Office of the Vice President of Finance removes access to the Brown Book
In early June, the Office of the Vice President of Finance (VPF) deleted the Report of Sponsored Research Activity, or Brown Book, from their website.
Colin Clark - The Tech
In early June, the Office of the Vice President of Finance (VPF) deleted the Report of Sponsored Research Activity, or Brown Book, from their website. The exact date of the deletion could not be verified. According to the VPF, future issues of the Brown Book will also be discontinued. The Brown Book listed the fiscal contributions of primary and direct research sponsors such as universities, military organizations, government institutions, private businesses, and nonprofits, along with the faculty recipients of these sponsorships.
In a statement from MIT spokesperson Kimberly Allen, the VPF said that the Brown Book’s removal aligns MIT’s financial reporting with “typical practice,” retaining the Institute’s “complian[ce] with federal requirements.” The VPF noted that past Brown Book issues would still be available in the Distinctive Collections archives under the Records Management Program.
On behalf of the VPF, Allen also stated that paid researchers will be able to request the sources of their own funding from their principal investigators (PIs). Furthermore, researchers requesting sources to their funding could refer to lab or personal websites, should these websites choose to disclose funding, or to the funding acknowledgements in papers. MIT Departments, Labs, and Centers are required to retain sponsor records for four financial years after the termination of a sponsorship, but are not obliged to publish them.
Skipper Lynch ’26, a member of MIT Divest — an organization which seeks to divest the Institute’s endowment from fossil fuels — was critical of the change. Lynch wrote that the Brown Book, along with other disclosure processes, is "an essential tool in holding fossil fuel companies accountable for their greenwashing and ensuring the credibility of Institute research.” They referenced a 2022 Nature Climate Change report, which found that compared to less fossil-dependent research centers, fossil-funded centers such as those at MIT, Columbia, and Stanford tend to express more favorable views towards natural gas compared to renewable energy in tweets and reports.
Aaliya Hussain ’25, a former member of MIT Divest and the Coalition Against Apartheid (a pro-Palestinian student group that was suspended from MIT in 2024), drew a comparison to the Media Lab’s concealment of its financial associations with Jeffrey Epstein that culminated in the resignation of former Media Lab Director Joi Ito amidst major scandal. Hussain urged MIT to follow the example of the Vietnam War-era MIT Pounds Panel, which condemned MIT’s “imbalance” towards military sponsorships and recommended “intimate involvement of faculty and students” in “non-academic public service.” Hussain said that the Panel, while flawed, “represented a far more honest and open approach to research sponsorship controversies.”
Kyle Williams ’27 used the Brown Book to inform his 24.134 (Experimental Ethics) project and Tech article about pro-Palestinian protests at MIT. He stated that he was neither “surprised nor shocked” about the removal.
Williams also drew a parallel between the VPF’s decision and the Trump administration’s takedown of federal datasets. “Erasure is an all too common tactic of institutions,” Williams said.
A correction was made on July 4, 2025: A previous version of the article misrepresented Lynch's statement. Lynch believes that the Brown Book is a tool for holding fossil fuel companies accountable for biasing research at universities toward industry profit, not for having goals of profit.