The Pulse of the Faculty of MIT was originally conceived by Michael Short (Nuclear Science & Engineering) and Anette “Peko” Hosoi (Mechanical Engineering), and rolled out with the support of MIT’s Faculty Officers in December 2023. The Pulse is a remarkable innovation by Mike and Peko: an online space where the community of MIT faculty can propose simple questions, contribute to prioritizing which questions to put to the Faculty as a whole, and submit their views on those questions. Participation is restricted (through Certificate authentication) to MIT faculty, and is anonymous. The Pulse thereby offers a unique channel of communication among MIT faculty on issues widely deemed as important for the Institute.

One of the Principles Mike and Peko established for Pulse is that the role of Keepers of the Pulse (also called “Question Keepers”) be handed off at regular intervals to new faculty who would be nominated and elected through the Pulse itself. In the summer of 2024, we (Roger Levy and Yossi Sheffi) were selected through this mechanism as the new Keepers. In August 2024 we took this role over from Mike and Peko. With this article we want to recognize Mike and Peko’s achievement, express our gratitude for their leadership in launching Pulse and serving as its Keepers for the first year, and briefly describe how we plan to follow in their footsteps in ensuring that Pulse serves the MIT faculty as effectively as possible.

As the new Keepers, we plan a few initiatives to ensure transparency, foster collaboration, and encourage broad faculty participation in the Pulse. One of these is regular longer-form communication with the faculty through the Faculty Newsletter, starting with this article. Broadly speaking, we see the Keeper role as enabling your active participation for the benefit of the entire MIT community, strengthening our collective voice, and contributing to more inclusive decision-making processes. Here we’ll review the Pulse questions from 2023-2024 that elicited the greatest faculty response, and offer encouragement and a few guiding remarks regarding submitting and prioritizing Pulse questions based on our initial experience as Keepers.

Below we report the ten 2023-2024 Pulse questions (before we assumed the role of Pulse Keepers) that received the most faculty votes, with brief summative remarks regarding the responses. In reading this list, we urge you to keep in mind that Pulse is not currently designed as a scientifically valid opinion survey. Based on our review of previous Pulse questions and responses, we believe that the MIT community would nonetheless benefit from carefully considering best practices for such surveys, as we briefly note later on in this article.

• The most voted-on question was, “Are you concerned about retaliation from any of the people listed below when you speak your mind?” (320 votes!) Less than a third of the faculty responded “no” or “abstain”, with over two-thirds indicating concern about retaliation from (the most-selected being retaliation from students).
• 319 faculty responded to the question, “Should we restore the faculty dining area on the 4th floor of the Stata Center?”, with the overwhelming majority responding “yes” that a faculty dining area of some form should be restored.
• “Should MIT increase the cadence of faculty sabbaticals?” elicited 293 responses, with 62% responding “Yes”, and only 13% responding “No”.
• For the question soliciting current opinion on the Schwarzman College of Computing (290 votes), the plurality response (31%) was “Too much hype that is not backed up with substance”.
• 202 of 285 voting faculty responded “No” to the question, “Do you know about the link on the MIT homepage for campus updates and correcting misinformation?”
• “Should all faculty be guaranteed by MIT a minimum discretionary income of $5-10k per year?” elicited 282 votes, 148 of which responded “Absolutely” and the remainder of which expressed varying degrees of caution or opposition.
• “Do you think the DEI establishment at MIT is serving our community?” elicited 273 votes. The question offered many possible response options and responses were widely distributed among them.
• “Is it appropriate to require faculty candidates to submit DEI statements?” elicited 272 votes, the majority of which were some form of “no”.
• “Your Preferred Grad Admissions Site: Slate or Gradapply?” also elicited 272 votes; the majority of responses indicated a preference for Gradapply.
• Rounding out the top 10, “Should the faculty have opportunities to rate senior administrators?” elicited 265 responses, which were almost exactly split between an affirmative answer on the one hand and a variety of negative or more restrictive answers on the other.

We invite you to view the full results of these and other questions by visiting the Pulse results page.

We believe the responses to these questions indicate Pulse’s potential for identifying topics widely deemed by faculty to be important for the Institute, and for eliciting faculty opinion on these topics. During our term as Keepers, we will continue to work to improve this tool. Please submit questions that are on your mind, help prioritize the submitted questions for voting, and vote your mind! We encourage you to keep several points in mind as you do so:

First, many questions require accompanying context or analysis to achieve their value. For example, questions related to MIT outlays (salaries, benefits, overhead, etc.) may require financial analysis regarding the impact on MIT to be more relevant. Please consider what additional context or analysis may be worth including in your submitted questions. Where possible, we also will make an effort to provide any additional context we’re aware of to submitted questions. In other cases, questions may reveal that faculty may benefit from more information about how exactly the Institute does its business. We will also endeavor to provide this information.

Second, the best questions reflect careful consideration of the principles of question design and optimal wording. Both the wording of a question and the response options (as well as the set of response options given) can influence responses. We encourage you to consult resources for learning about survey design and wording such as those offered by the Pew Research Center and the American Association for Public Opinion Research. We anticipate revisiting the issue of question design and wording in greater depth in the future.

Third, we sometimes receive questions that are on important and timely topics, but that contain inappropriate (unclear and/or potentially inflammatory) language. We plan not to release questions for prioritization or voting when we identify such issues. If you do not see a question you have submitted in the Questions View page of Pulse, you are welcome to contact us to ask why you don’t see your question released, or simply to resubmit a new version of your question, keeping the above considerations in mind.

Finally, please keep in mind that the “Prioritize”/”Deprioritize” buttons on the Questions View are not intended as yes/no responses to the question; these buttons are intended for you to express your view on how valuable it would be to the Institute for the question to be voted on by the Faculty. Likewise, the thumbs-up/thumbs-down numbers appearing next to each question on the Questions View are not intended to provide a sense of faculty sentiment on the response to the question, but rather faculty sentiment on whether the question is worth posing to the faculty as a whole.

We look forward to continuing to interact with you all in our capacity as Pulse Keepers!

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