He's got tenure, but I think CSAIL really ought to have a conversation about whether Sussman's sponsorship of Stallman was a benefit to the lab or not. I don't think there's much to be gained by kicking Sussman out (as far as I've heard, Sussman himself is not the problem, and as a former student I can say he taught classes just fine), but I think there's very much to be gained with a "blameless postmortem," so to speak, of what happened and how we can prevent it from happening again. In particular, given the stories coming out about both students and faculty going out of their way to ward off RMS, could the lab have picked up on him being a problem earlier and gone through some well-defined process? (Consensus is that he was an annoyance 10+ years ago when I was there, was he more than that / could we have established consensus that he was an actual problem?) What should the procedure / norms be to review sponsorship of a lab visitor? How did he get an office when the lab was pressed for space for actual paid researchers, and why was he allowed to have a mattress there?

(If you're applying standard SRE philosophy, someone resigning after a media firestorm is absolutely the sort of atypical and unwanted event that merits an unconditional postmortem. Whether or not you agree with them leaving, it's clearly not the right outcome: either they should have stayed or they should have left before the firestorm.)

That is such a disappointment. The MIT ethic is all about proving yourself by doing worthwhile things, not by flashing wealth around. Cool people eat ramen and advance the world's knowledge. Losers drop out of that and work in hedge funds. (Okay, that's an exaggeration, but not by much.)

So for a long established MIT professor to show himself susceptible to a guy like Epstein showing up with a model at each arm and flashing money around is such an unbelievable letdown. Even if nothing else was wrong with Epstein.

The whole world is going to unravel like Mr Oogie Boogie in the Nightmare Before Christmas by the time all the strings back to Epstein get pulled.

I don't really think all these "strings" mean too much.

... yikes.

So Abelson left Swartz out to dry and Sussman says this !@#!. Lessig tries to put spin on the money as "complicated". While RMS spews some seriously libertarian viewpoints and defends Epstein, that we need to take a nuanced approach. I wouldn't say they were heros, but damn, that any of them even thought that what they were saying would be taken any other way ... is not fathomable.