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Comment by kough | Hacker News Reader

Just another sign of the continuing corporatization of MIT (and the rest of academia). Our Dean of Students is now a Vice President, in line with our "peer institutions." At the end of the day, MIT is a corporation, and exists to make money, but it's incredibly irritating when administrators refuse to admit this to students, and frame all debates without that context. "These changes are to make us more similar to our peer institutions" = "we want to make more money".

If anyone here is an MIT alum (or boardmember!), please considering getting in touch with current students and seeing how you can help. At this point it's pretty clear we have no voice on campus.

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The criticism should be directed at the concept of a corporation itself, then at making more money. It's not just the profit motive, it's the discourse and the tools that go around it that are even more of a problem. For instance short term thinking, price cutting, the management and employee hierarchy. Focus on form rather than function in terms of concepts like professionalism (or better labeled as a psychological disorder of forcing people to act like machines).

The whole way that we think about these things needs reform. Corporations are machines for distributing power to a certain group of people who are in touch with the capital owners, the shareholders rather than the stakeholders. This is usually at the detriment of everyone involved, other than the shareholders and their managers. The ultimate goal of such arrangement is for the reduction of the power, well-being, happiness, and contentment of the stakeholders for the financial benefit of the shareholders.

> reduction of power, well-being, and happiness

I love you, but this is not quite right. The goal is to addict the stakeholders to participation and then reduce their support as low as possible. Power, well-being, and happiness of stakeholders are parceled out in order to maximize addiction while minimizing resources spent.

Can you give more detail? I'm an alum ('10) who was majorly involved in student government but now have little insight into what's going on.

I'm not that plugged in myself, but send me an email (username @ mit) and I can put you in touch with someone in the know.

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