Our Mission
The founding mission of the MIT Free Speech Alliance is to promote free expression, academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, and open scientific inquiry, without regard to partisanship or ideology. This objective is now embodied in MIT’s Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom. Our next steps must be to ensure that the ideal embodied in this statement is reinforced throughout the Institute in official and unofficial actions, policies, and institutional structures of both the administration and the faculty. Once we achieve these goals, our priorities will shift to ensuring that a diversity of viewpoints is not merely tolerated at MIT, but that heterodox views genuinely thrive on campus.
MFSA’s long-term goal is to help restore the balance between the foundational Enlightenment Values that enabled the scientific revolution and the Postmodern/Critical Theory ideology that displaced them, reversing the roles of which guides the operation and flourishing of the world’s foremost STEM university.
A critical action at this stage will be for MFSA to actively oppose any ideologies that are inimical to freedom of expression and to the unrestrained pursuit of the scientific method. An important aspect of this shift in focus will be advocating for the restructuring of the most problematic elements of MIT’s programs that inculcate an identitarian orthodoxy under an oppressor/oppressed rubric, with the accompanying suppression of alternative viewpoints that are a key component of enforcing this orthodoxy. As an element of our advocacy, we call for a careful re-examination of and debate over the identitarian composition goals outlined in MIT’s Strategic Plan for Belonging, Achievement, and Composition. Finally and most importantly, MFSA champions a return to merit in both admissions and faculty hiring and promotion irrespective of candidate identities.