Commencement 2025: From a 50-year perspective
Jim Zaorski ’80 reflects on the turbulence of the 2025 OneMIT Commencement Ceremony
Forty-nine years ago this September, I arrived on campus and with great delight I learned that my freshman advisor was to be none other than then MIT president, Dr. Jerome Wiesner. In other words, I’d won the lottery. I was surprised that despite being a man of immense achievement and responsibility, Dr. Wiesner also found the time to take a personal interest in all four of his freshmen advisees. He invited us to his home on several occasions and always inquired about our experiences and academic progress.
Also surprising to me for someone in his role, Dr. Wiesner seemed to be a rather taciturn man. He needed to be coaxed into speaking among strangers. It took a lot of effort to get him to reveal his rationale for choosing to march with students against the Vietnam War despite the fact that a large part of the Institute’s revenues at the time came from defense and government sources. As those who knew Dr. Wiesner can attest, some of his most prescient pronouncements would emerge, almost imperceptibly, from the barrel of his pipe. These quietly revealed his humanity and razor-sharp wit.
A few years later, I was lucky enough to take a course with Dr. Noam Chomsky, likely the leading ethicist of our time. Through classic essays like “Manufacturing Consent,” Dr. Chomsky warned of the dangers of “believing everything you hear.” Most of Dr. Chomsky’s lectures were only barely comprehensible to this 20-year-old aspiring mechanical engineer. Still, they proved well worth the extra effort to unravel and piece together over the course of the week.
Fast forward twenty-five years to my class’s 25th reunion. That day I had the privilege to sit next to recently installed MIT president Dr. Susan Hockfield at the reunion luncheon. Dr. Hockfield was ebullient. She had just learned that, for the first time ever, MIT had attracted a plurality of the top women scholars in the country. She candidly attributed MIT’s success to Harvard president’s Larry Summers, now infamous, misstep declaring that there might be “issues of intrinsic aptitude” that might explain the achievement gap in the sciences between the sexes. In my view, although Dr. Hockfield might have been partially correct in her assessment, I personally believe that a lot of credit for this, and many subsequent MIT recruitment victories, should go to the MIT Corporation at the time for having the courage and foresight to appoint our first woman president. The appointment sent a signal to the world. And as I see it, the world has responded disproportionately.
To an outsider, MIT since Dr. Hockfield’s appointment focus has gradually broadened and become less compartmentalized. Interdisciplinary programs have flourished, producing many unforeseen results and opportunities.
Twenty years later, the changes wrought by that Board’s broader vision are evident everywhere. Our Media Lab is a model used by other universities to embrace integrating technologies. The D-Lab is respected worldwide. Kendall Square has been transformed into a worldwide biotech hub of collaboration and innovation.
While 50 years ago it might have been inarguable that MIT was one of the top science and engineering institutions in the country, today, it is equally indisputable that the Institute is one of the world’s top universities, period. As such, it continually attracts some of the world’s best scholars.
This turn of events could be construed as a self-perpetuating cycle. Still, I think we need to be mindful that the future existence of this positive feedback loop is by no means guaranteed. The powerful engine that many have worked exhaustively to develop will always require a constant supply of the best and the brightest to continue to push the frontiers of what is possible.
As I see it, aspiring academic athletes must not only recognize that MIT is not only a good place to develop their skills, they must also viscerally know that the Institute will always put a premium on protecting them personally while providing them with the latitude to explore and express their ideas. If the Institute cannot provide this, the world’s top academic athletes will most assuredly find another place that does.
We live in troubled times. As engineers, doctors, economists, professors, and scientists we have become very concerned that scientific analysis and process have been ignored, and often are often disparaged, for political advantage by individuals of dubious motivations.
At Thursday’s graduation, MIT sent another signal to the world.
From my perspective, it was the wrong one.
I am troubled by President Kornbluth’s pronouncement on Thursday that the “friction of disagreement is a very effective way to sharpen each other’s thinking.”
My discomfort arises not from the plain text of her message, but rather from the message when juxtaposed with the Institute’s subsequent actions of that day – that the Class President was banned from walking at a subsequent degree ceremony.
MIT’s punitive treatment of the 2025 class president for expressing her own opinions causes President Kornbluth’s statement to come off not as a statement affirming academic independence, but rather as calculated, apologetic appeasement, designed to protect the financial interests of the Institute.
While I have been troubled by this turn of events, I am not willing to take the path of some of my peers who have come to conclude that MIT no longer shares their personal values. They have decided that they can no longer justify continuing to financially and emotionally support it.
MIT has been too important to my personal development as both a student and as a person for me to ever abandon it. While this path has sometimes been rocky, I will always be grateful to it for the things the Institute has given me and the opportunities that it has afforded.
I view the Institute and its community as a family. Families work out problems together and move forward. I am hopeful that given time and reflection, that MIT will regain its footing and once again embark on its mission of not only scientific excellence, but also of academic and world leadership.
In the meantime, I have decided that this year I will do what for me was once unthinkable. I will give half my funds earmarked for academic giving to Harvard University.
I very much believe that many of the things I hold dear are under siege.
My decision to contribute to Harvard is based on the reality that, today, Harvard finds itself in the crosshairs of those who would try to dismantle the protections for free speech, academic freedom, and scientific credibility, seemingly for their own personal enrichment. I much appreciated Harvard’s efforts to continue to speak truth to power regardless of the cost.
Right now, intentionally or unintentionally, Harvard finds itself at the frontline of this battle. I may not agree with all of Harvard's decisions, but I am much more fearful of the prospect where a strategy of "divide and conquer" succeeds than I am fearful of creating the perception that I implicitly agree with all of Harvard's decisions.
(Yes, my decision is somewhat ironic coming from a guy who, in 1979, waded along with other unnamed accomplices through the freezing Charles River to paint a carefully engineered big red "T" on the Harvard dock the night before the Head of the Charles Regatta. My guess is that if you live long enough, you'll likely see everything.)
Sadly, today, resisting power comes with a very, very, steep price.
This said, I would contend that sacrificing one's ideals by appeasing power to avoid conflict, comes with a much larger long-term bill.
I realize I am just one small pail of water in a vast ocean of MIT alumni donors. MIT should hear that very many of us are willing to sacrifice to support it in defense of the fundamental values which we all hold dear. I imagine the same could be said for many students, professors, and staff.
Whether this knowledge will change the current calculus, only time will tell.
Jim Zaorski graduated from MIT with a BS in Mechanical Engineering in 1980 and received his JD from Rutgers University–Camden in 1983. He was founder and CEO of Sequoia Retail Systems from 1984 until it was acquired by Blackboard Inc. in 2016. He has continued to be involved with the MIT community, working with and helping to fund Susan Murcott's clean water projects in Nepal and Ghana, donating to the MIT Climate Clock, and judging and contributing funds to the PKG IDEAS Social Innovation Challenge.