Proving that she’s not as washed up as everyone says she is, MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles has responded to the Institute’s $300 million structural deficit that produced a hiring freeze on all non-faculty positions, canceled raises, and shuttered library services. Her solution: create an entirely new vice chancellorship, filling it with a younger, more energetic version of herself.

Meet Akirah Bradley-Armstrong, EdD (she/her), who arrives from UC Santa Cruz to become MIT’s new Vice Chancellor for Student Life. It is, insiders say, less a hire than a cloning. Where Nobles spent a decade insisting science is racist, Bradley-Armstrong brings “proven leadership in closing equity gaps,” precisely the skillset MIT was crying out for as colorblind merit-based policies threaten to return to the world’s leading STEM university.

Bradley-Armstrong’s passion for student affairs work comes in part from her own experiences as a first-generation college graduate and her identity as a queer Black womyn. As a former board member of NASPA, the trade group that gave us the Chief Experience Officer for students, she can be counted on to keep the flame alive for race-conscious admissions, equity-driven programs, and identitarian support systems.

Money, apparently, was no obstacle. Bradley-Armstrong was paid $364,750 at USCC, a salary MIT will presumably have to top. You cannot, after all, put a price on someone who “wanted to figure out how I could shift policies, programs, and procedures within the education system… to support students who look like me.”

Nobles, whose own Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, and Composition was mothballed after the DOJ noticed it was illegal, clearly needed backup. In Bradley-Armstrong she found not a subordinate but a successor-in-waiting, someone to keep the banner aloft until Washington’s political weather turns and DEI can come roaring back.

MIT’s endowment may be shrinking, but its administrative class thrives.