‘Am I as brave as I think I am?’ MIT Media Lab student Arwa Mboya on the aftermath of a scandal

'I’m optimistic for everyone, even for Joi.'

It’s been another hard week at MIT. Our campus has been divided by revelations of inappropriate fundraising, coverups, and the harboring of far too many tech geniuses who seemingly put their own interests and careers over the safety of women, among other marginalized groups.

As a chaplain to students and faculty at the Institute, but also as an opinion writer on the ethics of technology who is supposed to be on sabbatical from the chaplaincy to focus on the writing, I’ve been torn all week as to what to say. If you don’t know what a chaplain is, and you would hardly be alone in any ignorance there, it is a position that emphasizes confidentiality and trust. I know there are a lot of people on MIT’s campus who are scared, sad, and hurting for various reasons, and I wouldn’t want any of them to feel less able to speak with someone like me because I’ve chosen to speak out publicly.

At other times, in the midst of other campus controversies, I’ve personally opted to remain relatively silent, leaning into the part of my job that is, officially, one of quiet service to a university as a whole. I’ve been critical of a lot of big institutions over the years, including much of religion, but also a lot of organized atheism.

But as a chaplain at big educational institutions, I’ve rarely felt comfortable being too critical of those institutions, the universities, which at least in my judgement have more power and influence (not to mention more money, though they don’t really pay it to me) than even the oldest and grandest of churches and temples.

Maybe I was wrong in some of those cases; at other times, maybe I was able to do some good by keeping quiet. I reflect on this out loud not because anyone reading it should particularly care about my situation or my inner conflict. You most likely shouldn’t.

I share my own ambivalence, however, because I know countless executives, administrators, and other kinds of leaders have been through similar thought processes. It’s not my place to speak. If I do speak, maybe they’ll fire me, and then I can’t do anyone any good. Even if they don’t fire me, I’m supposed to be ‘objective;’ if I enter the fray, I’ll lose the trust and confidence of half the community.

But then I think about the students and faculty who need support the most. What they need are educators, peers, and administrators who are willing to join them in taking some risk to do what is right.

I was proud, last week, to share the first half of an exclusive interview with an MIT student named Arwa Mboya who brilliantly and bravely spoke out, helping bring about the resignation of one of the world’s most influential tech ethicists, former MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito. As I said on Twitter, for my money Mboya has been the biggest of the many heroes in this Media Lab scandal.

For her efforts, Mboya was awarded a “Bold Prize,” and celebrating students for their bravery seems unequivocally good. Leaving them alone with their courage, however, by remaining silent in the name of “objectivity,” would be a moral failing.

I’m not sure it’s my place to use this space to call on MIT President Rafael Reif to resign for his own role in allowing Jeffrey Epstein’s donations to the Institute — a role Reif acknowledged this week at an MIT faculty meeting in which he said, “I understand that I have let you down and damaged your trust in me, and that our actions have injured both the Institute’s reputation and the fabric of our community.”

Maybe there are ways forward where MIT is able to heal with Reif still at the helm, though personally I have a hard time envisioning them. But at the very least, we must support students.

And by that I mean, people like me need to publicly and visibly support tech students who feel an ethical obligation to call for the resignation of their own university’s leader over his publicly acknowledged role in not only tolerating but greenwashing human trafficking and serial pedophilia. Just like the drafters and 60+ signers of this powerful letter from women on MIT’s faculty have done.

Will Reif resign? Will more information come out that makes his resignation seem even more inevitable? Or will the “independent review” he has put in place exonerate him in some way? Time will tell.

Meanwhile, as MIT sought to distance itself from Jeffrey Epstein and the broader social questions his case raises, this hard week did bring at least one piece of good news: the resignation of Richard Stallman. A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and major figure in the history of computing, Stallman has long been a stain on the reputation of institutions with which he has affiliated, for troublingly sexist comments and stances.

The Overton Window on someone like Stallman has now shifted, however, once again thanks to outspoken students, most often young women of color. Like Selam Gano, a recent MIT graduate in robotics engineering, who “arguably set Stallman’s departure in motion,” by speaking out last week on Medium. Gano’s post, entitled “Remove Richard Stallman and Everyone Else Horrible in Tech,” followed an email Stallman had sent to a Listserv affiliated with MIT’s renowned CSAIL research laboratory.

“There is no single person that is so deserving of praise their comments deprecating others should be allowed to slide,” Gano wrote. “Particularly when those comments are excuses about rape, assault, and child sex trafficking.

Child.

Sex.

Trafficking.”

Gano’s drawn-out emphasis on the nature of the crime in question is entirely appropriate. After all, “human trafficking is the single largest illegal industry in the world,” as the framers of this additional recent petition for resignations of prominent MIT officials made clear. Human trafficking, they wrote, far eclipses even the international drug trade, and continues to inflict incomprehensible suffering on women, children, and families around the world.

In calling for leaders to leave, Gano, like Mboya before her, is not harming MIT or damaging its reputation. To the contrary. Both women have expressed, publicly and privately, a great and ongoing love for the school and what it represents.

