Thanks! The hypocrisy is what stands out to me; other than that — I'm not donating any money to MIT either.

The real issue here is where the educational institutions get their money from, and how they spend the money they get.

Undergraduate admission systems are so deeply flawed that changing admission criteria does nothing, I feel: there's always a way to fine-tune them to get or exclude any demographic. I feel like the first step to addressing the disparity is making higher education free to begin with.

I'm on board with the idea of taking background into account, I'm just too pessimistic about the universities not twisting anything we come up with.

I agree with what you are saying (though the conclusion that "skin color has nothing to do with advantages" is flawed; you should look at where white people with background comparable to those of Nigerian immigrants end up). It's a data science question, and "skin color" has a nonzero weight.

Rephrase it as "skin color alone doesn't determine advantages or disadvantages, and comes after socioeconomic status" — and I don't think you'll find much disagreement; the idea that poor black people and poor white people have much more in common than the poor and the rich is the reason why the rich have been fueling racial tensions hundreds of years ago (divide and conquer). But the consequences of such divisions last a while.

But it doesn't seem like that is really what the authors of the original post care about anyway.

Say, firing of the chaplain who felt the need to issue a piblic comment on a tragedy that made the entire institution look stupid.

If I start talking about how deeply the entire education system is flawed — including the admission criteria — I'll be here for a very, very long time. I got a PhD in math, left academia for a software job, and am currently trying to figure out how to teach without being a cog in the education complex. My partner left after getting on the tenure track.

The amount of structural problems in our education is so immense, that "wokeness" (the way they think it's a problem) in general — and whatever is going on at MIT in particular — is so, so insignificant in comparison that I don't even know where to start.

And the virtue signaling and hubris of the two nincompoops that feel they're influencing the system by withholding their donations (tsk tsk, they never say how big they were anywau) is as astounding as the noise they make is insignificant.

If we want to have some straight talk, we need to start with federal funding of K12 education (having it tied to local/property taxes is oprressive by design).

We need to have national standards (please support common core — it's the only thing happening that doesn't make me want to pull my hair off).

We need not just free higher education, we need stipends to support the students while they are studying (hard to study when you have nowhere to live and nothing to eat).

Then, after all of that, we can start looking into admission criteria.

Elite private colleges are pretty open about not having fair admission: your parents went there — you're favored; that's a criterion they consider without shame.

Such institutions may not receive any taxpayer money.

But our state-funded schools have completely opaque admission criteria too, and funding subject to the whims of boards that have nothing to do with education. Case in point: the university my partner taught in thought of shutting down their physics department, citing too few majors produced as the reason, even though the department brought more in tuition and research grants than was ever spent on it.

The real reason was that the board who appointed the decision makers in a red rural state didn't like eggheads who don't vote for them.

It was a huge scandal, but the staff was powerless.

The rabbit holes of who is actually in control of how, what, and whom we teach go so deep, that thinking that any single issue is going to doom (or un-doom) or education is naïve at best.

Which is why I'm so pissed with these two fools.

As someone who's spent years actually teaching, I find the audacity of them saying "goodbye" to anything — and people, for some reason, caring about it! — both sad and amusing.

>What will happen when the universities stop being the leaders of free thought?

The late 1980s.

It's kind of hard to truly destroy a system where at the bottom level, people actually care about free thought, and are willing to work for slave wages (i.e. adjunct salaries) to keep it going, but boy have we succeeded a lot in turning universities into glorified trade schools.

>most will agree the great things Western civilization has achieved over the centuries mostly comes from our respect for free speech and free thought

I think Giordano Bruno might have disagreed, but that's a whole another conversation :)