I’ve been there only the past two, but what an amazing ten years CMS has had. For the past few months, I’ve been putting together a history of the program, which is available at cms.mit.edu and on Scribd:
On Friday we held an all-day symposium, featuring about 40 alums, this year’s ten graduate students, and dozens of guests from around MIT. But the highlight by far was on Thursday, when we welcomed back former CMS director Henry Jenkins for a Communications Forum, where he spoke of a career at MIT. I happened to be sitting directly behind the Dean, who briefly shrank to almost nothing when Henry’s first words were, “I hate this fucking place!”, not realizing he was citing the old MIT student slogan (since adopted by other institutions, including the military service academies).
I’ve only been at MIT since late August, but I’m just as bummed as everyone else about Comparative Media Studies co-Director Henry Jenkins’ leaving for USC.
He made the announcement in person, to a group of students and separately to a group of staff. It was an object lesson how to break tough news: expectations were set some time back that this might happen; he gave the news in person but had his assistant email all details during the meetings so the facts were in front of us when we got back to our offices; he left lots of time for questions; and once everyone had time to process why it had to happen, he made it public knowledge himself: http://henryjenkins.org/2008/11/professor_jenkins_goes_to_holl.html
Because Henry was a co-founder of the program, once he leaves, it will essentially be up to MIT to decide how to move it forward.
