And I had to look them up to make sure I'd remembered their meanings correctly.

The Big Lie, if what everyone is saying about Harvard and MIT's joint edX project properly handling their courses correctly is true, is confounding that with MIT Open CourseWare (OCW) "best effort" offerings which we've had the deaf "aldordeah" helpfully confirm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9042399 (OCW's remit was to publish materials useful to other teachers, with things like self-learning gravy).

Things like, from their PR:

“Online content represents the next frontier for learning and lifelong education,” said Howard A. Rosenblum, NAD’s CEO. “Yet both Harvard and MIT betray their legendary leadership in quality education by denying access to approximately 48 million Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing. All they have to do is provide accurate captioning to such online educational content, yet they provide no or inaccurate captioning which is contrary to these schools’ ideals of excellence and service to all.”

"Betray" is a very strong word, just the sort of thing to provoke an angry reaction.

Then there's the fact that they don't actually call out any specific online courses for not having captioning (which unless OCW has been spending a lot of their money in their new mode on this should have been trivial), but stuff of much less importance, of course leading with a discussion of the holy Brown v. Board of Education, as well as e.g. Bill Gates and Chomsky talking.

Then there's the criticism of the quality of what appears to be Youtube auto-captioning of videos of nothingburger Lady Gaga and Obama visits placed on official Harvard and MIT Youtube channels. Unlike the 3rd example of the President of Liberia talking about Ebola at a Harvard Political Institute event, the only sane thing for institutions to do with the former sorts of events is to not publish them in any form with audio on any venue.

That, plus a lot of the wording, including stuff you incorrectly assume implies that "that these schools were given the resources to "build a ramp" and just decided not to", is clearly designed to provoke an angry reaction. As I've detailed elsewhere, MIT's Open CourseWare was explicitly not "given" the resources to do that, nor do I remember it being part of their fundraising appeals. And I hope you're not claiming Harvard, let alone the much less wealthy MIT, were given the resources to properly caption video of every vacuous celebrity who visits.

If you want, I seem to remember there are more lies that I can detail, but seeing as it not just made me angry, but enraged me after a close reading.... Although see e.g. their gross overstatement of how many people are truly blocked from hearing these soundtracks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9042760 Not 48 million, "U Gallaudet itself estimates that the percentage of people with severe hearing loss in the US is 2%, half of whom are over 64. Functionally deaf people account for 0.4% of the US population." per SeanLuke.

Especially if you understand that endowment does not equal arbitrarily spendable wealth, the vast majority of gifts are earmarked.

And I suppose it's time again to make the disclaimer that I'm MIT Class of '83 and donate to OCW.