Susan Silbey MIT Faculty Meeting, September 18, 2019 Prepared remarks (from which oral presentation was excerpted)

Susan Silbey
MIT Faculty Meeting, September 18, 2019
Prepared remarks (from which oral presentation was excerpted)

When we live in a culture whose anthem is “move fast and break things,” when disruptive entrepreneurship is the ostensible purpose of education, we cannot really be surprised that a level 3 registered sex offender is a courted financial donor to educational institutions and is celebrated for his imagination and creativity. Jeffrey Epstein, a known sexual predator who trafficked in young girls is invited to campuses. We should be horrified but not surprised.

There are two issues here and while closely entwined are nonetheless distinguishable: one is taking money from this person and another is inviting him to campus to mingle with the community. We need to address both: donations and visits to campus.

We all know that MIT, like all institutions of higher education, research and the arts need capital. For nearly forty years, our governments (federal and state) have increasingly abandoned their commitment to both public and private education, as well as to science and the arts. We have no choice but to rely — as we do — on the generosity of philanthropists: individuals, families, foundations and corporations.

I have heard some make the argument that Epstein is no different than taking money from the Kochs. The Kochs harm more people with their philosophies and political activity, some suggest. Others think we should not take money from these alumni for cancer research because they also spend their money disseminating false and misleading information about the effects of fossil fuels on the earth’s atmosphere and also because they use their wealth, and its consequent power, to build organizations that impede the progress of science, knowledge and a more equitable and just world (which is what we say we are doing and tell our donors). Some think we should not take money from authoritarian governments that engage in what appears to be genocide of their population or their neighbors.

I do not like the Kochs or their politics, and I am willing to debate the tenets of their political philosophies and the value of their philanthropy.

But, there can be no debate about sex trafficking of children. It is beyond reason, truly unspeakable. There is no defense.

If we cannot see the difference between the Kochs and Jeffrey Epstein, we are indeed in trouble. We are good at making distinctions; that is what scholars do. This is the heart of the issue, I think. So, how did we come to this place?

We are mistaken if we think what happened is simply a breakdown in process. No process — thorough or cursory — should have resulted in taking money from a person who

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is and was at the time a registered sex offender, known for prostituting minors, and had a reputation for such at the time MIT engaged with him.

Misunderstanding this as a process issue instead of a judgment issue is symptomatic of serious problems deep in the organizational structure of MIT as well as cognitive and intellectual failures characteristic of the MIT culture.

First, the organizational and structural problem. What explains the failure of due diligence that enabled a donation from Jeffrey Epstein? I imagine, frankly, that there was limited or no attention to the case. I imagine that a list of current and prospective donors went past a group of senior administrators, like many such lists and no one paid much attention. Why?

Why no significant discussion and inquiry? Moist likely, it is a consequence of organizational overload. MIT loves to be lean, so people cut corners. Issues are treated as they are presented, already framed and packaged without sufficient time, or without a diverse group of advisors with multiple perspectives. Debate is unproductive, not lean. Thus, Epstein’s involvement was not seen for what it was. It was not noticed as a problem because there was neither time to discuss nor a sufficient range of persons with expertise and sensitivity to know better. The group lacked the cognitive ability and experiential variability to identify the harm Epstein’s donation and involvement with MIT would cause, to see the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The volume and velocity of issues for which the leadership of an organization of this size and expanse are responsible — its global reach with budget of billions of dollars — undermines leaders’ ability to know what is actually going on. When leaders are surrounded by a relatively homogeneous group of like-thinking colleagues, they are less likely to be offered contrary interpretations of the situation, only compounding the organizational overload. Managing size and complexity, plus the absence of diverse points of view generates less conversation, not more, about the issues to be decided, impeding recognition of what may turn out to be a critical, game-changing decision.

