{"id":2091,"date":"2014-12-10T11:55:33","date_gmt":"2014-12-10T16:55:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2091"},"modified":"2016-12-10T04:45:19","modified_gmt":"2016-12-10T09:45:19","slug":"walter-lewin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2091","title":{"rendered":"Walter Lewin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I heard the sad news that Prof. Walter Lewin<\/a>, age 78—perhaps the most celebrated physics teacher in MIT’s history—has been stripped of his emeritus status<\/a> and barred from campus, and all of his physics lectures removed<\/a> from OpenCourseWare<\/a>, because an internal investigation found that he had been sexually harassing students online. \u00a0I don’t know anything about what happened beyond the terse public announcements, but those\u00a0who do<\/em> know tell me that the charges were extremely serious, and that “this wasn’t a borderline case.”<\/p>\n

I’m someone who feels that sexual harassment must\u00a0never be tolerated, neither here nor anywhere else. \u00a0But I also feel that, if a public figure\u00a0is going to be publicly brought down like this (yes, even by a private university), then the detailed findings\u00a0of the investigation should likewise\u00a0be made public, regardless of\u00a0how embarrassing they are. \u00a0I know\u00a0others differ, but I think\u00a0the need of the world to see that justice was done overrides MIT’s internal administrative needs, and even Prof. Lewin’s privacy (the names of any victims could, of course, be kept secret).<\/p>\n

More importantly, I wish\u00a0to register that I disagree in the strongest possible terms with MIT’s\u00a0decision to remove Prof. Lewin’s lectures from OpenCourseWare—thereby forcing the tens of thousands of students around the world who were watching these\u00a0legendary lectures\u00a0to hunt for ripped copies on BitTorrent. \u00a0(Imagine that: physics lectures as prized contraband!) \u00a0By all means, punish Prof. Lewin as harshly as he deserves, but—as students have been pleading on Reddit<\/a>, in the MIT Tech comments section<\/a>, and elsewhere—don’t also<\/em> punish the countless\u00a0students of both sexes who continue to benefit from his work. \u00a0(For godsakes, I’d regard taking down the lectures\u00a0as a tough call if Prof. Lewin had gone on a murder spree<\/em>.) \u00a0Doing this sends the wrong\u00a0message about MIT’s values, and is a gift to those who like to\u00a0compare modern American college campuses to the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0For those who are interested, while the comment section starts out with a discussion of whether Walter Lewin’s physics lectures should’ve been removed from OCW, it’s now broadened to include essentially all aspects of the human condition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I heard the sad news that Prof. Walter Lewin, age 78—perhaps the most celebrated physics teacher in MIT’s history—has been stripped of his emeritus status and barred from campus, and all of his physics lectures removed from OpenCourseWare, because an internal investigation found that he had been sexually harassing students online. \u00a0I don’t know […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nerd-interest","category-obviously-im-not-defending-aaronson"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2091"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2105,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2091\/revisions\/2105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}