<story><title>Dava Newman Named Director of MIT Media Lab</title><url>https://news.mit.edu/2020/media-lab-director-newman-1222</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xhkkffbf</author><text>Could I ask you to enumerate, now that we&amp;#x27;ve had the distance of time, just what went wrong? As best I can tell, Ito wasn&amp;#x27;t guilty of doing rogue fundraising. The President of the University signed off -- literally -- on the gifts.&lt;p&gt;The other folks who were angry struck me as particularly odd. The best was the visiting researcher who announced that he wasn&amp;#x27;t coming back after his contract was over -- and pretended that he was somehow quitting or making a statement or virtue signaling.&lt;p&gt;So can you explain what I&amp;#x27;m missing?</text></item><item><author>CJefferson</author><text>[deleted]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>woofie11</author><text>Well, Joi Ito came forward, apologized, and showed remorse, so he got canned. Seth Lloyd came forward, apologized, and showed extreme remorse, so he got severely disciplined. All the folks who went to Epstein&amp;#x27;s island and partook of the girls didn&amp;#x27;t even get mentioned in the &amp;quot;Factfinding report.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The sin seems to be coming forward and apologizing.&lt;p&gt;I know I&amp;#x27;ll get down-voted for this by MIT fanbois, but if you&amp;#x27;d like to find photos of MIT faculty on Epstein&amp;#x27;s island, you&amp;#x27;ll find at least a half-dozen on archive.org for Epstein&amp;#x27;s various charities.&lt;p&gt;MIT CSAIL shut down its mailing list because someone had the gall to raise the issue of Minsky, not so much because Minsky did anything wrong (he probably didn&amp;#x27;t), but because Minsky was conspicuously absent from Factfinding too. Have at it:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;factfindingjan2020.mit.edu&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;factfindingjan2020.mit.edu&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have a lot of insider information, but I&amp;#x27;m only mentioning things which are public record at this point. A lot of people did a lot of wrong. The only ones who were punished were the ones who came forward.&lt;p&gt;Stepping beyond public record, lots of NDAs and non-disparage agreements at MIT now... MIT is a cesspool of corruption these days. And yes, if you went to MIT and care about MIT, you should NOT be donating money. That leads to more corruption. You should be pushing for it to clean up, although it seems too late for that...</text></comment>
<story><title>Dava Newman Named Director of MIT Media Lab</title><url>https://news.mit.edu/2020/media-lab-director-newman-1222</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xhkkffbf</author><text>Could I ask you to enumerate, now that we&amp;#x27;ve had the distance of time, just what went wrong? As best I can tell, Ito wasn&amp;#x27;t guilty of doing rogue fundraising. The President of the University signed off -- literally -- on the gifts.&lt;p&gt;The other folks who were angry struck me as particularly odd. The best was the visiting researcher who announced that he wasn&amp;#x27;t coming back after his contract was over -- and pretended that he was somehow quitting or making a statement or virtue signaling.&lt;p&gt;So can you explain what I&amp;#x27;m missing?</text></item><item><author>CJefferson</author><text>[deleted]</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghaff</author><text>&amp;gt;Ito wasn&amp;#x27;t guilty of doing rogue fundraising&lt;p&gt;He sort of was. I don&amp;#x27;t remember all the details but he apparently deliberately obscured where the money was coming from.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;The President of the University signed off&lt;p&gt;As I recall, he did sign a routine thank you letter but it was a committee of three people in treasurer&amp;#x27;s office who actually OKd it. Two had already left and the EVP of finance resigned to do a pursue other interests sort of thing, presumably because he saw the writing on the wall.&lt;p&gt;I would guess it was a very near thing for Reif but he didn&amp;#x27;t quite have his fingerprints on it.</text></comment>