Why We Still Need the MIT Media Lab
Despite the recent scandal, and the deserved resignation of its director, the lab does important work. But it can be better.
If you are in the tech or science world, you’ve probably heard by now about the recent scandal involving convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his donations to the MIT Media Lab. Some at MIT (including some faculty and students) pushed for Joi Ito, the director of the lab since 2011, to resign as soon as they learned that the lab took money from Epstein under Ito’s watch.
The recent revelations from the New Yorker ignited a larger firestorm of protests and changed all that. Ito resigned a day after the article was published, in the wake of the allegations that he and others concealed Epstein’s donations. MIT has initiated an independent investigation to determine what exactly happened.
Let me be clear: I think Ito resigning was a good thing. He should have done it sooner. (Kudos to those who called him out and shame on people like Lawrence Lessig and others in the academic community for standing up for Ito when they should’ve been asking him to resign).
In the wake of this scandal, there is no shortage of opinions being offered by the Technorati, and the story has made its way into the non-tech press as only juicy scandals can. An article in Slate declared “The Moral Rot of the Media Lab,” and one in Techcrunch asked “Would we miss the Media Lab if it were gone?” The tech journalist Kara Swisher wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled “He Who Must Not Be Tolerated,” condemning Ito just months after she was fawning all over him.
Should MIT consider shutting down the Media Lab itself?
In my opinion, even though the Media Lab is far from perfect and has many problems, some of which I’ve seen firsthand (and others which I’ve heard about in whispered and not-so-whispered tones from members of the MIT community), it should be fixed and not jettisoned.
Part of the underlying mission and purpose of the MIT Media Lab is to serve as a cross-disciplinary “hacker-type” lab where people build cool stuff in conjunction with industry, outside of normal academic departments. One scandal (a big one, to be sure) and one…
