Massachusetts
Massachusetts Institute of Technology forced into spotlight After Harvard, Penn presidents ousted – Times of India
Outside the Ivy League, the school prides itself on its anti-elite, prank culture. It uses standardized testing for admissions and releases those decisions on March 14 — better known as Pi Day. Situated right next door to Harvard University, it churns out rocket scientists, Wall Street quants and artificial intelligence experts.
For all its eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, MIT has been dragged into the biggest controversy in decades in US higher education. It started with allegations of antisemitism on campus in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. But it has since morphed into a broader fight over free speech and diversity.
MIT President Sally Kornbluth, a cell biologist, has faced calls for weeks to be fired, demands that have intensified this week after Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, quit after just six months in the role. Gay’s exit came on the heels of the resignation last month of the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill.
All three leaders were excoriated for their performance at a Dec. 5 congressional hearing over antisemitism on campus, when they provided narrow legal responses to Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s question about whether calling for the genocide of Jews is against university policy. While Gay and Magill said it depended on context, Kornbluth, who is Jewish, responded that it would be investigated as harassment “if pervasive and severe.”
Her slightly more forceful response made no difference to Stefanik and investor Bill Ackman, who led a campaign driven by social media to oust Gay from Harvard.
Kornbluth, who through a spokeswoman declined to comment, has always been in a different and less vulnerable position than the leaders at Penn and Harvard.
Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, also faced claims that she’d committed plagiarism in her scholarship. Magill had already been under pressure prior to the Hamas attack and Israel’s invasion of Gaza. In September, Penn hosted a Palestine literature festival on campus, a decision that infuriated influential donors including Apollo Global Management Inc’s chief executive officer Marc Rowan.
‘Toxic’ environment
All three university leaders appeared before Congress to answer questions about antisemitism on campus. Social media had been awash in reported incidents such as protesters disrupting classes and chanting slogans including “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which is perceived by many to be a call for the expulsion of Jews from Israel. There were also reports that some Jewish students were harassed.
Talia Khan, an MIT graduate student who provided testimony to Congress, said that the environment at the school had grown “toxic” since the war started. She said she felt compelled to speak up after witnessing a rise in antisemitism on campus and what she saw as MIT’s failure to protect its Jewish students.
Khan said she left a study group over her support of Israel and was forced to take down Israeli flags in her office windows overlooking Massachusetts Avenue while flags for other countries or causes have been allowed to stay.
Still, she thinks the problem is bigger than Kornbluth.
“The problem with everybody saying ‘two down, one to go’ is that it’s not productive,” Khan, who is pursuing a PhD in the department of Mechanical Engineering, said in an interview. “Just firing a university president if all of the rules stay the same, if the senior administration, the board of directors, if they all stay the same, there’s not going to be a change in campus culture.”
MIT and Kornbluth have remained largely silent amid the furor.
While the donor and alumni bases at Harvard and Penn were vocal in threatening to pull their support, their counterparts at MIT have been more muted.
A group of Jewish alumni at MIT this week launched a campaign to cut their giving to $1 but they aren’t seeking Kornbluth’s removal at this point. Instead they are seeking to work with the administration on changes such as disciplining students who violate rules and issuing clear statements that threats against Jews are wrong. They’re also pushing for Kornbluth to apologize for her comments during the congressional hearing.
“The lack of apology sends a clear message,” said Matt Handel, organizer of the MIT Jewish Alumni Alliance, who earned an MS in Management from the university’s Sloan School of Management in 1991. “We’re Jewish members of the MIT community who want to protect Jewish members of the MIT community.”
In the days after the congressional hearing, MIT said its leadership “entirely support” Kornbluth. In a statement this week, she described a review of MIT’s approach to handling complaints of student misconduct and announced a new committee on academic freedom and campus expression.
“While we address the pressing challenge of how best to combat antisemitism, Islamophobia and hatred based on national origin or ethnicity in our community, we need to talk candidly about practical ways to make our community a place where we all feel that we belong,” Kornbluth wrote in the Jan. 3 statement.
The moves were too little, too late for MIT computer scientist Mauricio Karchmer. The lecturer wrote on LinkedIn this week that he decided to resign his post.
“During a time when the Jewish and Israeli students, staff and faculty were particularly vulnerable, instead of offering the support they needed, the broader MIT community exhibited open hostility towards them,” he wrote. “Like many other college campuses nationwide, the institute clearly failed this test.”
(WJAR) — A child has died after a tree fell on a playground outside an elementary school in Melrose.
NBC Boston reported that another child and an adult were also injured in the incident at Winthrop Elementary School on Monday.
A child has died after a tree fell on a playground outside an elementary school in Melrose. (WBTS)
It appeared that the tree fell from behind the playground.
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Counselors were available at the school to support students and staff on Tuesday, NBC Boston reported.
On Sunday, the Massachusetts women’s rowing team headed to Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester, Mass., for the Intercollegiate Rowing Association’s Eastern Sprints. There, the Minutewomen faced 14 teams from various Northeastern conferences, with Temple being UMass’ only Mid-American Conference opponent. A Northwest tailwind with wind gusts up to 12 mph offered a fair day on the racecourse.
The varsity eights proved to be good competition early on. The Minutewomen broke 6:30 for the second consecutive weekend, but it was not enough to land them a spot in the grand finale. Brown finished first overall in the heats with a 6:14 time, putting just 15 seconds between the top nine boats across all three heats. The petite final was just as competitive, with boats finishing within a second of each other. UMass took second place with a 6:30.19, which put the Minutewomen in eighth place overall.
California native AJ Prahl coxed the second varsity eight to a speedy 6:48.26, which landed the boat in lane six of its final. The boat’s final time was 6:50.11, landing second in its respective final and eighth place overall. UMass kept its gap behind the first-place-finisher, Columbia, under 10 seconds, and just managed to stay ahead of Cornell by a bow ball, finishing within the same second.
