Catching up on the mail I read through the latest Technology Review, MIT’s alumni magazine. Things are far worse than feared. One letter calculates the cost of the $283 million new computer science building as $17 million in 1916 dollars. The main buildings, which are enormous by comparison, were completed in 1916 at a cost of $7 million.
Much more depressing than the backwards slide of the American construction industry in terms of efficiency is an article about Chuck Vest’s 14 years running MIT. The article touches briefly on Vest’s achievements in increasing research funds between 1990 and 2003, which sound very impressive due to the lack of inflation-adjustment (the actual increase in 2003 dollars was from $430 million to $472 million). Nothing having to do with innovation in research or education is mentioned. If the article is accurate, Vest’s major focuses turned out to have been
- fighting with the Federal Government over MIT’s price-fixing arrangement with the Ivy League colleagues. This agreement was predicted to be illegal by Stanford, which refused to join the cartel, and deemed illegal by a Federal District Court Judge but we ultimately beat the rap in the Court of Appeals (see my tuition-free MIT article for more)
- studying the extent to which female faculty members had less lab space than male faculty members and whether this was due to discrimination
- pursuing sex- and race-based discrimination in student admissions and faculty recruitment and promoting such discrimination nationwide in briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court in affirmative action cases
I guess Phil Sharp, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist who turned the job down is feeling pretty good about his decision to stay in the lab.
The only encouraging news in the magazine concerned Erika Ebbel, MIT Class of 2004 in Chemistry, who as Miss Massachusetts will compete in the Miss America pageant on September 18.
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