beyond the AP BC sequence, and calculus based mechanics and physics (and chemistry and maybe biology).
But....