The second varsity four kicked off racing on Sunday in one of two heats. The Minutewomen came in with a 7:36.4, sending them to the petite final. The boat came in 10 seconds behind Northeastern and beat Boston College by just under a second. Coxswain Sara Lavigna commanded the boat to fourth in the petite final and a 10th-place overall finish with a 7:49.77, adding about 13 seconds to the boat’s earlier heat time.
New Hampshire native Meghan O’Hern coaxed the varsity four from one of three heats into the petite final. Stroke seat Anastasiia Kolesnikova led her crew to a 7:32.41 finish, holding off Holy Cross by over 16 seconds, but failing to close the eight-second gap between UMass’ and Radcliffe’s boat.
In the petite final, the Minutewomen were placed in lane four, where they improved their heat time by a second, ending with a 7:31.91 time and a third-place finish, the highest placing of any UMass boat across the competition. Cornell pushed the Minutewomen to the end, coming in less than a second behind them at 7:32.57, while Northeastern left a seven-second gap ahead of UMass.
Sophomore Mia Bierowski coxed the third varsity eight in heat two to a 7:02.61, landing her crew in lane four of the petite final. The Minutewomen rallied with a 7:06.41, landing the boat in fifth place in its respective final and 11th place overall.
The fourth varsity eight had no heats and only had a final. The UMass boat, led by sophomore Dagny Sammis, placed third out of the four boats in the category with a 7:17.14, coming in 10 seconds behind Northeastern, and leaving Boston College behind by about 21 seconds.
As the Minutewomen conclude their inaugural season competing in the MAC, they have their sights set on the MAC Rowing Championships. There, they will battle for their ticket to the NCAA Women’s Rowing Championships, searching for their first appearance in the national-level competition since 2014.
The MAC Championships will take place on Saturday, May 16, on Ford Lake in Ypsilanti, Mich. The races will be livestreamed on ESPN+. The start time is still to be determined.
Olivia Thibodeaux can be reached at [email protected].
Massachusetts
Will Minogue’s Trump ties, abortion stance make him unelectable in Mass.? – The Boston Globe
Minogue’s words during a recent appearance on WCVB’s “On The Record” — “I’m a Catholic and I am pro-life” — certainly run counter to the careful abortion rights positioning of other Massachusetts Republicans who won the governor’s office over the past three-plus decades.
When Charlie Baker ran for governor in 2014, his first general election campaign ad featured his then-17-year-old daughter saying, “You’re totally pro-choice and bipartisan.” When Mitt Romney ran for governor in 2002, he stated in a debate, “I will preserve and protect a women’s right to choose.” When Bill Weld ran for governor in 1990, he told the Globe, “Count me as ‘modified pro-choice.’”
Over time, these positions evolved in different ways.
Weld went from “modified pro-choice” to showing up at a national GOP convention to lobby against the party’s antiabortion platform. When Romney ran for president, he retreated completely from the stance he’d taken in Massachusetts. Despite Baker’s “totally pro-choice” positioning, he ultimately vetoed a bill that expanded access to abortion, including a provision that would have allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to get an abortion without parental consent. The Legislature overturned that veto, and the measure became law in 2020.
As reported by WBUR, the Minogue campaign put out a statement that said, “Mike Minogue cannot and will not change the law,” without elaborating beyond that.
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned abortion as a national right, making state law even more critical. Since then, Governor Maura Healey has made the strengthening of abortion protections for patients and providers even more of a signature cause.
Last week’s ruling by a federal appeals court in New Orleans, which halted access to a common abortion drug, mifepristone, through the mail for telehealth patients, once again underscored the political uncertainty around abortion access. Healey, who joined other Democrat-led states in stockpiling the drug to guard against a potential ban of it, quickly issued a statement that said she would “keep standing up to efforts by President Trump and his allies to roll back reproductive rights.”
On Monday, the Supreme Court temporarily restored access to mifepristone. Both sides have a week to respond.
While Minogue can try to argue that abortion is protected in Massachusetts, and there’s nothing he can or would do to change that, these are unpredictable times for reproductive rights. It’s a key issue that puts him at odds with many Massachusetts voters.
His first campaign ad since the GOP convention that endorsed him introduces him as “a new kind of governor.”
By Massachusetts standards, he certainly would be different. He’s much closer to Trump than other recent Republican candidates, having hosted that Vance fund-raiser and donated nearly $1 million to Trump and MAGA candidates in 2024.
Of Massachusetts’ 5 million voters, 1.2 million are registered Democrats, and 423,387 are registered Republicans. Unenrolled or independent voters, who make up 3.2 million registered voters, are key to winning statewide office. Given that Trump’s overall approval rating in the state is about 33 percent, Minogue’s Trump connections are not going to help him much with that crowd.
Polling also shows that the vast majority of Massachusetts voters strongly support abortion rights and are more likely to support elected officials if they work to advance legislation that will prevent the government from interfering with personal decisions about pregnancy.
Minogue will no doubt want to talk about transgender athletes, illegal immigration, the cost of housing and utilities, and the overall issue of economic growth. His allies are also trying to drive Shortsleeve out of the race, and in the WCVB interview, Minogue argued that the overwhelming endorsement he got from the roughly 1,800 delegates who attended the convention shows where the Republican Party is in Massachusetts right now.
And so it does. But is that where most Massachusetts voters are?
There’s a legitimate debate to be had, for sure, about the economic direction of the state.
But to have it, Minogue will have to convince voters to look past his Trump association and his “pro-life” self-description. Meanwhile, a fellow Republican is calling him unelectable — music to Healey’s ears.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at joan.vennochi@globe.com. Follow her @joan_vennochi.
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