Icosian Reflections

…a tendency to systematize and a keen sense

that we live in a broken world.

IN  WHICH Ross Rheingans-Yoo—a sometime quantitative trader, economist, expat, EA, artist, educator, and game developer—writes on topics of int­erest.

Mass Ave, Mt Auburn, and a Tale of Two Schools

Still, this report shows that Harvard could learn a lot from MIT about how to run a university.

Harry Lewis, "The Report Harvard Should Have Asked For", 2013


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Around the time I came to Harvard, both Mass Ave schools were dealing with the fallout of embarrassing, messy institutional mistakes. Both started with relatively small incidents, compounded by administrative decisions that were incredibly contentious during and after the fact.

Harvard's began with the Gov 1310 cheating scandal -- and it escalated when scandal erupted over the administration's search of faculty emails to find which sub-dean had spoken to the press, raising both privacy concerns and unease about the relationship between the faculty and the administration.

MIT's began with the arrest of Aaron Swartz for downloading academic articles from JSTOR -- and escalated over the Institute's complicity with the US Attorney's Office, which many members of the community felt betrayed the school's values.

That fall and spring, I was a freshman overburdened with courses that I could just barely keep up with. I was just barely finding my way around Harvard (and had not yet begun this blog!). But I wanted to understand the community I had joined, so I read commentary on what seemed to be the pressing issues, by people that I had come to respect. Some drew parallels between the questions of identity that faced each school. And I began to piece together a theory -- or at least an understanding -- about the soul of the modern university, at least as it was understood along Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Mass.

Now, I'm a degree-holder on the University's donor rolls, flung some two-hundred miles from Cambridge.

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Burn the Man's Books!

According MIT's Title IX Office, no-longer-Professor-Emeritus Walter Lewin acted in violation of the Institute's sexual harassment and misconduct policy while teaching an online MIT course open to the public. The Institute announced on Tuesday that it has stripped Lewin of Professor-Emeritus status, and will be removing videos of his physics lectures -- which have been called "legendary" -- from MIT OpenCourseWare and MITx.

I accept without question the reports that the charges were extremely serious and that "this wasn't a borderline case", and I agree with my current CS(@MIT) professor Scott Aaronson, as he writes in a recent blog post:

  • [S]exual harassment must never be tolerated, neither here nor anywhere else. But I also feel that, if a public figure is going to be publicly brought down like this (yes, even by a private university), then the detailed findings of the investigation should likewise be made public, regardless of how embarrassing they are.

  • More importantly, I wish to register that I disagree in the strongest possible terms with MIT’s decision to remove Prof. Lewin’s lectures from OpenCourseWare—thereby forcing the tens of thousands of students around the world who were watching these legendary lectures to hunt for ripped copies on BitTorrent.


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Again, I believe that MIT President Rafael Reif speaks correctly when he says, in the Institute's initial press release:

Students place tremendous trust in their teachers. Deserving that trust is among our most fundamental obligations. We must take the greatest care that everyone who comes to us for knowledge and instruction, whether in classrooms or online, can count on MIT as a safe and respectful place to learn.

To this

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