Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows (review)

Every wonder what it would be like to be Noam Chomsky’s department head? Or to administrate at a university where 75 of the students, faculty, and staff have won Nobel Prizes (ix)? In his intriguing new memoir, Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows, former MIT department head and associate provost Samuel Jay Keyser provides a snapshot of administrative life at one of higher education’s most cerebral and celebrated institutions.

From 1977 to 1985, Keyser was head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, where his most famous colleague was Noam Chomsky, and from 1985 until 1994, he was associate provost at the Nobel-rich “institute” (Keyser controversially commented in his first year as associate provost that MIT “is not a university” [46]). Nevertheless, while the volume contains an amusing description of Chomsky’s office (7–8) and notes that he always called Keyser “boss” (5), there is curiously very little else in this book about Keyser’s interactions with Chomsky or any of his other faculty colleagues. The prideful comment that “every other faculty member you meet walking down an MIT corridor is worth talking to, a higher ratio than most places that have corridors” (4) makes the unfortunate absence of faculty relations more deeply felt. One would expect that someone who spent over twenty years in the company of so many colleagues “worth talking to” would have more to say about them, particularly in a book devoted to the MIT nobody knows.

Nonetheless, this is not a memoir about faculty life at MIT. If anything, it is one about student life from the perspective a university administrator who was for much of his career responsible for overseeing educational programs and policy. As such, it contains a lot of discussion about compliance with university policy, particularly in situations that led to disagreements among students, faculty, community, and administration.

Looking back on his career as an administrator, Keyser fashioned himself as “someone who stood between the troops and their superiors, one leg in the trenches, the other in the corridors of power” (9). The martial metaphors of this phrase capture Keyser’s administrative ethos and reveal a philosophy that may be disturbing to some students, faculty, and community members. The use of the term “troops” to describe his distinguished colleagues betrays Keyser’s occasionally awkward, if not inappropriate, use of metaphors and analogies regarding the faculty and students at MIT. “It was a bit like walking into St. Peter’s on Christmas Eve wearing a T-shirt with a Star of David on it that lights up and plays Hava Nagila when you touch it” (189), writes Keyser of an MIT student arrested at Logan International Airport who was thought to be carrying a bomb. Elsewhere, Keyser bemoans his failed efforts to stop MIT student Adam Dershowitz (nephew of lawyer Alan Dershowitz) from showing the pornographic film Deep Throat on campus as follows: “I was as successful in converting Adam as Isabella and Ferdinand were in converting the Jews” (88). One would like to believe that a world-class linguist and long-standing member of “one of the finest universities in the world” (ix) (in the words of Tufts University President Lawrence S. Bacow, who provides a foreward to the book) could come up with some better analogies.

Regardless of whether “troops” refers to the students or the faculty (or both) at MIT, this book is essentially about Keyser working through—and justifying—some of the more controversial and difficult administrative decisions he made during his tenure as associate provost. From his opposition to the showing of pornographic movies on campus and his account of being sued by a former student who was removed from a graduate program to his role in the administration’s reactions to student pranks (called “hacks” at MIT) and protests regarding divesting MIT funds from South Africa, Keyser retraces many of his administrative thought processes and actions. For the most part, there is little second-guessing...