There are other organizational and structural features that threaten the governance of MIT. To take one very fundamental yet determinative example: we use the accounting procedures of a profit-making organization for a non-profit organization. As such, we try to balance revenue and costs, income (from tuition, research grants and contracts, endowment and philanthropy) and expenses (education, research, physical plant, administration, development etc.). This accounting model obscures the fact that this is an expense generating organization where there is no limit to what could be an expense, no limit to what we might dream to do (e.g. starting online education, inventing new courses for prospective students, enhancing our teaching of ethics, expanding quality of life for students and staff as well as faculty, creating new schools, developing new research programs). This is a faculty of over 1000 persons with abundant creativity and an endless capacity for imagining what we could do, if we only had the money.

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Over the last five years, we raised 5+ billion dollars, and are in no better position than where we were to begin because our bottom line needs have escalated. We pursue the money to feed endless growth. The data on the increasing population of the faculty, the staff, the number of graduate students, and the square footage of the physical plant all attest to this exuberant but potentially calamitous growth.

For an organization this size, governance structures are thin, not deep, a very shallow pyramid, where issues that rise up must be taken as given, lest we devolve –as it is regularly feared — into argumentation in setting the Institute’s agenda, goals, enacting basic values. The alternative is thicker governance structures but they might generate inefficient debate rather than moving fast. There are consequences to these alternative models.

And thus we come to the cultural problems. First, we appear to value growth above all, perhaps defining excellence by size and speed. Is this really who we are?

Second, this is not just an organizational and structural problem, but a deep cultural failure, which derives from and is enacted by prioritizing mechanical thinking and devaluing social knowledge and expertise. We regularly return to this at MIT. In the last two years we had to deal with misunderstanding of: IQ in setting up the quest for intelligence; the relations with Saudi Arabia and MBS; the invitation to Henry Kissinger for the opening of the college; the design of the college; and now Epstein. In each of these instances, mistakes were said to be unintended. But they are repeated and the injuries compounded because we have not understood that these issues as problems of social meaning. Intentions are not physical causes. Intentions enter the social world as words and actions that are interpreted by diverse audiences in multiple ways, which can be explained and are interpretable by the social and humanistic disciplines. The mistakes are repeated because those making them think intentions can be known and understood in singular ways, with a fixed meaning (and as good intentions) despite the words and actions being in fact received and experienced in many ways (some of them unfortunate).

Offering process as the explanation of and cure for these cultural failures reproduces the cultural failures. Technologies of decision-making — call this an algorithm or layers of review — cannot overcome the necessity of exercising judgment within a social context at each step of the process — e.g., making a choice or choices.

Neither law nor machines eliminate the role of human judgment which exists at every step of the governance structure. Legal and organizational processes provide back up, do-overs and appeals to help improve outcomes and move us toward more reliable and valid decisions that are acceptable to the community. But at every step of a process, a person or persons make a choice.

And thus this was not solely an error of process, wherever in the institutional hierarchy the decisions were made; it was an error of judgment. At some point people at this institute agreed that it was permissible to take Epstein’s money, and at another point in time or in the hierarchy people decided to invite and welcome Epstein into this

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place. Those were choices. Processes are choice engines, and if a process is too narrowly conceived, it invites bad choices.

Misunderstanding this as a process problem instead of a judgment problem offends all of us who know that when we do business with predators, and we agree to give him even an ounce of pleasure by doing business with us, we fail to condemn his acts and fail to ostracize the person from the community.

If we cannot recognize a problem for what it is, we cannot exercise good judgment but we also cannot even begin to solve the problem. Misunderstanding this as solely a process problem instead of a judgment problem disables us from even beginning to see that the problem has been too narrowly framed. This applies to the particular decision process that allowed us to take money from a sexual predator; and it also applies now to the response to this failure by looking for a new or improved process. What we have here is deep cultural failure, of which processes are a small piece.

The way to fix judgment is to change culture that nurtures and informs judgment. However, and importantly, I urge us, as strongly as I can, not to see or say simply “the culture is to blame.” That is too facile. We must ask what aspects — practices and messages — of our culture led to the poor process and failure to deliver a good decision. This is my message.

