It's super sad. My boss was once at the center of one of these big press release splashes at the university I worked. She said it was almost more of a burden than a boon, because the attention it attracted was almost all of the wrong kind. And among the right kind of people, she had to spend time and effort excusing the embarassing and ridiculous press release.

I wonder if universities understand that they're sometimes harming their own people with these things.

The incentives for the PR team is to make news. They don’t have to spend a ton of time cleaning up the mess of misleading press releases.

At some point it tarnish the reputation of the university. If your university get famous for sending ridiculous press releases, I hope that eventually the journalist will notice and just forward them to The Onion.

MIT has a reputation for super sketchy press releases, but their research reputation is fine still. Even with the whole epstein scandal. I wonder how much it takes to actually tarnish their reputation.

There's no shortage of reasons to criticize at MIT but I'm not sure Epstein is one of them.

AFAICT the administration did not turn a blind eye to Epstein, and in fact barred him. And the scandal is that Joi knew that he was persona non grata and therefore took steps to hide Epstein's funding. That is unquestionably terrible but in my mind doesn't tar the Institute.

I'm certainly not defending (or criticizing) MIT as an institute (there are bigger problems than the dreadful press releases from the publicity office). But if my understanding is correct, Epstein, while lurid, might not be a useful line of attack.

An institution is its people. If institutional policies aren't followed, the reputation suffers.

Well sure, but the point is the institution put a stop mechanism in place, when it was found out that someone had worked around it then a group of them were canned too. The media lab is a tiny part of the smallest school in a very large institution and the sums were correspondingly trivial compared to the institute's annual budget. (even all of education is a small fraction of that budget).

It's as if Google's parking valets were found to be running a car theft ring (made up example): unless Google seemed to think it below their notice, I would have a hard time considering that should be grounds for condemning Google.

I'm not defending MIT (or conflating car theft with sexual abuse) I'm merely saying that if you want to attack MIT consider something more substantive like its slow progress in recruiting and retaining female scientists; it's intimate ties with the government and military (despite various fig leaves assembled over the decades), or its treatment of undergraduates which at best is neglect. Don't waste your efforts on a small, if noisy, lab that has produced negligible research of consequence.

Also MIT != MIT Media Lab. (Although in terms of reputation the two are usually conflated.)

That point is too far in the future for anyone currently in power to care. If that point is ever reached it would require larger numbers of the population to be scientifically literate. I don't see that happening, everything is clickbaity now.

Yup, there are no consequences for these people so why should they change? No skin in the game I tell ya.