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Comment by shawn-butler | Hacker News Reader

I am removing MIT as a benefactor from my will and ceasing donations to the alumni association. I will not reconsider until the institution provides a full accounting and takes responsibility for the actions of its legal counsel in deciding to refer the matter to federal authorities.

If you are a current member of the student body or faculty you have a lot more power than me. Please read about this matter and learn what your institution chose to do on your behalf and take some action fully in the spirit of MIT to reclaim what it has lost.

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I just wrote an email to admissions@mit.edu indicating that I will dissuade my children from attending, and that I will bring up this matter repeatedly throughout my life to dissuade others as well. Being an "innocent bystander" is not true innocence.

I'd be interested to know what people were expecting from MIT (and would also like a public statement).

The dockets (1) suggest MIT made the poor (perhaps incidental?) decision to involve the Secret Service, at which point the evidence became part of a federal investigation.

I think the paragraph about MIT's "tepid" interest in the investigation is telling.

(1) http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N46/swartz/swartz-suppress1.pdf http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N46/swartz/swartz-suppress2.pdf

For what it's worth, if you're looking for another place to put your money, Aaron appreciated the work that Givewell (givewell.org) is doing. It's worth investigating how you can support them and the charities they endorse.

Hopefully there's a successful civil suit against the Institute, with funds going to Givewell.

On what grounds? That they reported a crime, that lead to an overzealous prosecution even after JSTOR said they had no interest in pressing charges, that may or may not have been the reason, or a reason, someone took their life.

People here and in other friends are discussing what they consider a blatant misuse of the law. To my mind, attempting to sue MIT for responsibility in Swartz's death would be a similar misuse.

What is MIT's tort? Investigating a repeat hacker violating physical building and network security?

Yeah, in reality they probably don't have any. They referred a minor crime to an overzealous federal agency who had it in for the guy. To Godwin this thread, they would have reported Anne Frank for trespassing to the Nazis. Perfectly legal, but if they had full knowledge of what would result, perfectly immoral as well.

They will never see another dime or kind word from me, though.

This is clearly out of my purview, but why in the world would you have an institution as a beneficiary unless it's one you control? Are they really that accomplished at brainwashing people?

You aren't going to control any institution after you are dead. The best you can do is pick one that you feel you can trust.

Okay, poorly worded on my part. I was thinking more in line with Gates leaving everything to the Gates Foundation.

My brain can't reconcile why someone would want to donate to something that already takes money from people in return for services. Kinda like the onion half-headline: "Man Has Alarming Level Of Pride In Institution That Left Him $50,000 In Debt."

I don't know MIT's specific financial situation, but my impression was that, while tuition covers a great many things such as salaries and programs, every academic institution is dependent on generous endowments in order to pursue large capital projects and initiatives. Hence, why many stadiums are named after their donors.

Remember that some of those donations go to scholarships/etc so that there may be a reason for reciprocity. (That being said-it doesn't really seem to exist in Australia. I've never been contacted by my old university (a Gof8) and asked for donations.

There's some in Australia who do. UWA telephones & writes to me every year for donations to their Alumni fund - this year they even invited past students to a cocktail party called "A Celebration Of Giving". I don't donate anymore but did once in the past, specifically because the funds went towards scholarships.

Go dedicate a year to read about a small fraction of MIT's contributions to the world, and then post an update to your comment. We aren't talking about ITT or U of Phoenix here.

Not that it is any of your business but because I have no children and the education of future generations is about the most important thing there is to me. What is important to you?

Thanks for trolling me. I will try and make your contribution positive by reminding readers that if they lack a will with benefactors or executors with real world power, the state generally takes everything often ignoring legal documents you leave behind.

No intent to troll here. I was just curious, seeing as I hold my academic institution in such high contempt.

Now that you mention it, I'm not sure where I would leave any form of wealth I had. My first intuition would be needy organizations of some sort (cancer/hiv/troubled youth--and there's always hackerdojo). Intelligence finds a way. I'm not too worried about the world on that front.

I'm glad you took a few minutes to think about it. Even if you are not wealthy it helps focus on what is valuable.

Regarding your bad experience it sounds like you weren't able to make the best out of your time and maybe your school failed in some respect. I find universities valuable because they are basically reincarnated every 4 or 5 years. They exist and function as an expression of the values of the students and to a lesser extent the faculty hired in that time. I simply cannot fathom how the Institute in any incarnation that I have been involved with would set out to destroy a productive community member for something so inane. Perhaps handle it internally but to ask for a formal prosecution? Something is really broken and I hope it is brought to light before the institution fails its students further.

I find universities valuable because they are basically reincarnated every 4 or 5 years.

Ah ha! That's where we differ.

My university experience made me feel it was a huge cancerously-growing bureaucracy that doesn't really want to change. A huge bureaucracy with draconian rules whose goals were to never inconvenience any employee of the university at the expense of student time and frustration.

[[ At one point, they threatened to suspend my registration privileges because I WWW::Mechanize-automated my registration against their crappy web registration system. They kept telling me I was a horrible person for violating the "honor code" and "computer use policy" and I had no recourse but to write a lengthy letter of apology before they allowed me to register again. fun times. ]]

They kept telling me I was a horrible person for violating the "honor code" and "computer use policy" and I had no recourse but to write a lengthy letter of apology before they allowed me to register again. fun times.

I bet it would've been fun if you'd automated that, too, using a Markov chain.

"Not that it is any of your business"

If you don't want people to read and comment on something, maybe don't bring it up to them, hm? It's not trolling to continue a conversation about your will that you began.

Also, shaming someone for asking a reasonable question with "I will try and make your contribution positive" seemed deliberately offensive. It's not clear to me why you lashed out at that person as though they were prying into a private matter, when you opened the discussion on it.

I would agree with your comment except that seiji used the derogatory term, "brainwash," to refer to an activity that shawn-butler clearly chose to participate in. This frames the conversation in a very negative light (it was quite unnecessary), and it's not surprising that shawn-butler's response was not entirely positive. I thought the reply showed appropriate restraint.

I agree that that seemed a poor choice of word, but the term doesn't seem deliberately pejorative to me.

Good for you. Shaming, ostracizing, removal of support are all effective. Even better is that you remind others to do the same.

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