Was It Campus Extortion in 1970?

Names will be changed to protect the guilty in this one, but it's not because I don't remember them, but because there is no point in calling down the wrath of whatever on someone who may have grown up somewhat in the intervening time.

I started college in September of 1969, a dumb ol' kid from the farm who had no idea how unprepared his very small-town high school had left him for a university like M.I.T.  I got in on a rural quota, I assumed.  I had never been to (or near) the Boston area; the fact that I grew up a Red Sox fan was a geographical anomaly that explains Tigers fans from Arizona, or Cardinals fans from Oregon, or Yankees fans from anywhere on earth.

But I digress.

By the fall of 1970, my sophomore year, buoyed by having survived a pass-fail first couple semesters and declaring for biology as a major toward pre-med, I selected as one of my optional classes a small, three-credit-size class called "Animal Communication Systems", course number "6.40". 

You may have heard of the noted professor Noam Chomsky (yes, that name is real and not one of the changed names), whose career included pioneering research in how human language evolved and still does, and how animals communicate with one another.  The latter was what this class was based on, although we never did meet Prof. Chomsky, who was world-famous even then at 42, and is now 88 and still world-renowned.

I liked the class.  It had nothing to do with my major, at least not that much.  It was a biological class, of course, but it was offered by the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE was department number "6", hence the course number "6.40").  Don't ask why EE offered it; I couldn't tell you why.

It was taught by a doctoral candidate whom we'll call Etaoin Shrdlu.  I looked up Etaoin in "researching" this piece; he is now 71 and still a professor of linguistics at an Ivy League university.  Etaoin, in contrast to me, is actually working in the field in which he was educated.  I'll give him credit for that. I have received not one penny in compensation in the 44 years since I received a biology degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a result of any work done in the field in which that degree was awarded.

Plus, I kind of liked Etaoin as an instructor.  The class was pretty interesting, which helped, of course, and Etaoin was obviously working in the field and knew the material.  And for our final quiz (there was no final exam), we could do any one of a half dozen things -- including reviewing the class itself.

I always knew, for example, that bats fed on moths using a type of radar to sense their location and go after them.  I did not know that some moths had evolved to develop "radar detection", two nerves of different sensitivity to radar signals.  When only the more-sensitive one fired, the moth would just fly away; if they both fired, it meant the bat would have to be close and the moth would respond by diving quickly.  Fun stuff.

Now, let's set the mood.  The previous semester (freshman spring for me) had ended with a student strike to protest ... something or other.  Might have been the Vietnam War, which was still going on, or the amount of military research that was being done at M.I.T. that helped our troops there and, incidentally, helped pay for the costs of the school we were going to.

We returned to Cambridge that fall to a campus full of unrest and protest and all the stuff that goes along with immature kids whose tuition was paid for by their parents.  I noticed a curiosity.  As you left the main entrance of the academic buildings at 77 Massachusetts Ave., the building had a very large echoing central hall, the west end of a very long corridor from which the academic wings branched.  There were hawkers in that hall and the exit door, selling the evening newspapers (you had evening newspapers then).

Along with the paper boys with their stacks of the evening Globe and Record ("Get yuh Globe er Reckid heah!"), there was a guy selling a leftist paper and magazine called The Militant.  The previous spring, before the strike, his hawking cry was "Read the Militant, socialist newspaper 50 cents, socialist magazine one dollar!".  I think the prices were something like that.

In the fall, the same guy was there with the same-sized newspaper and magazine.  Except now the pitch was different: "Read the Militant, communist newspaper 50 cents, communist magazine one dollar!".  Apparently the increase in tensions allowed the hawker to be more honest, or at least to say "communist", which fifteen years earlier would have been reacted to a bit differently.

Hopefully that sets the tone a bit.  Because some time that fall, a couple months into the semester, I was on my way down the hall at the end of the class day.  There was Etaoin Shrdlu, by God, and he was soliciting donations for a far-leftist organization on campus.  He knew me, of course, which made the whole situation extraordinarily uncomfortable.

I had no money; we were pretty lower middle class and I was at M.I.T. on a set of loans and scholarships.  I played on the varsity golf team but with third-hand clubs and a bag provided by the school.  So I certainly didn't have ten whole dollars -- a lot in 1970 -- to donate to a cause I didn't even support.  And I didn't, mumbling some excuse.

I was going to be applying to med school in two years, one of 42,000 applicants trying to get one of 14,000 places in the entering classes of American medical schools.  I needed good grades, and my grade in 6.40 depended on Etaoin Shrdlu, who was there asking for me to give money to an ill-defined organization supporting a cause I opposed.

For a moment, I thought there was some extortion going on, but I have to give Etaoin credit; he was disappointed that I didn't give to his cause, but never connected it to the class itself, and I did end up getting a B in the course, which is probably what I deserved.  But it is almost 47 years since, and I can still picture the scene and how uncomfortable it made me to think I could be shaken down to support an instructor's cause.

Could this still be going on?

I would like to know that, at least on my campus, that practice is banned and banned heavily, where academic employees and graduate instructors are forbidden from soliciting a penny on campus for any cause.  In fact, I think this piece needs to get sent to the Provost's office at M.I.T. to see.

Because that's something that needs never to happen again.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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