Letter to Members from MFSA President Wayne Stargardt, May 30, 2023

To read this letter in PDF format, click here.

May 30, 2023

To Members of the MIT Free Speech Alliance:

I am honored to serve as the third president of this important, independent alumni organization. As I take over the leadership of our collective efforts, I think this is a good time to take stock and review what we have accomplished so far.

I want to start by thanking my predecessor, Chuck Davis, for his leadership, time and effort that helped guide us to our accomplishments. As a measure of Chuck’s abilities and leadership, we are proud to note that he was selected as the new president of the Alumni Free Speech Alliances, the umbrella organization for alumni organizations like ours.

When we originally founded MFSA, we had three main objectives: 1) get MIT to adopt the Chicago Principles supporting free speech at MIT, 2) have MIT apologize to Dr. Dorian Abbot for cancelling his presentation at the Carlson lecture, and 3) make the issue over which he was cancelled, the conflict between Merit, Fairness and Equality versus Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, actually open to public discussion at MIT.

Over the past year, the outraged MIT faculty did issue their Statement on Free Expression, largely mirroring the Chicago Principles, with our urging, input, and support. That statement was then endorsed by the new president of MIT and applied to the entire MIT community. Our first goal was accomplished.

Then in April of 2023, we sponsored a very visible and public debate at MIT on whether DEI should be abolished on college campuses. The participants were a nationally recognized group of advocates on both sides of the issue, and the moderator was the former president of the ACLU. The debate almost filled a 300 seat lecture hall on campus, and the live stream of the debate was viewed by almost a thousand people. In the three weeks after the debate, our YouTube recording of it was viewed over 14,000 times. At the time of this letter, viewings are over 21,000. As a model for better discourse on campus, the debate was reasoned and passionate, and also polite and peaceful. The audience questions, mainly from students, were thoughtful and respectful. If you haven’t already watched it, I urge you to find it on our website and watch it. We have accomplished another one of our initial objectives.

We haven’t gotten MIT to issue an apology to Dr. Abbot yet, and I suspect that we never will. But the faculty report that accompanied their Statement on Free Expression made an implicit repudiation of Dr. Abbot’s cancellation and laid the groundwork for preventing something similar from happening again. We did not fully accomplish our third objective, but two out of three of our founding objectives in the first 1-1/2 years is respectable.

But we had more accomplishments under Chuck’s leadership. Chuck was instrumental in our receiving a generous donation from the Stanton Foundation, which helped jump start our initial year of operation. That grant set some ambitious goals for ourselves for our first year, and we have met almost all of them. Under Chuck’s tenure, we increased our membership almost 50% to over 1,000 members today. We accelerated our own fund-raising. Late last year, we received a matching donation of $25,000 and in a little over two months, met that matching target with your additional donations. We currently have a war chest of over $300,000. We also hired our full-time Executive Director, Peter Bonilla. Finally, we provided some financial assistance for an MIT undergraduate course on free speech (Course 24.150).

We had successes last year, but support for free speech is still not where it needs to be at MIT. We have a lot more work to do to restore the culture necessary to keep MIT as the preeminent STEM university. While we accomplished a lot, we are planning to do more in the coming year to help bring this about. I will share our objectives and priorities for the coming year with you in a future letter.

In closing, I want to thank you for highlighting the importance of freedom of expression at MIT that you signify with your membership. We are now large enough that MIT cannot ignore us. I especially want to thank those of you who have supported us with donations of time, money and ideas. We still need more volunteers to help us with our upcoming programs, so please volunteer if you can. And we are always accepting donations!

Regards,

Wayne Stargardt
President
MIT Free Speech Alliance
president@mitfreespeech.org