Letter to President Kornbluth on Member Priorities

Dear President Kornbluth:

I know that you are about to take your listening tour on the road, which will include gathering the perspectives of alumni. Even visiting the cities with the largest MIT alumni clubs, you will be able to meet only with but a selected and small subset of graduates. To provide you with additional information for your synthesis of the input you are receiving, I am sharing with you the high level results of a survey we made of the MIT Free Speech Alliance membership earlier this year. The survey consisted of two simple questions:

What should be the top priorities of MIT’s new President?
What should MIT’s new President do to strengthen MIT’s support for free speech, viewpoint diversity, and academic freedom?

Admittedly the first survey question is outside our mission, but we thought it would be interesting information for you and a good question to drive up our response rate.

We provided several response options to both questions, and participants were required to rank order those responses. In addition, each question provided an “Other” option in which participants could write in another response as well as ranking it. The rank order synthesis was provided by SurveyMonkey’s standard methodology for rank order surveys.

Almost 20% of our membership at the time participated in the survey and provided responses to both questions (i.e., 196 respondents). For the first question, 53 of the respondents (27%) wrote in an additional “Other” response, and 34 (17%) provided an “Other" response to the second. As you might imagine with MIT alumni, the “Other” responses were interesting and thoughtful.

MIT’s President’s Top Priorities – Top Five Responses

Response	Average Weighted Score
Redouble MIT’s focus on hiring the most distinguished faculty and admitting the most qualified students.	14.87
Restore free speech and a campus culture of free and open discussion	14.11
Expand MIT research coverage in new and emerging fields	12.64
Reduce MIT’s expenses not directly related to education or research, especially administrative bloat	12.48
Strengthen and improve MIT’s global reputation for STEM leadership and excellence	11.53

The average weighted score is relative to a total set of 16 prompted responses (i.e., if everyone had ranked “redouble MIT’s focus…” as their top rank, its score would have been 16.00). The median ranked response was about 8.5, understandably, and “Other” ranked at 5.08.

The second ranked response obviously reflects the concerns of our membership with freedom of expression at MIT. I would interpret the high ranking of the other four responses as both our membership’s dedication to MIT maintaining its exceptionalism together with their concern that MIT may be straying from its mission.

MIT President’s Support for Free Speech

Response	Average Weighted Score
Adopt the faculty AHWG Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom as official Institute-wide policy for ALL members of the MIT community	17.07
Using the MIT Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom as a basis, strengthen MIT’s commitment to freedom of expression and academic freedom in the MIT Policies and Procedures document and in the Mind & Hand Book	15.87
Include MIT’s free speech policies in freshman orientation	14.24
Create a FAQ webpage that succinctly addresses common questions about freedom of expression and academic freedom and refers readers to relevant MIT policies and offices	13.71
Display the Statement on Freedom of Expression on Institute and Department web sites, include it in student recruitment and application materials, and include it in course syllabi and other course materials	12.20

The average weighted score is relative to a total set of 18 prompted responses. The median ranked response was about 10.0, and Other ranked at 4.51.

You have already implemented our members’ top ranked recommendation, and we applaud that. The second and fourth recommendations are actually listed among the faculty Ad Hoc Working Group report’s ten recommendations. These, along with the other AHWG recommendations, represent unfinished business in implementing the AHWG’s unanimous vision on how to help improve the culture on campus for open expression. The third and fifth recommendations are from a list of upcoming MFSA recommendations, and they would also clearly help move the Institute forward constructively on this objective.

I appreciate that you are pursuing your own agenda on this listening tour, but these responses from an engaged subset of the alumni might be useful for stimulating additional discussions. If you are interested in digging deeper, we will be publishing the complete survey results on our website, along with the verbatim responses to the question for Other.

We look forward to your addressing our membership on October 19^th.

Best regards,
Wayne Stargardt ‘74
President, MIT Free Speech Alliance