Today’s Globe includes its heavily promoted MIT supplement, a glossy 43-page advertorialish tribute to the school, which the newspaper usually covers pretty well. Produced by the features department, the supplement was written by some of the paper’s fine feature, science and business staff.
It looks like something you would give out at graduation, with ads that say things like “Congratulations to MIT on 150 years of Influencing the World.” (The bath fixture and patio furniture ads skip the histrionics.)
And MIT didn’t even have to pay for it. The school did take out a full-page ad – a chunk of text with highlights of President Susan Hockfield’s speech for “MIT’s Next Century Convocation.” Bill Gates has a byline on another full-page tribute, this one illustrated with a drawing of the gazillionaire with the MIT dome — complete with halo —in the background.
Now we know that (#41) MIT scientists “discovered the process that ultimately led to the creation of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan” and (#90) invented Guitar Hero.
We imagine that the steam coming out of the ears at the other end of Mass Ave will soon drown out the ever-present hum of the Kendal Square industrial strength HVAC systems. List all Harvard’s famous grads and discoveries – like anesthesia – and you won’t have any trouble hitting 150.
Don’t get us wrong. We appreciate MIT. (See our numerous 150 birthday posts.) And we love the Globe. (Disclosure -It’s the hand that feeds my family.)
And, not everything the Globe runs about the school has to point out things like temperamental Nobel Prize winner Susumu Tonegawa scaring off a female postdoctoral fellow who was planning to join MIT’s redundant McGovern Institute for Brain Research. That’s what blogs are for.
Number 126: Achoo!
Susumu Tonegawa received a 1987 Nobel Prize for his insights into explaining how our immune system wards off so much disease. He founded the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT.
Nor does it need to point out that Tonegawa’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory was funded with money from one of Bernie Madoff’s beneficiaries or victims, depending on how you want to see it. (Boston’s universities and hospitals are studded with institutes and airy new buildings paid for by Madoff’s winning clients.)
But, the content gets a little silly sometimes, for example, giving the school credit for graduates like George Schultz (Doesn’t he have a Princeton tiger tattoo?), Click and Clack and the former Harvard president Lawrence Summers.
Number 131: Summers in Cambridge
He’s known as the former president of Harvard, but Lawrence Summers is an alum and former MIT professor who was active on the MIT debate team. Oh, he was also U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.
He’s also the guy who in 2005 speculated that “there are issues of intrinsic aptitude,” that may explain why women don’t do as well in the world of science as men.
Too bad they editors couldn’t find one spot in 150 to honor MIT prof Nancy Hopkins, the celebrated biologist who said she felt like running to the bathroom after hearing Summers’ remark. She and other women at MIT were responsible for the 1999 “Report on the Status of Women Faculty of and the School of Science at MIT. That report highlighted the ongoing sexism at MIT and in science in general. Since then, the number of women faculty in the school has doubled. ”https://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/images/documents/women-report-2011.pdf">Find the update here.
We’re sure you’ll find equally advertorialish sections in any number of Nature publications. So, forgive the snark and feel free to call us hypocritical.
And, we’ll say it again: We love MIT too. But, not unconditionally.