Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
Published by the MIT News Office at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
Noble Drops Tenure Lawsuit Former MIT Associate Professor David Noble has dismissed his lawsuit against MIT. The dismissal order was signed March 5 by Judge James McHugh of Middlesex Superior Court. In the lawsuit, Dr. Noble had sought reinstatement with full tenure and $1.5 million because the tenured faculty of the Program for Science, Technology and Society voted not to recommend him for tenure. In dismissing his claims, Dr. Noble will get neither money nor reinstatement. In approving the dismissal, President Charles M. Vest said that he had accepted Dr. Noble's suggestion of an internal faculty committee to look at some of the issues raised by Dr. Noble, in preference to MIT spending scarce resources on a trial. Dr. Vest also said he was pleased that Judge McHugh had adopted a procedure for reviewing requests from evaluators to preserve the confidentiality of evaluations in Dr. Noble's tenure file. Dr. Vest declined further comment on the case, other than to express his confidence in the integrity of the STS faculty and their deliberations on Dr. Noble's tenure application. Dr. Noble was a faculty member at MIT from 1978 to 1984. In 1983, while on leave as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., he applied for tenure at MIT. He was not granted tenure in February, 1984, and instituted the lawsuit against MIT in 1986. Dr. Noble is now a tenured faculty member in the department of history at Drexel University in Philadelphia.