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From The Faculty Chair
In June, the position of Chair of the MIT Faculty will pass into the extraordinarily capable hands of Steve Graves. We as a Faculty are lucky that he has accepted this position. As the outgoing Chair, I wish him all the best.
As the end of my term as Chair of the Faculty approaches, I have spent some time reflecting on the general state of MIT. One of the best things about being the Chair is the opportunity to see how the place works, and how the various competing forces influence decisions. Being the Chair of the Faculty allows a wonderful view of how MIT's broad mission gets translated into day-to-day decisions, and how the distinct priorities of the departments, schools, laboratories, research centers, and administrative offices are reflected in the tradeoffs made both implicitly and explicitly. One is an insider because of the nature of the Chair's responsibilities and access to the senior administration, and an outsider in the sense of participating in decision-making but not having any line responsibilities. This odd combination of aspects of the job of Chair of the Faculty allows an almost unique perspective on the university. My wise predecessors tried to explain this to me, but the truth is that it is one of those things that is best understood retrospectively.
The experience of being Chair has led me to several conclusions about the university, its administration, its faculty, its staff, and its students. Perhaps the most significant is that, in many ways, MIT is in the best shape it has been in for the 25 years that I have been on the faculty. We have recovered from the painful legacies of the period of federal cutbacks in research funding, internal budget cuts, and the changes induced by Reengineering. The enormous successes in fund raising in the later part of the 1990s, accompanied by the growth in the endowment resulting from successful investment strategies, have allowed an almost unprecedented, and long overdue, rehabilitation of the physical plant. We have seen a growth in undergraduate applications that has permitted us to be even more selective than ever before, and we have been able to increase financial support for graduate and undergraduate students. We continue to attract many of the world's most talented individuals to our faculty and student body. We have been able to support new initiatives in many areas of teaching and research. The faculty, staff, and administration for the most part function in a collegial and collaborative way that avoids the worst of academic politics. In short, the reputation of MIT as one of the world's premiere universities seems as secure as ever.
The Institute continues to face a wide range of challenges. Running a premiere university is more complex and expensive than ever, particularly one such as MIT with a large portion of its faculty in areas of engineering, science, and management. Research in these areas often requires enormous investments of money and space, and we compete for the best people in the world with other top universities, some of which have financial resources considerably greater than our own. The decisions we face are often complex, requiring large investments in people and research funds in the face of great uncertainty about the outcomes.
This difficult environment produces pressure to undertake programs and projects that have short run payoffs. My own observation is that we tend to make the best decisions when we pay less attention to the short term and instead are guided by a broader and longer-range view of our mission. I'll explore some examples of this below.
Great universities have historically provided their faculty and students with tremendous autonomy, job security and flexibility, allowing us to do our research and teaching with a maximum of support and a minimum of interference. There is an implicit contract in which, in return for this support and flexibility, we devote our energies and efforts to educating our students and advancing human knowledge to the best of our abilities. As unlikely as it might seem on the face of it, this implicit agreement has worked incredibly well. Nevertheless, there is often a temptation to focus the faculty's efforts in a more coordinated way, picking just a few research areas that seem most productive and directing the efforts of the faculty towards those areas.
Such a narrowing would be a terrible mistake. First, it is unlikely that we would pick the right areas. Even if we did, a very narrow focus on research areas selected by others would make this a singularly unattractive place to work. Many of the best of us would leave, either for better-paying positions or for places that gave us more flexibility. The good news is that this is well understood by the administration, and no one in it thinks otherwise.
Another example is need-blind admissions and need-based financial aid for undergraduates. In the short run, there is great temptation to use financial aid as an incentive to attract students who either can pay a larger fraction of the total cost of an MIT education or who, by whatever metrics, appear to be the most talented. Many universities have already taken these steps. In addition, some of our peers who claim to operate need-blind admissions and need-based financial aid have eroded these principles at the edges. Combinations of athletic scholarships, special merit-based scholarship programs, legacy admissions, and distorted calculations of financial need all have been used to undermine admissions policies at many universities.
MIT has always tried to admit the finest undergradute students we can attract and provided everyone with the aid they need. These policies reflect our core values as an institution, and we abandon them at our peril. MIT's exemplary decision to oppose the federal government's efforts to prohibit coordination of financial aid policies among the top universities was symbolic of our commitment to these values. Despite its lack of pragmatic benefit, our success in the subsequent litigation was one of our greatest moments. As the circle of universities remaining true to the spirit of need-blind admissions and need-based financial aid gets smaller, we as a faculty must continue to maintain these policies even at considerable cost to the university. I have no doubt that our administration will continue to support such efforts. Moreover, our alumni will continue their historic generosity as long as we sustain our commitment to the ideal of a university that is accessible to the best students regardless of their financial means.
Still another example is our commitment to achieving diversity in our students, staff, and faculty. Every university articulates the need for such diversity, but few would undertake the broad review of gender equity that was reflected in the recent report on the problems facing women faculty in science. Doing such a study, taking corrective actions and distributing the conclusions, is something no other university has had the courage or commitment to do. Through this process we learned things that we wish weren't true, and we unquestionably have much more work to do in the future before the opportunities that MIT provides are equally accessible to all groups in society. Nevertheless, the way we as an institution addressed this issue reflects what makes MIT special, and we should not hesitate to tackle other difficult problems in a similar way. In that spirit, President Vest and I have jointly chartered a Task Force on Minority Student Achievement that is addressing other, complex issues with a similar directness.
Having reviewed some of the great strengths of MIT, it is also worth noting at least one of our ongoing, and largely unresolved, problems. As I have noted in earlier columns, almost every faculty member I speak with reports feeling stretched across too many obligations. No one thing stands out as taking too much time; rather it is the sum of small time demands that collectively taxes us and divides our time into ever smaller increments. In a metaphorical sense, our available time is being "nibbled to death by ducks."
Many of the things we most want, such as increased interactions with our students and a greater sense of an MIT-wide community that involves us in the non-academic lives of our students, simply cannot be accomplished without freeing up more time in our crowded schedules. The growing demands for faculty members' time and attention also threaten our ability to think deeply about our research and teaching. At the extreme, they have the potential to slowly undermine almost everything that has made the Institute great.
It is one of my few regrets that we haven't made real progress on this issue, so as outgoing Chair, I humbly bequeath it, along with a batch of other, still pending problems, to Steve Graves. May you also find being Chair as fascinating and rewarding as I have.
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