As expected:
JUST IN: Joi Ito resigning from Media Lab, MIT. Story tk.
— marc tracy (@marcatracy) September 7, 2019
Forward email sent to provost, cc-ing President:
“After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as Director of the Media Lab and as a Professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately.”
I bet he gave it much thought. He knew all along; he’d worked hard to keep Epstein’s involvement secret. And then, boom, the day a major article reveals how snout deep in the trough he’d been, he decides now would be a good time to resign.
I don’t think he’d planned this until he was caught blinking in the floodlights.
So, now we wait to find out how long before Ito gets a new professorship. It should take him about as long as it took Antonio Brown to get a new gig. I mean all he did was blatantly breach his employers’ instructions about donations and enable a child rapist and sex-slave trafficker. Does that really merit removal from respectable society? I mean, actual child rape didn’t keep Epstein from respectable society, so this…?
Sweet Gods of Candy Corn, I wish something like accountability actually existed for society’s wealthy.
The New Yorker story in the earlier post says that Ito and Cohen “did not respond to repeated requests for comments”, which suggests they knew the article was about to break. There are also indications that MIT knew more of the story was coming out. It’s not difficult to imgine that Ito and the MIT admin were giving their response some thought, as in whether to let him resign or fire him.
Is Peter Cohen out as well?
Is there even a semblance of an apology or an acknowledgement of wrongdoing? Or is it just “this is a good time to resign”?
I dunno, feels a bit premature to resign after only one embarrassing article. Could have given the Trump strategy of “all fake news folks, and J.E means I play Jim Earthworm on my office computer to relax” a chance.