[hnnnnng]

Whats gonna happen? People are not going to stop going to MIT. The market it is in is education which is always growing and (sadly) the majority of people don't care what happened to Aaron Schwartz. MIT will still retain its top position and frankly I cannot fathom a scenario where it would have to face any serious consequences. So its most likely trying to hide something thats worth the loss of 'face' by filing this. But even if it fails, I don't think they give a fk.

[jmj42]

>People are not going to stop going to MIT.

Well, actually... Let me provide a little insight. My daughter, a future engineer, has dropped MIT from her top choice to off the list. There are many schools that are nearly as good, and despite rankings, better than MIT.

Here's another cool little anecdote: I was in a meeting with director from NIST, along with another researcher and our director. He was in town to give a lecture as part of a regular lecture series we conduct through the school year, and I was meeting with him one-on-one to ask questions about the intersection of IT and power grid operations. He was relaying a story about some engineering project that they had asked MIT researchers for help on.

Suddenly our director burst out laughing. Said he couldn't contain it anymore. He says, "Yeah, we know about that project. We're the people MIT called when they couldn't figure it out."

The moral of the story: MIT is marketing machine. As a rule, they are over-ranked in nearly every category, and rely on a historical perspective rather than a current one.

[ericd]

I wouldn't say some researchers handing off a project warrants a broad panning of the school and the thousands of people that make it up...

[jmharvey]

Donations matter, I hope. But I don't know how many regularly-donating alumni will follow through on their pledge not to give until this case is resolved, and proper action is taken.

It's hard to do, and it feels lousy. The alumni who feel closest to this case are probably people who spent a lot of time making stuff. When they donate, they're more likely to target their money at helping other people make stuff, by donating to things like the Edgerton Center [1], MITERS [2], or SIPB [3], or even just giving money directly to dorm governments (my hall had a PIC burner sitting next to the toaster on our kitchen counter and a couple of oscilloscopes you could check out from the front desk, courtesy of some slush fund somewhere).

When these alumni donate, they're not doing it to get their name on a plaque, or out of some kind of broad-based affinity for the school, they're doing it to help current students have the same kind of experiences they were able to enjoy. And if they stop donating, it's pretty easy to see the culture of creation suffering. People will keep making stuff, but it'll be a little more difficult, require a little more dedication, and it'll wind up being fewer people. That's a significant price to pay to stand on a principle.

[1] http://web.mit.edu/edgerton/ [2] http://miters.mit.edu/ [3] http://sipb.mit.edu/

[rapind]

Couldn't they donate elsewhere and have pretty close to the same affect? I assume that your choice to donate specifically to your school instead of another has something to do with your feelings for the school.

[ericd]

Yeah, I always donate to EC, they're not the ones that are responsible for this kind of crap :-/

[marshray]

But MIT didn't get where it is by being careless about its public image. Association with that image is a nonzero part of the value of a degree from MIT. If they go about acting like bozos it affects current and future students as well as alumni.

[rayiner]

MIT got where it is by being a crucial instrument of the military industrial complex, in many years the largest non-profit defense contractor in the country. They know which side their bread is buttered on.

[ericd]

Eh, I think you have to separate the students and faculty from the admins. I don't think many MIT students have ever been proud to be associated with the admins, because they do boneheaded things pretty regularly.

[Amadou]

The way the administration threw Star Simpson under the bus within hours of her arrest was despicable.

[ericd]

Did they? I graduated the year before that whole debacle, so I didn't get a very good sense of what happened beyond what was going on on one of the dorm mailing lists. I wouldn't be very surprised, though.