What we need at MIT is a full-throated commitment to changing our culture, which for too long has normalized misogyny while accepting and exacerbating hierarchies among human knowledge — the disciplines. The fast and blinkered decision-making and narrow choices need not be the only way to govern. The messiness of social action and human decisions is the subject of fields of study researched and taught here at the Institute, but these are devalued in the technological culture of disruptive entrepreneurship and big science. This has isolated the disciplines and experts in the social sciences and the humanities (where there are higher proportions of women) who understand and can explain how culture develops and is sustained, how judgments are made and justified and sometimes obfuscated. When you devalue scholars who bring that more complicated, complex and contextualized understanding to issues essential to education, the organization of science, and of technological invention, you shut out colleagues whose expertise could expand and enrich the range and quality of the Institute’s choices.

The inability to recognize a problem is a consequence of insularity, ignorance, lack of sufficient references and associated context to identify and interpret the phenomena or situation and thus recognize a problem when it stares you in the face.

It is not only normalized misogyny, but the devaluing of what too many at MIT describe as soft not hard knowledge. Even here there is a masculine picture of the world right down to our corporeal bodies. It is a matter of resources and respect.

We effectively enact our values, make words into action and over time into habitual practices when we reward celebrity instead of scholarship, distribute our material

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resources to those who succeed in the marketplace not of ideas but of commerce, and fail to see the actual and added value that social and humanistic knowledge brings.

What is to be concluded about our enacted values when we allow men at MIT to advertise ‘hot girls’ on their office doors and no one does anything about it. And what does it say about our values when someone who removes murals of naked women and references to sexual assault from the walls of dormitories is called fascist. The students justify their action promoting the murals as protected speech (which it is not) and local culture. Is it any wonder that our students develop AI that cannot recognize women’s or black persons’ faces, and our students populate Silicon Walley, building an internet awash with pornography and destructive social media threatening constitutional democracies?

What choices are they making? Where did they learn to make those choices? Or do they think that they have no choices to make? To many social scientists, these are all explainable consequence of a culture that thrives at MIT.

Culture is not just a set of words on official documents — it is what circulates every day in the smallest exchanges. It is what is said, what is written, what is rewarded, what is included and excluded. Cultural analysts spend time and energy identifying the patterns in what may look to the unreflective and poorly educated as a random assortment of individualistic preferences. It is not a randomized ether of signs and practices. And exactly because it is not random, we are able to live in communities of large numbers, interact relatively smoothly with strangers as well as those we know well.

Because culture is what circulates and is practiced daily and variably, it is why culture is so hard to nail down, put in a box and tie a ribbon around it. Most of the time culture changes very slowly, and programmed change is hard, taking a long time.

Yet we must change our culture if we are to do better.

But, we must ask ourselves, what kind of culture intends to do good but takes money from and invites a sexual predator to campus? Someone who had a choice to make and likely used a cost benefit analysis and not a bright line moral judgment where pedophilia is to be condemned absolutely. Someone made a calculation that maybe “it’s worth it” to take the money from even a donor like him. It’s worth it because we can do really good things with the money. No one intended to hurt anyone or do wrong; decision-makers thought they were doing the right thing. But that is the problem because they did not understand what they were doing.

The obvious failing with this argument is the calculation of worth. Is it worth the potential for reputational damage? Worth the hostility and injury to women and girls expressed by taking money from a sex trafficker? Worth whatever comfort MIT gives to a pedophile? Worth the cultural degradation MIT suffers from having Epstein around campus for a while? Worth the hostile environment it causes those who have to suffer in his presence? Worth having students make presents for a sex trafficker?

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We are collectively ashamed because it looks like MIT cares more about taking money than we care about the harm specific people have caused to women and children. No matter how you consider it, we were balancing some sum of money against something most of us would think has no price.

The only reason to take the money is if we did not know what we were doing. And so we have to figure out how such not knowing can be prevented. We need cultural change for sure, but we also cannot let the invocation of culture blind us from a more robust process. Putting culture and process together, we must be able to recognize bright lines, as well as debatable choices. Thus, we need more diverse decision-making structures with a wider array of perspectives and voices that enables us to focus on what is a core mission — to educate and create knowledge that makes a better world. Perhaps also we begin to forgo perpetual growth and endless search for new money to shore up this core mission.

We say that we want to teach about ethical conduct. This is a moment to show what that means.