This is an amazing takedown by one of Columbia’s own professors. Wow
Perhaps someone at Harvard or MIT can chime in with whether such contentions exist outside of Columbia, but I'm not too surprised to see a professor criticize the school for somewhat blatant wrongdoing.
When I was there they hired older, very experienced police officers who were looking for a good, not normally intense final job for their career. So they were generally understanding and fit into the culture.
Aaron Swartz was an entirely different thing. Instead of hammering JSTOR from his own institution of Harvard to the point it blocked the whole campus, he disguised himself demonstrating mens rea, a guilty mind, let himself into a machine room and left behind the laptop to do his act of civil disobedience or whatever. And then proved chronically depressed people have no business committing such crimes. From beginning to end he demonstrated ill intent towards MIT.
The extreme competition seems to be overtaking all of the elites. MIT is the #1 university brand in the world, but it spent most of its integrity and soul to get there.
There's a fine line you need to walk to become a faculty member at elite schools.
You need to lie a little on grant applications to align when you want to do to what will be funded. You need to lie a little bit in publications so they have impact. You need to fight for credit, sometimes on work you didn't do. As these become normalized, winners do these more and more; otherwise, you won't get that faculty job.
The culture slowly trickles down. I think most grad students at MIT are still honest, but not the most successful ones (most of the ones who find faculty jobs are at least a little bit crooked). Second-tier school faculty slots are filled with graduates of first-tier schools.
MIT has a traditional hacking culture which emphasizes breaking rules. This worked well when this involved climbing on rooftops, but it works less well when the endowment is O($100M) per faculty member, and there's money to embezzle through complex corporate schemes and financial games.
Contentions don't exist too much between faculty and admin right now, but they definitely do between students and Institute. MIT grad students are working to unionize, and the Institute, to union-bust.
While this might be true, I suspect the statistics are not that different from the general population.
There's something which extreme competition does which breaks that, both by whom it selects, and by how it changes culture. MIT a quarter-century ago was much more honest than MIT today. Peer institutions -- one stop down -- are also still much more honest, although I suspect that will change in a decade or two.
The same change happened in several of MIT's peer schools.
Big SaaS providers offered us 40k each to get on board with some all-in Cloud offerings. I'd bet my hat some of the offshore IT companies we used were throwing kickbacks to Ops Managers.
Not speculation, either -- there were executives fired for such things. One set up a shell company and was billing it for consulting services to the tune of 400k per year. He got busted and probably faced charges, probably.
The competition needed to be an executive at a F500 multinational extreme. There are many good studies on the topic, from "Dictator's Handbook" to "Power." The latter should be read with a grain of salt, but has helpful insights.
Elected politicians -- above some level -- operate under analogous constraints too. If you don't take an election donation in return for political favors, your opponent will.
I think the decline of the integrity of MIT (as for executives and politicians) became inevitable once competition and $$$ reached a certain threshold.
Nah. Maybe 15 years ago.
There's a #1:
https://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings
Now I'm faculty at a reasonably good university in Europe, and obviously MIT is a fantastic place and I'd probably give a finger to get a tenured job there. But I think Harvard/Oxford/Princeton/Stanford have slightly eclipsed MIT in pure brand power. Stanford especially gets more of a 'wow!' reaction these days.
By the late nineties, MIT research was just past its peak. Peer reputation peaked then or a little bit later. The general public was just starting to notice it existed.
In the 2010's, MIT research quality and integrity was in freefall. General public noticed MIT was #1, perhaps a half-century after-the-fact. Peer reputation was just past the peak.
I expect it will take another 10-30 years before the general public notices MIT has declined.
Stanford gets a "Wow" reaction for entrepreneurship more so than research.
I definitely wouldn't give a finger to be at MIT or Stanford. Of the ones you'd mentioned, Princeton, I think I'd be pretty happy at. If I had my druthers, though, I'd pick a school which is on the rise, basically where MIT was in the sixties or eighties. Mostly, I want a place which has a lot of freedom, integrity, and an open, accepting culture. Georgia Tech seems like a decent place right now. Yale would be nice. ASU would be a uniquely good fit. There are a few state schools I like too.
Schools in Europe are a mixed bag. I've considered going to a less-well-known school in one of the poorer countries in Europe, where there are smart people, and where I could buy a home for cash, and have the perfect freedom of being independently wealthy. If you're at MIT or Stanford, you need to do consulting, startups, or similar to have a decent standard of living, and that brings a pile of conflicts-of-interest. Entry level mortgage requires $200k+ in income in either of those housing markets, which is more than junior faculty are paid. Tenured faculty -- including consulting and outside interests -- make a mint.
The humanities? Like education? Where MIT acquired a bunch of IP through fraud, lies, and sometimes intimidation, bundled it up into edX, and sold it for $800M, with money lining the pockets of well-positioned faculty members?
Or Stanford? With their school of ed? Baking data to support politically-popular causes, and gaining "impact" when fraudulent research is adopted by virtue of reinforcing what teachers want to hear, with the only victims being the students?
Yeah. Please. Do some research and come back another time.
If you want high-integrity ed research, you can look towards ASU, WPI, or many other schools one tier down in brand, and two tiers up in integrity.
There is one of the humanities disciplines that MIT has been excellent in for several decades... if you don't know which one it is, then you don't know as much as you think you do.
(As I said, 'integrity' isn't really an issue in my discipline. Outside possible plagiarism, I guess. Another way in which your rant was a bit silly.)
Also, ASU and WPI one tier down in brand from MIT? Dream on, try three or four tiers.
https://cehd.gmu.edu/assets/docs/faculty/tenurepromotion/ins...
MIT, ASU, and WPI are all on this list. MIT and ASU are both R1, while WPI is R2.
As a footnote, elitism isn't a good look either, at least in 2022. I had that look when I was affiliated with the elites, and I believed it too.
I'm at somewhere way less prominent than either, but even I can see that there are way more than 1 prestige tiers between MIT and ASU.
But of far greater concern is your bizarre condescending tone. You even told me to do my research. Are you an antivaxxer?
There are plans in the works to fix these infrastructure issues but the timeline is frustratingly long.
I don't know too much about NYC development, but Manhattanville seems somewhat unambitious in height, I don't know if that was the limit to Columbia's air rights or what, but it seems like a waste of limited footprint.
I can't speak to any run-down labs, but regarding cramped working conditions -- space is just always going to be at a premium in Manhattan. Arguably Columbia is going above and beyond to acquire more space by opening up the Manhattanville campus [0,1,2].
In general, when academics complain about things, I take it with a grain of salt. Having said that, I don't doubt for a minute that the administration juked the stats to get a better USN&W ranking.
[0] (https://neighbors.columbia.edu/news/robert-fullilove-appoint...
[1] https://www.stirworld.com/see-features-twin-buildings-with-s...
[2] https://ny.eater.com/2022/2/22/22939502/columbia-jerome-gree...