Video Argues That MIT Students Are Not All Geeks

A new video on a Web site of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology makes the case that the famously geeky campus actually attracts some students and professors who break the stereotype of a pocket-protector-wearing egghead.

“There are serious historians here and serious literature people and so on,” says Daniel Hastings, the institute’s dean for undergraduate education, in an interview at the beginning of the video. “But the uniform impression they find when they go outside MIT is people say, You do history? You do literature? Really? The answer is, Yes, we do.”

The video, playfully called MIThBusters in reference to a popular television show about science, includes interviews with MIT students who teach dance, direct plays, and play sports. Naturally, all of the students interviewed are science or engineering majors.

But the video frustrated one of MIT’s most-famous geeks, Henry Jenkins, a co-director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program (featured in a Chronicle cover story last year). “Most of the folks they depict still come across looking like geeks, not that there’s anything wrong with that!,” Mr. Jenkins wrote on his blog earlier this month. “I thought the video would have been more effective if it broadened our definition of geek to include all of the rest of us at MIT who don’t participate in the robotics competition or spend most of our time talking to our shoes. I’m proud to be a geek — and to be geekish about culture and art. To my mind, saying that MIT isn’t all geekish because it teaches the humanities is another way of saying that the humanities are cut off from the things that made MIT famous, and I don’t accept that core premise.”

He jokingly suggests that MIT take a different strategy toward geekdom, and offer prospective students a “geek entrance exam” to make sure the institution continues to attract a playful and cool form of geek. —Jeffrey R. Young