This is MIT is a promotional video that celebrates MIT’s longstanding contributions to America’s military industrial complex, advanced manufacturing, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and patriotic national service. The big takeaway? You can’t even Imagine a World Without MIT.
To the relief of MIT’s new VP of Government Affairs, a former oil-industry lobbyist, neither of these chest-thumping videos mentions climate change, MIT’s highest priority a few short years ago when MIT President Sally Kornbluth bragged that twenty percent of MIT’s faculty was feeding from that copious federal trough.
But have no fear, climate hysteria at MIT will never die. It just finds refuge in receptive reservoirs in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Socialist Scientism (SHASS).
Enter Living Climate Futures, the MIT Human Insight Collaborative’s flagship “Faculty-Driven Initiative,” now housed safely within the Anthropology Department, where real scientists dare not tread.
Program Head Chris Walley explains that “climate change is a social, political, economic, and cultural problem.” It demands that we “think holistically.” Fighting for environmental justice forces us to ask, “what do we consider to be evidence and whose knowledge counts?” Take that, Western Science, with your settler-colonialist epistemology. We must bring “multiple forms of knowledge-making to bear on the problems we face.”
This explains why MIT’s Anthropology Department, world experts in other ways of knowing, along with former department head and now associate dean for faculty artisanal cheese scholar Heater Paxson, is leading the charge.
Living Climate Futures is proud to empower thought leaders like Kurt Russo, Co-Executive Director of the Indigenous activism group Se’Si’Le, whose mission is to “utilize Indigenous ancestral knowledge for the benefit of our Mother Earth” through its Return of the Matriarchy campaign.
The Beaver is pleased to shine a light on such enlightened activism at the world’s leading STEM university.
Story suggested by the MIT SHASS Newsletter