MIT Media Lab Tightens Its Belt

Forbes Magazine has this story about the MIT Media Laboratory's current "burn rate" problem. It seems that the Media Lab is feeling the same big draft at its posterior that dot-com companies felt last year after years of go-go growth and seemingly unlimited funding. The Media Lab is particularly sensitive to this downturn due to its heavy reliance on corporate sponsorship, as well as its fondness for unconventional, even eccentric, research. Items that will no longer receive funding according to a January 5th internal E-mail from the Lab's Executive Director Walter Bender: cellular telephones, first-class air travel, food at internal Lab meetings, and furniture. Other more serious cutbacks for the Lab include layoffs for 29 staff members and reduced funding for students, including salaries for "Undergraduate Research Opportunities" (UROP) positions. The Media Lab had previously paid such positions $8.75 and up in order to remain competitive with industry offers that even not-yet-graduated students were receiving.

Comments

Reality

[john82]

Its great that MIT is a bastion of engineering and research. Its also apparent that, like many other schools of this ilk, they neglect reality.

There is a budget. And its not infinite. A lesson that someone should have explained before we launched into the dot-com idiocy in the first place. I view the situation at the Media Lab as another opportunity to learn.

Too much funding.

[Restil]

Even if you have practically endless funding, I can see better uses of that funding then paying for first class airline tickets and limo service. These ARE students we're talking about, right? They certainly don't fit into the "starving college student" role very well.

Not that the rest of the dot-com wave didn't suffer from the same problems. And yes, when any college student who once turned on a computer could land a lucrative job in this industry, with all the lavish perks that go with it, I can see where MIT might have to compete on those grounds to attract that same talented individuals. But there would always be others. There would always be people to whom the research was more important then the perks. Yeah, you'd have to search a little harder, but I'm sure there were a few real starving college students at MIT that would have been happy for a $9 an hour starting salary job.
And when the wave collapsed, MIT labs wouldn't be struggling, and wouldn't HAVE to cut back or cut jobs, and the people in those jobs would be VERY happy.

But hey. What can ya do?

-Restil