Opinion
The Paradox of Institute Performance and Faculty Perceptions
During the last few months, as I served as the chair of the MIT faculty, I have been surprised by a phenomenon which I can only describe as a paradox. While all the indicators of MIT’s institutional performance look quite positive and convey clearly that MIT remains a leading research university in the world, the faculty — not all, but a sizeable number — seem to feel that the Institute is not moving in the right direction, that its institutional norms and practices are changing, moving away from MIT’s traditional culture of decentralized innovations towards a relatively centralized and somewhat corporate model of governance. This odd juxtaposition of success and alarm has been intriguing for me.