Who Runs MIT

Part 3: The Faculty

The first article in this series described the shared governance framework MIT nominally uses to allocate authority among its governing board, administration, and faculty. The second examined the MIT Corporation. This third article turns to the faculty—the group most directly responsible for MIT’s reputation for excellence and, on paper, for stewardship of its academic, research, and educational mission.

MIT’s faculty are world‑class in research and teaching, yet the MIT Faculty Newsletter recently described faculty governance as “characterized by disengagement, inefficiency, and a lack of accountability.” This article explores that paradox: how MIT’s distinctive, committee‑driven governance structure both contributes to the Institute’s exceptionalism and fails to overcome a persistent lack of faculty engagement. As Benjamin Ginsberg noted in The Fall of the Faculty, professors at many universities have ceded their prerogatives to administrations for decades; MIT is not immune.

MIT’s Peculiar Governance Concoction

The Schools of Engineering and Science together employ roughly two‑thirds of the Institute’s faculty and educate most of its graduate students and undergraduate majors. MIT’s global reputation—Nobel Prizes, Turing Awards, Fields Medals, patents, and rankings—rests primarily on the accomplishments of these STEM faculty and the graduates they train. The faculty play, “many key roles in the governance of the Institute, including stewardship of academic and educational matters,” and they carry collective responsibility for degrees, curricula, academic standards, and educational policies.

MIT’s approach to faculty governance is unusual among major research universities. As one Faculty Newsletter essay put it, “our system [of governance] is a peculiar MIT concoction: a unitary faculty meeting with real power and influence, but which rarely draws more than 15% of the faculty, combined with a strong system of standing committees.”

Unlike many IvyPlus peers, MIT has no faculty senate or formal faculty association. Instead, faculty governance operates through two channels:

• Standing committees charged with specific domains, the most important of which are the Faculty Policy Committee (FPC) and Committees on Curricula (COC), the Undergraduate Program (CUP), Academic Performance (CAP), Discipline (COD), and Nominations.

• Monthly faculty meetings, open to all faculty, where any member may speak, introduce topics, and vote on motions, degree changes, and major policy questions.

A Faculty Newsletter article notes that, “about a quarter of the faculty serve on at least one committee at any given time,” suggesting broad potential involvement. The administration also operates standing committees on which faculty serve. On paper, this gives the faculty significant direct power with less bureaucracy than a formal senate.

Another peculiarity is that the MIT administration appoints the heads of academic departments. At many peers, department chairs are elected or chosen through faculty‑driven processes, whereas at MIT faculty influence is at best advisory.

How Governance Actually Works

In practice, the opportunity to participate is limited and unevenly used. There are more than a dozen faculty committees, but only about 40 faculty at any time serve on the most consequential ones. Promotion to full professor now typically requires some Institute‑level service., Because research and teaching demands mean governance participation competes directly with tenure pressures the Institute allows non-tenured faculty to devote most of their time to lab work, grants, and teaching, and to treat committees and meetings as optional.

The nominations process reinforces the disengagement. The Chair and Associate Chairs of the Faculty and all committee members are formally “elected” by the faculty, including via online ballots. In reality, a Committee on Nominations—whose members are appointed by the three faculty officers—solicits interest, vets candidates, and presents a single slate for an up‑or‑down vote. Alternate nominations are technically possible but historically rare. Elections thus function largely as ratifications of a pre‑selected slate chosen by a small, self‑nominating group.

Faculty meetings are nominally the central locus of authority. The President, as an officer of the Faculty, presides and sets the agenda with the Faculty Officer Group. Quorum is only 30 faculty, a threshold set in the 1930s and never updated. Recent commentary reports median attendance of roughly 100–110 faculty out of about 1,100, but often less than 10%. Meetings are open to the MIT community, with a similar number of non‑voting staff attending. Routine business often proceeds with only a modest fraction of faculty present. Curriculum votes require a two‑thirds majority of those present, which can raise turnout for high‑stakes issues, but most decisions are made by a relatively small subset.

A 2025 Faculty Newsletter article argues that limited participation, combined with procedural complexity and inconsequential pre‑selected agenda topics, yields a system where “disengagement, inefficiency, and a lack of accountability” are the norm. This is MIT’s version of the broader pattern Ginsberg described: faculty formally have power, but do not often exercise it.

Case Study 1: Degrees, Gatekeeping, and Mission

One domain where faculty still exercise clear authority is the creation of new degree programs. Since the early 2000s, the faculty have formal guidelines requiring multi‑stage review and a vote of the full Faculty before any permanent undergraduate degree can be authorized. Proposals pass through CUP and COC, are reviewed by the FPC, and then brought to a faculty meeting for debate and a vote; approval requires a majority and minimum quorum.

Over the past two decades, the faculty has exercised its responsibility by approving multiple new undergraduate and masters degree programs across all departments. Even at the highest level, the PhD program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), created in 1988, was described as, “the first new doctoral program approved by the MIT Faculty in over 20 years,” and remains one of only two humanities doctorates at MIT. When the faculty approves a program, they are voting on what kinds of knowledge MIT will institutionalize and teach.

Case Study 2: When Faculty Governance Worked

A recent example of faculty governance functioning well is the Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom, adopted in 2022. After sharp controversy over campus speech and invited speakers, the faculty established a committee under faculty rules to draft a statement on free expression. The draft was circulated, debated, and amended at faculty meetings, then approved by faculty vote as a formal statement of MIT policy and values.

This process—faculty‑initiated, committee‑led, debated openly, and formally ratified—shows the governance structure at its best: direct faculty voice on a core academic value, exercised through the mechanisms the rules prescribe.

Case Study 3: When Faculty Governance Was Bypassed

The Schwarzman College of Computing, discussed in the second article of this series, is a clear case of faculty governance being sidelined. The College, a major new academic structure, was announced in October 2018 as a large gift and institutional commitment. The initiative did not first go through the normal route of faculty committees and meetings for creating a new academic unit. MIT’s Turing Award winners had urged a school of computing, and the administration developed the College in response. The Corporation approved the initiative, but faculty were consulted largely after the fact on implementation.

Here, administration conceived and launched a major Institute‑wide academic entity with faculty governance brought in mainly on details, not on the decision itself. Likewise, the MIT Mission Statement and MIT Values Statement were prepared entirely by the administration and were neither drafted by faculty‑chosen representatives nor approved by faculty vote. These episodes illustrate how MIT’s peculiar governance concoction can fail to protect faculty prerogatives even when protective structures exist on paper, as well as how the administration often defines MIT’s public policies with minimal faculty governance involvement.

Paper Authority, Exercised Rarely

Taken together, the structure and these cases support the Newsletter’s critique: MIT’s faculty governance has real authority on paper, limited engagement in practice, and a structure that can enable both faculty initiative and administrative bypass. A governance system that depends on faculty showing up cannot work well when most do not.

Much of MIT’s exceptionalism rests on its STEM faculty, but being world‑class in research and teaching is not enough at MIT: STEM faculty have a special obligation to engage in governance so that together they preserve, protect, and strengthen the Institute that STEM faculty built.

The fourth article will examine the role of the administration—how presidential and provostial offices, including the Office of Innovation and Strategy, define priorities and interact with the Corporation and faculty.