Excellence is a Shared Path: Working Together for Justice and the Quality of Life

Exploring the past opens up new perspectives on the present and offers ways of navigating a challenging future, these speakers suggest, in a call to action on the occasion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. Susan Hockfield has been “digging into MIT’s history,” where she finds seeds for the institute’s distinct culture. One core aspect of this culture, sustained over MIT’s 150 years, is the idea of “rewarding talent and initiative regardless of social position or pedigree,” says Hockfield. However, as she describes, meritocracy has sometimes been more of an aspiration than reality. Hockfield cites examples of the grudging acceptance of women students in the 19th and early 20th century. In the 1961 centennial, there were only 155 women enrolled in a student body of more than 6,000, she says. “Today, through a conscious and sustained outreach, 45% of undergraduates are now women.” Although MIT now boasts far more students and faculty of underrepresented minorities, Hockfield says that “opening doors turns out to be the easy part.” It is more difficult ensuring that “those who come from outside the circle of affluence or white privilege can count on a sense of full citizenship.” MIT’s central challenge must be “full inclusion,” states Hockfield, and the Institute should lead the nation in attaining this goal. Don’t show up at a King celebration, says Roland Martin, if you do not intend to recommit to “his cause, his ideals and vision.” Martin frets that today’s young people are waiting for the right moment “to take charge and get involved.” It was not always so. In 1955, a handful of pastors in Montgomery, Alabama chose a very young Martin Luther King to lead the city’s improvement association. It was high school and college students who frequently led the charge with lunch counter sit-ins, boycotts, and other protests that launched the Civil Rights movement. Martin notes the sense of lowered expectations around President Obama’s administration, as if...

Channel: MIT World Video Length: 0s Date Found: Tue, Mar 08 2011 4:27 AM Category: Science Date Produced: Thu, Mar 03 2011 12:00 AM View Count: 6