Last May 31st I attended Technology Day at MIT, where the school presents talks on all kinds of interesting research to its alumni. Commencement is always the day before, and the alumni reunion events are that evening. I’m a big fan of these talks and have written about previous years here: 2024, 2023, 2019, 2017, and 2011, Videos of the three sessions can be seen here:

Yet this year it had a much darker tone. The Trump administration is explicitly trying to destroy US universities and scientific organizations. They are canceling research contracts, defunding science agencies, denying visas to international students and even threatening to remove accreditation. Even the research that is kept on will have its institutional overhead (“indirect cost”) cut from a median of 56% to 15%, meaning the federal gov’t will pay almost nothing for the facilities of the university that make the research possible.

At Trump’s insistence, Congress just raised the tax rate on leading university endowments by six times, from 1.4% to 8%, significantly damaging their finances. Former MIT president Rafael Reif wrote about the effect of this tax in the Boston Globe: Big Beautiful Bill Will Raise the Cost of College. The tax is as large as MIT’s entire undergraduate financial aid package, which currently grants free tuition to any student with a family income of less than $200K. Incomes of less than $100K get free board as well.

So how did MIT respond on Technology Day? The first session was devoted to fascinating medical advances. The first speaker (11:03) is looking for ways to detect tiny ovarian cancer tumors using optics and AI. The second (19:39) is planning how to rework the US insurance system for greater equity. The third (28:36) has made extraordinary progress on robotic prosthetics, and lost his own legs in a climbing accident. The fourth (36:44) has new attacks on the ancient and deadly disease of tuberculosis, against which we only have one fading vaccine.

They all talked about how the funding cuts were ruining their plans. At the very end the moderator asked “What’s the one missing piece that would aid your research?” One said flexible funding to pursue strategy changes and another thought there should be more focus on therapeutics across a diverse community instead of research. Yet the last to speak, Prof Bryan Bryson, said:

What we need is you. We need you to go out and talk to everyone about the wonderful things you’ve heard here. Academia is not some ivory tower – it’s attacking problems that affect everyone. Someone in your life has had TB or cancer or a terrible accident. When people ask ‘What do they do over there?’, say ‘They help you.’ Go out and tell twenty people about the amazing things you see here.

So that’s what I’m doing!

Yet the leader of MIT, President Sally Kornbluth, was not as inspirational. In the third session above, she is interviewed by the head of the alumni association, Natalie Lorenz Anderson, ’84. At 25:22 she asks Kornbluth very gingerly about “How do you think MIT should be positioned to meet the challenges of the day?” She says that in the worst case scenario, they could see their budget cut a third (!). In that case, she would cancel some programs outright to favor maintaining others – “We will not spread the peanut butter thinly.” They have joined a group of 14 universities to sue to prevent the new indirect cost rate from going into effect and so far have gotten a restraining order to prevent the change.

What struck me, though, was how accepting she was of this situation. This country is in the midst of a right-wing, foreign-backed coup. A concentration camp has been built in Florida, and masked, armed police are kidnapping people off the streets, including students. The president is openly senile. Congress is openly giving away the federal government to their donors. Yet she still keeps going down to Washington, telling people that MIT is crucial to the medical and defense and technical innovation pipeline. If they cared about any of that, they never would have started down this road. If they cared about the general good of humanity or America, they would not have destroyed millions of tons of food aid for Africa, and millions of doses of vaccines. She cannot accept that these people consider the likes of MIT to be the enemy. She was attacked personally on Dec 5, 2023 when she was hauled in front of a Congressional committee headed by Rep Elise Stefanik. They called her an anti-semite for not crushing the student protests against Israel’s horrific treatment of the Gazans. The attack succeeded in ousting the presidents of Harvard and U Penn. Yet she still persists in talking to them. She cannot think of anything else to do.

She is bound by the constraints of her position, just like the helpless Democrats. They can only work within the system even as it is failing in front of them. What it will take is general public disgust and revolt. That’s what Prof Bryson was asking for. These people are stealing your present in the form of federal support for public goods, and stealing your future when they go after the likes of MIT.