Petting Zoos were not enough. Fainting Couches didn’t do the trick. Puppy Dogs proved insufficient. We have now moved on to Coloring Books & Pupusas.

MIT — the institution that brought the world radar, semiconductor lasers, public-key cryptography, high-speed photography, CRISPR, and the internet — has decided that its most urgent institutional priority is managing the emotional fragility of its students.

Presiding over what has become a therapeutic colossus is Associate Dean of Wellbeing and Belonging RoseAngelle Poyau (she/her). Her dominion stretches across the Wellbeing Lab, LGBTQ+ Services, Women and Gender Services, and a standing army of paid student Wellbeing Ambassadors.

Dean Poyau’s qualifications for overseeing the psychological infrastructure of the world’s most demanding STEM university are listed as “smiling, laughing, and fostering genuine joy.” Try searching the web for her priors. You will find no undergraduate institution, no graduate degree, no field of study, no publications, no management experience, no prior employment. She just materialized inside MIT’s Violence Prevention office in 2021—perhaps leaping fully formed from the skull of past president L. Rafael Reif when he had a bad DEI headache.

Her 2022 Excellence Award citation, bestowed by MIT’s leading DEI hire and chief race monger Chancellor Melissa Nobles, explains everything. Colleagues testified that Rose had taught them to “advocate for myself,” and that under her leadership they had “never felt more valued, welcomed, and genuinely happy at work.” MIT’s crack institutional research team, meanwhile, determined — after rigorous survey analysis — that students who have friends feel better than students who don’t.

Alas, the engineers who built the Apollo Guidance Computer did not have a Wellbeing Lab. They had to make do with slide rules, cigarettes, and a deadline.

Story suggested by the Weekend@MIT mailing list