Welcome

Roger Levy
Chair of the Faculty

Welcome to the first Institute Faculty Meeting of the year. It will be my privilege to serve as the Chair of the Faculty for the next two years. Joining me as your faculty officers are Associate Chairs Bevin Engelward and Erica James. We’re succeeding Mary Fuller, Peko Hosoi, and Elly Nedivi, who concluded their term as faculty officers in June. Mary, Peko, and Elly have left big shoes to fill. Thank you for your service and for your leadership.

We have a full agenda for today’s meeting, but before we dive in, a brief word about what the faculty officers actually do. We lead faculty governance, here at the Institute Faculty Meeting and on the Faculty Policy Committee, and in coordination with the other ten Standing Committees of the faculty. We also interact regularly with senior administrators and the Corporation to represent faculty voices. All of this is informed by outreach across Schools and departments, and through conversations with many, many groups of faculty.

I also want to state six priorities for faculty governance over the next two years. First: encouraging and catalyzing broad faculty participation in shared governance. Broad faculty participation is crucial to collective leadership and decision making across the Institute. By the latest count, thanks to our amazing Faculty Governance Administrator Tami Kaplan, there are 260 faculty currently serving on Standing and Special Committees of the Faculty, Institute Committees appointed by the President, and a range of other Committees and Councils. And there are still more faculty who contribute to shared governance through self-organized faculty initiatives. For those of you who are serving now or who have served in the past: thank you! And for everyone, there are opportunities to pitch in: please reach out.

Second, working together as a faculty to preserve the Institute’s unique role in civil society. We are a beacon of knowledge, excellence, innovation, free inquiry, openness, tolerance, and truth. We all have our part to do – regardless of the pressures we face – to jointly support MIT’s integrity and values, to continue carrying out the Institute’s mission, “to bring knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges”.

Third, education. The most comprehensive review in decades of our core undergraduate program is well underway through the Task Force on the Undergraduate Academic Program. And the pace of global knowledge production accelerates every year, with implications for curricula across departments and programs, undergraduate and graduate alike. Educational policy for the Institute is determined by the Faculty. And so you’ll be hearing about ongoing work on MIT’s academic programs and curricula throughout the next two years.

Fourth, research continuity and institutional support for faculty. Many of the pressures we face today, be they financial headwinds for the Institute or threats to international students and scholars, challenge our continued delivery of the world-class research we’re all here to do. We need to work together to surmount these challenges as effectively as possible. This means getting the right inputs from faculty: we’re all stakeholders in the decisions the Institute makes. To this end, we’ll be hosting numerous faculty gatherings in different formats throughout the year. Please attend them when you can, and reach out with your concerns and ideas. We need to hear from you.

Fifth, artificial intelligence. It’s transforming research in numerous fields, it offers profound challenges and opportunities for what an MIT education can and should be, and AI itself is rapidly advancing and changing society. AI has implications across Institute activities. Please join in the ongoing conversations you’ll see on this critical topic.

A final priority for the next two years is recognizing common core values held among us as Institute faculty. And on this, I’d like to speak briefly from a personal perspective. I’m a cognitive scientist of language. I study how we use language to communicate. And central to human communication is the mental models we construct of the world and of one another. The job of the faculty officers is to represent and serve all the faculty. Service as Chair in particular is preceded by a year of service as Chair-Elect, and during this past year I’ve tried to keep an ear to the ground, to enrich my mental models. This has been humbling, because, as with all enterprises of discovery, it lays bare the limits of one’s knowledge. But it has also been reassuring to recognize the values we hold in common – generating and disseminating knowledge, seeking truth and excellence, and working together in diverse communities – even in cases where we disagree on what it means to pursue or act on those values. Representing the nearly 1,100 MIT faculty is a joint task together with Associate Chairs Bevin Engelward and Erica James, our Faculty Governance Administrator Tami Kaplan, the Faculty Policy Committee, and all the committees of the faculty. So as we go forward, please join in listening and in open conversation, to better understand both our differences and, beneath them, the shared values that give us common ground and purpose as we shape MIT’s future together.