**Posted by the MIT Alumni Association on behalf of dmaxwel3@tampabay.rr.com.**

I'm working on a memoir that deals partly with my very unpleasant year at MIT in the mid-1950s. My interest was in applying scientific research in the creation of optimal utopian societies. For instance, if we could decide on a social index/social welfare function for our species, homo sapiens, what would the new model look like. I felt that MIT was simply a weed-out process to determine who could memorize the most disconnected data.

Education from now on will be a very individual, personalized matter, and our educational institutions should behave accordingly. MIT's motto: "Drink from the firehose of knowledge." is ably rebutted by Einstein's "It would be possible to rob a voracious beast of its appetite by whipping it and forcing it to eat."