Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MIT mandates diversity, equity, and inclusion training for students. Training is required in order to register for spring classes.

MIT's women's tennis program "took the lead in the department and held four anti-racism gatherings for friends of MIT women's tennis, MIT DAPER staff and MIT community members. During these sessions, the group had open discussions on anti-racism topics, which helped move the needle in a positive direction and create further awareness and education."

On August 28, 2019. MIT's Teaching and Learning Lab Department launched “MITeaches: Fostering Inclusion” for faculty, instructors, and teaching assistants. The workshop is the "only experimentally-proven intervention to produce long-term changes in bias."

The Department of Education has recently received complaints that Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT) as well as other universities are violating students’ civil rights. According to the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and Title VI universities are not allowed to discriminate candidates on the basis of race. However, MIT along with many other universities, decided to comply with Google and IBM “capping the number of white and Asian students whom universities can [be] nominate for [their] prestigious research fellowships…” In fact, these companies have “require that half of each school’s nominees be underrepresented minorities.”

On May 17, 2022, Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT) students “gathered on the steps of the Stratton Student Center… to support each other in the wake of yet another mass shooting targeting the Black Community, this time in Buffalo, NY.” This event was sponsored by the Office of Religious, Spiritual and Ethical Life and the Institution Community and Equity Office, where they “opened with a reading of the names of each victim of the Buffalo shooting.”

$1 million invested into Anti-Racist Research.

Massachusetts Institution of Technology’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society has launched a Research Initiative on Combatting System Racism (ICSR). The ICSR “aims to seed and coordinate cross-disciplinary research to identity and overcome racially discriminatory processes and outcomes across a range of American institutions and policy domains.”

MIT announced as a way to “build on the 2021 Antiracist Technology in the US Challenge and Solve’s effort to be a culturally diverse and anti-racist platform, Solve is integrating U.S. racial equity solutions across their 2022 Global Challenges by launching the Black & Brown Innovators program.” The teams who win this award will not only participate in the Solver program but will also “receive culturally-responsive support and partnership opportunities and participate in the annual Indigenous and Antiracist Innovators Summit.” In addition, Solve will also be “opening applications for the 2022 Indigenous Communities Fellowship, which looks for Native innovators in the United States and its territories.”

MIT Solve hosted a challenge event called "Antiracist Technology In The US." The challenge overview reads, "Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the US have created resilient, culturally rich, and generous communities despite centuries of institutionalized racism, anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and oppression. The Covid-19 pandemic has further exacerbated the disparities between BIPOC and white communities in the US, including in wealth, education, incarceration, and health."

MIT's Hacking Racism in Healthcare hosted an "Engineering Health Equity Hackathon."

Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT) recently released news that they would be implementing a “strategic action plan for belonging, achievement, and composition, intended to help the Institution forge a stronger sense of community and pursue excellence by tapping into talent globally.” MIT’s goal in this is to not only further the institutions ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion, but to open up space for “individual departments, labs, and offices to define and tailor their own efforts in this regard.”

According to a study performed by College Pulse on how Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) undergraduate students felt whether their Constitutional right to free speech had been hindered at MIT. The study found that “50% of students say they have rarely or never self-censored on campus [and that] 32% of students say they are not worried about damaging their reputation because someone misunderstood something they have said or done.” In fact of the students who spoke up in regards to the matter said things like “I never feel free to express my opinion on campus,” “In general I feel like expressing an unpopular opinion in front of positions of authority who have the power to make decisions on your behind and punish you is uncomfortable,” and “I never feel like I can express my views around my classmates, even a lot of my close friends. They frequently talk about how evil all conservatives are and even talk about how they’d wish they’d all just die.”

Massachusetts Institution of Technology’s (MIT) Media Lab published their 2022 goals to advance diversity, equity, inclusion. Their goals include: (1) “co-design of shared values statement, (2) co-design of Code of Conduct, (3) improve onboarding, and (4) continue efforts on our DEI graduate student programming.”

This past spring, Massachusetts Institution of Technology provided eight students with the opportunity to “learn about some of the most consequential events in U.S. civil rights history.” One of the students said they “had an understanding of the facts, but this trip deepened my understanding of the emotions and the lived experiences of the Black Americans whose stories are still not being told, and which continue to resonate today.”

Massachusetts Institution of Technology “researchers have developed a technique that removes multiple types of bias from mortgage lending dataset, which improves the accuracy and fairness of machine learning models that may help make fair predictions of whether borrowers receive a mortgage loan.”

Visiting professor Craig S. Watkins gave a TEDxMIT talk on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Racial Justice where he described that “even when we are not explicitly thinking about race, race implicitly makes its way into these systems in ways that must be understood.” He poses the question of whether “you [can] be “fair” and still not engage in structural racism?” This question was used to address the need to design a computational system that will address this interconnectedness of the interpersonal, institutional, and structural racism that has become so prevalent within our system. The goal with this new research is to bring attention to the fact that “we are trying to maximize influence and potential on the computational side, but we won’t get there with computation alone.” AI has proven it can only predict the outcome, but not prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the outcome is exact. He believes there is room to grow and to fight systematic racism which is why he desires to team up with experts outside the field of data science to uncover the interconnectedness of the different sectors of racism.

MIT published its Strategic Action Plan for "Belonging, Achievement, & Composition" and states, "To more fully live up to its mission and increase its impact, MIT will continue increasing the diversity and sense of belonging in its community, removing barriers to opportunity, and shaping an environment in which all people can do their best work and thrive."

MIT's "Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, & Composition" includes the proposed action to work "in collaboration with existing departmental curriculum development and planning efforts, create a program and incentive structure for department heads and individual faculty members to develop curricular innovations and academic programming that incorporates diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and ethics concepts into current subject matter and research topics across programs and departments."

MIT's Teaching and Learning Lab Department offers strategies for faculty and staff to combat implicit bias in the classroom and states that "Our biases and assumptions about others can be so automatic that they result in unintended thoughts that contradict our own beliefs. Even given our best intentions, we all hold some form of bias due to socialization and cultural stereotypes."

MIT's Human Resources Department offers several resources to "enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across the Institute."

In January of 2022, MIT's Teaching and Learning Lab Department launched "a new interdisciplinary community in which 12 MIT faculty and instructors came together to engage in anti-racist work within the context of their roles as educators across disciplines at MIT." The department also stated that "The Community of Anti-Racist Educators is designed as a structured and intentional space for MIT faculty and instructors to explore and apply anti-racist pedagogy modeled on the process outlined by Kishimoto (2018)."

MIT's earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences department canceled its Carlson lecture (which "has a very specific format and public outreach component"), due to "current distractions." The speaker had voiced opposition against higher education's diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. The department reached out to the speaker "present his scientific work on MIT’s campus to students and faculty," in lieu of the Carlson lecture.

On July 1, 2020, the Institute's President issued a "Letter regarding efforts to address systemic racism at MIT" and stated, "This time, all of us – especially those who are white and those in positions of leadership, at every level – need to be all in, individually and together, in the struggle to achieve racial equity and justice at MIT."