Independent MIT Alumni Group Receives Major Donation to Promote Free Speech
“We want to inform, educate, and engage the students”
The alums of other schools need to get involved in this way. Schools listen to alums because they’re potential donors.
The College Fix reports:
Independent MIT alumni group receives $500,000 donation to promote free speech
A group of free speech advocates associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has received a financial boost to help them grow over the next two years.
The Stanton Foundation announced a $500,000 donation to the MIT Free Speech Alliance, which has approximately 800 members, made up of alumni, faculty, students and other allies.
The donation is intended to further the alliance’s promotion of free speech, academic freedom and intellectual diversity at the university.
Chuck Davis, MIT Free Speech Alliance president and university alumnus, wrote the grant for the proposal and serves as finance committee chair. He told The College Fix by phone June 2 that the funds would be used primarily to hire a full-time executive director, update their website “to make it a more effective outreach platform,” and enlist professional accounting and compliance reporting services “to ensure transparency.”
“What we want to achieve is to launch the alliance, boot-strap it to be a self-sustaining organization built with an ongoing set of programs that will endure for the indefinite future,” Davis said.
“We want to inform, educate, and engage the students” on “what is free speech, why is it important…but also to inform students and faculty and staff about the rights they have that universities often violate,” he said.
Frank Stanton, former president of CBS, and his wife started the foundation in 1991 to promote free speech, among other causes. Stanton died in 2006.
“Frank Stanton was a fierce advocate for the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of thought and expression,” the foundation stated in its news release. “The goals of the MFSA align directly with the principles and values about which Frank Stanton cared so deeply.”
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Comments
It is perhaps an indication of how sour things have gotten at the Institute that I had to learn of this group here instead of from official alumni channels.
They just got a new member.
I’m happy to note that on their “histogram of membership by class year” my era leads the pack… and that the recent-years tail of the histogram is actually rising. Hope for the future of America in the demise of wokeism.
If you donated, I thank and salute you…and congratulate you, if Woke-ism did not destroy your financial capacity to donate !!
Well, considering that this actually has nothing much to do with the ‘Tute itself, it can do little to shake my alum wallet open again.
“We want to inform, educate, and engage the students”
Given the current climate and the brittle showflakes, a more appropriate goal would be “We want to inform, educate, engage, trigger, and offend the students by reopening free speech. Perhaps the most important “law” of free speech is that you are encouraged to attack whatever anyone said by applying logic against it and, in many cases showing the ideas to be foolish. For example, if Biden says he wants to use tax money to pay off student loans, you can say how unfair it is that blue-collar workers who have to pay the higher taxes to bail out those college grads that are making much more money.
But you are not allowed to commit ad hominem attacks that attack the status or training or rank of the person making the speech. For example, you can’t say that Biden is an old fart who can’t think clearly, and he thinks it seems like a nice graduation present for college grads (both without proof).