The always-entertaining Donald Trump
The jury is still out on the question, and they’re likely to be out for a while longer. Despite the fact that Trump has been the Republican frontrunner for months now, some people still can’t wrap their minds around the idea that the real-estate mogul and TV personality has his eye on the Oval Office. The issue as it stands today boils down to this: Is Donald Trump a real presidential candidate with a vision, or is this ultimately a PR stunt?
An FSILG Village would hurt MIT’s Greek system
Over the past year, there has been discussion about transitioning MIT fraternities and sororities stationed in Boston into a “Greek Village” located on West Campus grounds in Cambridge. This concept of an FSILG Village has moved quickly amongst FSILG officials and MIT administrators but has not gained support within the actual Greek community. According to a survey reported on by The Tech, “Of 80 total alumni and student representatives, only five alumni ‘expressed high interest in the project,’ and only five students thought it was at all likely that their living group would be willing to move into an FSILG village.”
Five years after the American Red Cross efforts to rebuild Haiti
Following the January 2010 earthquake that killed over 200,000 Haitians and left more than a million homeless, donations flooded in from governments, financial institutions, and individuals around the world. U.S. households donated a total of more than $1.4 billion, and the American Red Cross raised the most of any charity for the cause: nearly half a billion dollars in the span of a single year.
A farewell to the Class of 2015
Today, new scientists and engineers, economists and financiers, academics and professionals leave MIT and begin their careers, among them many of my closest friends and colleagues. What strikes me most about this time of year is the atmosphere: not the fatalism that follows exam week or the relief at having reached a vacation, but rather a quiet (or not so quiet) sense of anticipation and hope for life beyond the Institute from those convening in Killian.
Abroad, at home
According to recent estimates, 1.65 million American households are now living in “extreme poverty” — trying to survive on less than $2 per person per day — despite the national recovery from recession. The number of such households has doubled since 1996.
Refocusing the Climate Change Conversation
This week, the initial phase of the MIT Climate Change Conversation will conclude with the release of a committee report weighing the pros and cons of actions proposed by the MIT community. A focus of that report will be on divestment of the Institute’s endowment from fossil fuels. Without the early, critical efforts of Fossil Free MIT (FFMIT), the energetic, campus-wide discussion of MIT’s options for climate action would never have begun.
Statistics and the new Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Earlier this semester, Provost Martin Schmidt and the Deans of the five schools announced the establishment of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, headed by Professor Munther Dahleh. This exciting new entity aims to “address societal challenges using analytical tools from statistics and information and decision systems,” and will officially launch on July 1.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
There have been more suicides at MIT this academic year than any other in recent memory. This is unacceptable. The MIT community as a whole needs to have a systematic, active, and open discussion about how to combat the issue. Each individual who chose to commit suicide had a life that cannot be summarized by a statistic, but if we study all of these individuals as a group, then we may find important insights.
Profiting from ignorance
By now many of us have heard that America’s favorite “fast casual restaurant” — Chipotle “Mexican” Grill — has gone GMO-free. Although Chipotle’s decision represents the singular action of a private company, it still speaks to the increasing success of the anti-GMO movement. And while private companies have every right to decide what products they sell, Chipotle’s decision to pander to the anti-GMO movement is dangerous and irresponsible.
The twisted incentives behind the Atlanta Public Schools cheating case
This month, verdicts were handed down in one of the largest standardized test cheating scandals in a public school system to date. Eleven out of twelve defendants ranging from test administrators to teachers and principals in the Atlanta Public Schools system were convicted for racketeering, making false statements, and other crimes. An investigation led by former Georgia Attorney General Michael Bowers discovered that more than 250,000 wrong answers were changed in thousands of students’ standardized tests since 2001. Yet as staggering as the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal seems to be, perhaps the real crime here lies in high-stakes standardized testing, which is blindly mandated across the board without attention to the unique contexts surrounding individual school districts.
WEIGHING NET NEUTRALITY VS. THE DIGITAL DIVIDE:
Today, over two-thirds of the world’s population remains without access to the Internet. It is crucial to an increasingly global economy to bridge this vast digital divide by connecting the billions of people now without a voice. And, at first glance, organizations like Facebook’s Internet.org seem to strive to do just that. To date, their service has provided free access to a handful of cherry-picked web applications to thousands of users in parts of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. But underneath the lofty goal to connect the rest of the world to the Internet, perhaps Internet.org has an ulterior, more manipulative motive that completely opposes the basic tenets of net neutrality.
The role of Residential Life Area Directors
The tragedies at MIT in recent months gave a new sense of urgency to the discussion about mental health support for all members of the community. A crucial part of undergraduate student life at MIT is the dorm experience and the unique and diverse residential communities we pride ourselves on encouraging. In 2012, the Division of Student Life (DSL) introduced the Residential Life Area Director (RLAD) position to the existing dorm structures on campus.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Yarden Katz’s guest column published on April 9 offers me the chance to clarify an announcement sent on April 7 concerning a new Paid Parental Leave benefit approved by the Employee Benefits Oversight Committee, which adds to leave policies already available to eligible MIT employees.
MIT’s insult to parenthood
Last week, Lorraine Goffe-Rush, VP of Human Resources at MIT, announced the Institute’s new policy on parental care. She wrote in an email on Tuesday that MIT is “pleased to announce” that the Institute will provide “up to 5 days of Paid Parental Leave to eligible mothers and fathers,” within 4 months of birth or adoption. Goffe-Rush added, “We are delighted to have this opportunity to further expand MIT’s benefits to new parents in our community.”
The unnoticed expansion of domestic surveillance
Earlier this week, John Oliver of HBO’s Last Week Tonight presented a compelling piece on the upcoming deadline for the reauthorization of the Patriot Act — the law passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks which greatly enhanced the government’s powers of surveillance. At the time, the public asked few questions, demanding action for greater security and disregarding the potential cost. Twelve years later, Edward Snowden leaked classified documents from the National Security Agency about the breadth and depth of the NSA’s surveillance programs from that point forward, sparking national and international debate.
Gender-inclusive housing at MIT
While the phrase “gender-inclusive housing” is tossed around somewhat regularly, many people are still unsure about what it exactly means or why, frankly, we care about it at all.
Scientific illiteracy in left-wing politics
It seems that every week we hear a new story that demonstrates a lack of scientific literacy in right-wing politics. Recently we learned that employees of Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection under the tenure of Gov. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) were instructed not to use the terms “climate change” and “global warming” in official correspondences. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) recently brandished a snowball on the Senate floor as evidence that global warming is a hoax. Last month Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) refused to state whether or not he believed in the theory of evolution, and who can forget former Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-Mo.) famous gaffe about “legitimate rape”?