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

And this is news exactly how?

[Marx_Mrvelous]

Wow, a news story about an institute cutting back on things. This is new, exciting news. Yea.

I just don't see the angle. Is it good just because it's MIT? I'm sorta tired of these "super schools" getting so much attention. If this was DePauw University cutting back, would it get posted on /.?

Such Difficult Cuts

[The Gardener]

Its legions of techies have eagerly spent money donated by corporate sponsors since the lab opened its doors in 1985. The money--an annual budget of about $40 million--went not only to sometimes wild ideas like "smart" potholders, dice, chairs and animal building blocks, but also apparently to fund some dot-com-style largesse. . . . won't be paid for out of the laboratory till: cell phones, limos, first-class flights and furniture. (It's not clear whether this applies to new chairs and couches that "think.")

Oh such brutal cuts. And less than two years after the private sector had to cut such frivolities as . . . everything. I know my company sympathizes with them.

The Gardener