Dr. Anantha Chandrakasan is, by any measure, a remarkable engineer. His low-power chip designs are legendary. His publication record is formidable. His citation count would make lesser academics weep. It is therefore a source of genuine institutional pride that MIT has appointed him Provost — a position in which he will design no chips whatsoever.

A welcome relief from our DEI-hire Chancellor? Alas, the Beaver has seen this movie before.

Past president L. Rafael Reif arrived at MIT as a semiconductor physicist of rare distinction. Like Chandrakasan, he was a highly respected professor and department head. But once he slipped on the Ring of Administrative Power, it transformed him. Seduced by the siren song of progressive activism, by the time Reif departed he had installed a woke bureaucracy so deeply embedded that MIT’s succeeding president couldn’t dislodge it with a pickaxe. The man did not seek evil. The Ring captured his soul.

Chandrakasan watched this from the Dean of Engineering’s office. There, he co-authored MIT’s climate action plan and launched Rising Stars — a boosterism convocation for women engineers, now open to people of “historically marginalized or underrepresented genders,” because MIT’s other no-male-need-apply programs got hit with federal discrimination complaints.

Coveting a ring of his own, Chandrakasan refined his administrative vision to its irreducible essence: “Whatever it means to enable impact. That’s my single goal.”

Six words. Zero content. Goodbye search for truth, hello quest for power.

President Kornbluth’s heir apparent now oversees a panoply of activist programs, including MITHIC, MGAIC, The Climate Project, and the MIT-GE Vernova Energy Alliance. The acronyms breed in the dark. The chip designer is no more.

My precious, he whispers, clutching his org chart.