Noubar Afeyan, Founder and CEO at Flagship Pioneering, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“I came to MIT to study in 1983 to pursue a PhD in the then-emerging field of Biochemical Engineering.
Having arrived in North America a political refugee from war-torn Lebanon eight years earlier, the academic rigor of MIT courses and professors challenged me at a whole new level, and through those challenges, taught me what I was capable of achieving.
It is safe to say my career trajectory – which has included co-founding more than 100 companies that have between them employed more than 20,000 American citizens over the last twenty five years – is due in large part to MIT opening its doors to me, encouraging me to use my voice and test the limits of my abilities, and rewarding my hard work and scientific achievement. Opening doors; protecting free speech; rewarding merit: these are MIT’s values, and I consider them to be the bedrock tenets of the United States, my adopted home. I stand proud of my alma mater, as an alumnus and a member of its board.
M.I.T President Sally Kornbluth’s letter responding to the Department of Education’s proposal (demand) for a “Compact” was well done. I hope those in the administration receiving it are equally thoughtful in reading and reacting to it. If partisan politics are allowed to disrupt the government-university partnership that has done so much to advance the nation’s (and the world’s) well-being, we will all be worse off for it.”
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