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Can it be true that the MIT community is largely uninterested in one of today’s most serious threats to academic freedom and the long tradition of open communication in academia?
That’s the impression that Boston Globe science writer Richard A. Knox got when he attended an all-day colloquium held in Kresge Auditorium on March 29. His story the next day quoted one of the meeting’s speakers, Lita Nelsen, head of the MIT Technology Licensing Office, as remarking that "It’s astonishing how few faculty are at this meeting."
A principal speaker, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, referred to the conference, which was designed to launch a nationwide discussion of the issues, as "a momentous academic initiative." Knox duly reported that statement and added his own observation: "But the sparse attendance left in doubt how many academic researchers would agree."
As three of the organizers of this colloquium, we share Knox’s doubt about whether the Institute’s faculty, students, and administrators take this issue as seriously as we believe they should and as all of the event’s 15 other speakers did.
The colloquium, jointly sponsored by MIT and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was intended to explore the influence of restrictions on communication of scientific findings imposed by industry and government on universities, where open discourse and scientific exchange has been held, at least theoretically, to be a primary credo. Along with Moynihan, who recently wrote a book entitled Secrecy, speakers included MIT Institute Professor John Deutch, a former director of the CIA, who declared that there should be no secrecy on campuses. Also on the program were MIT Chairman Alex D’Arbeloff; President Charles Vest; Institute Professor Sheila Widnall, a former secretary of the U.S. Air Force; and Robert Cook-Deegan, director of the National Cancer Policy Board of the National Academy of Sciences. The closing speaker was Mary Good, president-elect of the AAAS. Other distinguished speakers and two panel discussions with a wide variety of experts rounded out the day’s program.
The issues were deemed important enough that some two dozen journalists from daily newspapers, wire services, scientific journals and other trade publications covered the meeting, some flying in from the West Coast for the event.
However, it seemed that the vast majority of our faculty, administrators, and students had other priorities than participating in this "momentous academic initiative." It is not as if the event itself was a secret. For several weeks beforehand, hundreds of posters blanketed the campus and plans for the meeting were described in a front-page article in Tech Talk. The event was even "spotlighted" for several days on the Institute’s home page.
Thus, the poor attendance of MIT people cannot likely be blamed on lack of awareness. We sought to provoke a national discussion of the pervasive and perverse influence of secrecy in our academic institutions. We had not anticipated that so few at MIT would come hear about these important issues. Perhaps the underlying reason for poor MIT attendance may be even more dismaying than the organizers realized.
Can it be that the MIT community is simply not interested in issues that do not directly affect our individual work on a day-to-day basis? Is the pressure for the next experiment, the next publication, the next grant, the next meeting, the next problem set so severe that many of us have become blind to the possibility that academicians are losing their freedom to communicate research findings openly? Can it be that we are so preoccupied with our own work that we are losing a sense of community?
As evidence for this interpretation, we point to the low attendance at faculty meetings, where a quorum is often difficult to reach and sometimes meetings are cancelled. Perhaps MIT’s size and complexity make it no longer possible to maintain the illusion of a cohesive community discussing and sharing ideals of academic freedom and responsibility.
We write to alert MIT’s administrators, faculty, and students to this concern and to suggest that we find ways to work together to create a better sense of community that can reverse this apparent trend toward fragmentation. If the pursuit of individual career goals overwhelms other values, then new generations of leaders in technical fields – the students we are teaching and supporting now – can hardly be expected to contribute to a healthy society that will be responsive to the true needs of our nation’s citizens as a whole.
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