RE: Aaron Swartz, USpol, MIT, angry; universities, sexual assault Show more
@staticsafe universities are extremely quick to throw colleagues and students under the bus in order to make negative press disappear as quickly as possible, as anyone who has ever tried fighting for victims of sexual assault at university knows
for them, it is all about optics and donors, and saying/doing nothing is often the fastest way of making a story disappear, regardless of justice
For MIT it wasn't that Swartz was just proposing open access as an abstract idea or theoretical possibility as many others were doing at the time. He was advocating that students take direct action to pull down the barriers of privileged knowledge. That was a very direct threat to their income, and in that type of situation institutions don't just want to destroy the career of an individual they also want to make an example of them so that others will be deterred from following.
@staticsafe Yes, MIT completely steamrollered Aaron Swartz.
One thing about universities - especially ivy league ones - is that they critically depend upon privileged access to information, and to a lesser extent people. That's nearly all of their business model. In his guerilla open access manifest Swartz was proposing the opposite - that all scientific results be publicly available.
Aaron Swartz, USpol, MIT, angry Show more
you are a venerable institution with considerable weight to throw around and you act like, as Aaron's dad put it "like a for-profit corporation"
"famed MIT ethos"
your ethos means nothing when you refuse to stand up for it