Overcoming Betrayal and Corruption at the MIT Media Lab

Seduced by the dark side of the entrepreneurial culture it championed, the MIT Media Lab needs a leadership reboot to stave off extinction.

The Media Lab’s location on the eastern edge of the main MIT campus channels its historical discomfort of traditional academia. Photo by Michael Figueroa.

The MIT Media Lab, once a disruptive force for social progress through technology innovation at a time when industry seemed overly conservative and self-centric, has quickly devolved into an example of the subversive leadership, projected vanity, and ethical indifference embodied by the worst of the modern tech startup movement. Recent revelations of the Director’s subversive and reprehensible relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and the apparent enabling corruption of governance processes up through the MIT leadership team have shattered the confidence of faculty, students, and the MIT community-at-large.

Despite the extraordinary betrayal, the Media Lab’s past successes can and should inform a roadmap to redemption. Admittedly, sustaining the Lab’s mission is personal for me as an early associated undergraduate. Like a supportive child of a parent that has done serious wrong, I think that those more directly impacted by the Media Lab’s failures are best able to hold it and its leadership accountable. Rather than focusing on blame and consequence, I believe that we would benefit more from determining how the Lab can learn from its past and establish a new foundation. Rebuilding the…