this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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MIT Shut Down Internal Grant Database After It Was Used to Research School’s Israel Ties (theintercept.com)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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The Israeli Ministry of Defense has poured more than $3.7 million into developing warfare technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2015, according to a recent report from students and faculty organizing against the war in Gaza.

The report was published last month by the MIT Coalition for Palestine, which represents 19 student and faculty groups on campus, including MIT Divest, MIT Jews for Collective Liberation, and MIT Faculty and Staff for Palestine.

After the student organizers began further probing grant information, the school took down the grant software used for the coalition’s research, said Rich Solomon, a member and MIT graduate student who worked on the report. “MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda in order to silence and suppress this information,” Solomon told The Intercept.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Could academia today be seen in the future in a similar light as we look at the medieval church? It was the gatekeeper of philosophical education (largely on classist principles), to things like literacy, and used humanity’s curiosity and hunger for knowledge as a carrot on a stick to buy into an oppressive status quo.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Other than the medieval church, global academia has the fundamentals right, imho. The methods are flawed but the general goal is the right one.

The problem in the US is not a fundamental flaw in academia, but lack of political understanding that a state benefits from educated citizens and fundamental research that isn't immediately monetisable. That resulted in this weird situation, where the most prestigious facilities are just sport centers with a side hustle in education.

In the future the methods of today's global research will more likely be seen as something like greek philosophers. The goal of generating knowledge was right. The method of just writing down what your two remaining neurons, that haven't drowned in wine yet, produced and never verifying it, was... let's call it flawed from a modern perspective.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That resulted in this weird situation, where the most prestigious facilities are just sport centers with a side hustle in education.

When the football coach is paid literally actually 100 times or more what the average professor is paid, we've royally fucked up our priorities. Coaches are making millions per year while adjunct professors are struggling to make ends meet. It's disgusting.

Edited to add: the head football coach at my undergrad university makes 9 MILLION, PER YEAR. And his current contract runs through 2029. Let's also not discuss how most of these contracts require they keep getting paid even if they're fired for poor performance. Meanwhile, annual mean wage for a professor is like 80-90k.