Massachusetts Institute of Technology Archives

Wednesday

January 7, 2026

Blame the EU for your increasingly bossy car

From our UK edition

When Eileen, a 75-year-old British grandmother, bought a brand-new car she found its advanced driver-assistance repeatedly told her the speed limit in a 30mph zone was 80mph and then kept jerking the steering wheel to ‘correct’ her, even when she was trying to park. She told Which? that driving had gone ‘from a lifeline to a nightmare’. ‘I’ve seriously considered getting some old, beat-up car from five years ago that doesn’t have this technology,’ she said. Car safety features are boring and intrusive, like having a man with a clipboard and lanyard permanently in your backseat. Indeed, the Which? survey of more than 1,500 motorists found we are increasingly switching off all that ‘safety’ tech because it’s actually dangerous, distracting or useless.

Thursday

December 7, 2023

Roger Kimball

The disgraceful, ducking, diving, dodging college presidents

It was a clarifying moment, wasn’t it? The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania testifying for the House Education Committee about the wave of rabid antisemitism on their campuses. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York asked the same question of UPenn’s Liz Magill, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your campus’s rule of conduct, yes or no? That was the question. You might think it was a pretty simple question.

Tuesday

October 23, 2018

Dominic Green

American universities need to chop the hand that feeds them tyrants’ cash

Political correctness is the yoga of the modern Western mind. The salutations and poses of rationalised irrationality are nowhere aped more sedulously than in the American university. At the same time, the infinite cupidity of the American university, its appetite for money from parents, corporations and even foreign powers, brings the soft conscience into contact with hard cash from the kind of regimes for whom ‘political correctness’ retains its original sense, which is repeating the regime’s propaganda so you don’t get shot or sent for re-education in the local equivalent of a liberal arts facility.