Aut Caesar aut nihil, I suppose. Still, when I read the book years ago, White's decision struck me as defeatist. There are many fine institutions in which he would have prospered had he chosen to continue his education. Heck, there's an automotive carburetion school right down the road here in Circle Pines I'm sure would have welcomed Pepper and his shameful MIT mechanical engineering master's degree. Perhaps nobody informed White about the perks of getting a Ph.D. (free Frogurt for life, for one. Also, your mom will call you "doctor." Loudly, in public, and as often as she can). But, no. Instead of getting into a Ph.D. program elsewhere, Pepper White wrote a book about not getting into the Ph.D. program at MIT.
LabKitty didn't go to MIT, if that clarification was necessary. The closest I will ever come to the Great Dome are the OCW lectures available on iTunesU. Your support will help MIT OpenCourseware continue to offer high-quality educational resources for free. To make a donation, or to view additional material from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. I guess you can afford to put your lectures on-line for free when your endowment is larger than the GDP of Albania. No word yet on what the paying customers have to say about all this.
It was no small comfort to my nerd psyche, then, to discover the OCW lectures were entirely familiar, and perhaps even a little mundane. Make no mistake: I'm quite certain the infamous pace of MIT would have killed me had I finagled my way into the place. Heck, Royden nearly killed me the week I tried to be a math major. But the fare served up at MIT is apparently no different than what the rest of us schlubs ate at State. The students aren't breadboarding while riding pogo sticks or taking notes with prehensile tails. The faculty aren't made of pure energy, or lecturing in whale song. If anything, I find most of the MIT lectures I've sampled easier to follow than the correlates I suffered through at ole Circle Pines U. That sort of thing is to be expected when budget cuts force your Alma Mater to recruit engineering faculty from the bus station (TABOR -- Destroying higher education for cheap political points since 1987).
Still, graduating from the Tech is an accomplishment worthy of pride, even if it does come with deep emotional scars. Saint Crispin's Day and all that. The people I know who went to MIT say they wouldn't recommend it, and plan to steer their children to saner climes when the little ones approach matriculation age. 'Though that doesn't stop them from giving you nougies with their beaver class rings (what stops that is their little garter snake arms). The official line is the beaver was chosen as the school mascot because she is nature's engineer. It feels like there could be a joke here about a beaver being on their class ring for some other reason. LabKitty will not make that joke because LabKitty is classy.
Which brings us to Hollywood.
A singular obsession with MIT is on display in television and movies that makes LabKitty's affection for Kari Byron look like a schoolboy crush. I suppose we might view this as convenient storytelling shorthand, if by "convenient shorthand" we mean "lazy screenwriting." Why do the hard work of establishing your character's tech cred with real actual technical dialog when you can just stick them in an MIT sweatshirt and have them pine for the Dinky (is the Dinky still a thing? I only know it from Feynman's biography. Who, by the way, got his doctorate at Princeton). Occasionally, a writer will break ranks and have a token smart person hail from Berkeley or Oxford, just as a fictional lawyer occasionally didn't go to Harvard. But if Hollywood teaches us anything, it's that beyond the banks of the Charles it's Jethros as far as the eye can see. The Right may complain about Hollyweird dismissing anything that isn't the two coasts as flyover country, but higher education doesn't exist there outside of Boston.
I started to assemble a list of offenders, but fortunately discovered one already exists on Wikipedia. This saved me the trouble of cross referencing my tear-stained notes against IMDB. It also permits me to focus on more important things, like my Kari Byron macaroni diorama (this week we're adding a nursery).
Click on over to WillyPete's "MIT in popular culture." There you will find Matt Damon's polymath janitor roaming the halls in Good Will Hunting, anonymously spoiling the extra-credit problems Stellan Scarsgård keeps leaving on random hallway blackboards. (Bonus outrage: While Scarsgard calls it an "advanced Fourier system," what's written on the blackboard is actually a problem in graph theory. Also, if arranging the protons on methionine is literally going to consume Minnie Driver's entire evening, she might want to rethink the whole "going to med school" thing. Hollywood: once again not coming to LabKitty for reasonably-priced script up punching. But I digress.) And that's just for starters. MIT graduates appear in Ghostbusters, Independence Day, National Treasure, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and Armageddon. Ellie Arroway in Contact and Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap. The Tech cranks out superheroes and super villains in equal measure: Ironman and the Invisible Woman on the one hand, Lex Luthor and Peter Sullivan on the other. On the small screen we have Howard on The Big Bang Theory and Sam's dying physics mentor on The West Wing. Gordon Freeman is an MIT grad, as is Mei Ling and Otacon. Nor is this hackneyed device a modern invention; MIT features in The Forbin Project (1970) and in the Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
Here, I made a pie chart.
If you don't get your Ph.D. from MIT, you may as well be ground up and used as cattle feed, is Hollywood's lesson. Jump right into the back of a garbage truck like James Woods at the end of Once Upon a Time in America And god help you if you went to one of them foreign schools with a funny name like Göttingen or École Polytechnic. Umlauts? Are you out of your mind? Theater goers would burn down the place.
Here in American cinema, we like our screen heroes two dimensional. We like our underdogs victorious, our bosoms ample, and our ammunition infinite. Leave nuance to films with subtitles. Eisenstein was the guy who invented nuclear bombs. Orson Wells was the guy who hawked inexpensive vino. The French New wave was a bunch of bands with complicated haircuts who played music that went beep-boop. And if Justin Bieber or Sasha Grey or Ice Milk plays a nuclear physicist, that's the way it's gonna be. Every one of them is going to hail from The Tech and the rest of you nerds can suck it. Especially when they pronounce "data" as it it rhymes with "strata."
The MIT mystique is irresistible. A superhero club the rest of us academic sidekicks will never get into no matter how many papers we publish or patents we file. Perhaps that explains what left Pepper White so disillusioned. A delicate butterfly broken on the wheel who died reaching for hope at the end of his Mauser while the ink on the armistice dried. Or something. Allegory has never been LabKitty's strong point.
Besides, if I were a cheap hack, I'd be a screenwriter.
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