Whether it’s one of their most admired deans or one of their most admired graduates, MIT exhibits the “beautiful indifference” long identified by the psychiatric community as an unsettling insouciance in regard to one’s own dire condition.

Dean Gabriel Bitran rots in prison while MIT publications continue to admire his commitment to “producing leaders with a social conscience.” To this day, MIT has said not one word about Bitran, though one of his campus colleagues has keened over his “immense suffering” as he dealt with the legal implications of having swindled thousands of people out of millions of dollars.

As for Sloan grad Chris Clemons, who is not currently but will soon be in prison… You’d think all those tech geniuses at MIT could figure out a way to remove this from the internet. Or if they don’t like doing that sort of thing, they could append an update to this front page article slobbering over Clemons for his selfless beneficence. Otherwise, since Clemons seems to have embezzled huge funds from the charter schools he founds, sentences like this one from the MIT article about him read a bit … awkwardly…

[W]hat really got me excited were the structural aspects of running a school, like finance, and accounting, and becoming a sophisticated leader of a multimillion dollar organization.

When he said “excited,” Clemons turns out to have had in mind spending tens of thousands of school dollars at “Hooters, Twin Peaks, and the strip clubs Goldrush Showbar and the Cheetah Lounge.”

The thing is, a lot of people start charter schools with just “passion.” But, Clemons explains, you also need MBA types like him.

“Sometimes charter schools struggle to efficiently manage their resources It’s a painful divide in the non-profit sector between those who have some business skills
and acumen and those who don’t.”

UD ain’t complaining that Sloan hires and graduates a few stinkers. Everybody does that. She wonders why the school just smiles like an idiot and pretends the stinkers have nothing to do with MIT.