In fact, it’s not coincidental that both of these whistleblowers have even described MIT as the best place in the world for them educationally, the site of some of their happiest memories and proudest moments. It’s that kind of true pride that leads morally upstanding people to say, “enough.” Because they want and need to continue to be proud. And because they understand that true pride is the opposite of a coverup. It is the opposite of clinging to power.

As Selam Gano wrote in her Medium post, “I know, now, that if prominent technology institutions won’t start firing their problematic men left right and center, we will do nothing. Ever.” Gano, Mboya, and other students and educators I admire are unwilling to allow an extraordinary institution like MIT to do nothing, or to do so little of consequence that it would essentially be nothing.

These people are, to the extent that a large research university is like a nation-state, true patriots. It might be scary to join them and walk alongside them publicly. Taking a stand might threaten our privilege and expose us to risk. That’s what being brave is all about.

Your move, President Reif and MIT.


“Okay, this girl was asked to change her religion at gunpoint and she didn’t do it,” MIT Media Lab student Arwa Mboya told me at the end of Part One of my interview with her, about a young woman she’d read about in a book called Beneath The Tamarind Tree. The book, by former CNN anchor Isha Sesay, is a skillful account of the 276 girls abducted from Chibok in Nigeria, which launched the “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign.

Mboya’s outspokenness in the face of the Jeffrey (no fucking relation, thank you!) Epstein scandal, inspired in part by her reading of Sesay, was among the bravest demonstrations I’ve seen by a student in 15 years as a university chaplain.

Previously, Mboya and I discussed her decision process for taking a leap which earned her a “Bold Prize” of, to this date, over $13,000 of crowd-funded money. But even more importantly, we discussed the life experiences which inspired Mboya’s courage in the first place — namely her love and radical hopefulness for the youth of her native Africa, and her passion to inspire those young people with the best tech has to offer.

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(Photo by Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

In this second and final portion of my conversation with Mboya, we pick up where Part One left off, discussing human trafficking in Africa and in the United States, and how the two phenomena are more closely related than many might imagine. We then get into reading (or not) the comments on her now-famous op-ed calling on Joi Ito to resign; her reaction to receiving the crowd-funded “Bold Prize;” her feelings toward Joi Ito today; and how radical imagination can breakthrough systematic oppression, in Africa and beyond.

“She believed that much,” Arwa said to me about the young woman from Chibok, “that even at gunpoint, even with a risk of rape, with a risk of death, with the risk of all the other nasty things, she stood up for what she believed in.”

It’s not hard to see how that kind of perspective and wisdom might have enabled Mboya to do something exceptional.


Arwa Mboya: The activist who started the Bring Back Our Girls Campaign hounded the government down – and the Nigerian government is scary. I was like, “Okay, these people can do that. I have power to just speak out. Am I really what I think I am? Am I as strong, as brave as I [think I] am?”

Because at the end of the day, the very worst that could happen is that I don’t get my degree. That sucks, but I’ll be fine. The girls that Jeffrey Epstein and others hurt will not be.

Greg Epstein: Also, it’s not hard to tie together the two issues we’re speaking about: hundreds of girls abducted from an extremely poor area in Nigeria, and human trafficking on a massive and gilded scale here in the United States. They’re both about the idea that women’s bodies, women’s autonomy, their lives, their sense of comfort in the world can be plundered or taken advantage of, because of people’s desire for power. It is about power in both cases.

I would even say it’s more connected than just that because if we are allowing the exploitation of women’s rights on this scale here in the richest academic institutions in the richest country in the history of the world, then how much must we be allowing in other parts of the world? The fact that we who have all the opportunity to change our ways do not do so is what makes it so much more possible for these terrible things to happen to people in what some call the “developing world.”

Mboya: Yeah. Well that was exactly my argument as to why this is a New York Times op-ed issue, not an MIT issue. It is a national and international issue. It is at the richest echelons of society and the lowest and everywhere in between.

What was strikingly similar to me about these things was not the fact that women’s bodies had been abused. [It was that] if these things were just categorically unacceptable, these issues would not prevail. The problem is that you have a bad seed and then you have all these other people who will do everything to protect that seed for the sake of money, power, [or something else].

In Nigeria, it was to stay in government, because they could not afford a scandal that big. They were more concerned with reelection than the lives of poor black women. In this situation at MIT, it wasn’t just protecting Epstein for the sake of money, for the sake of network, it was then excusing that protection of him, as a “mistake.”

There’s so many layers of it [that] when the ‘We Support Joi Ito” website came out, my head wanted to explode. That was my most angry. I had to start thinking to myself, “I’m crazy because all these people I respect and learn from and love and been colleagues with don’t see this as that bad. They don’t see it as that bad.”

Epstein: Because they’re not seeing it.

Mboya: Yeah. Or they’re choosing not to see it. I actually never read the comments on my op-ed, on the Tech. I actually didn’t read them. I didn’t know.

Epstein: I read them. You’re good not seeing them.

Mboya: Okay. But my siblings [read them]. My brother who is 19 and far away and has no interest in the politics here was like, “Oh, the comments are pretty bad.” I was like, “Oh no, I’m done. I’m done. I’m not going to look at them.”

Because if you don’t agree, that’s one thing, but if you’re going to try and tear me down or say that I’m X, Y, Z for thinking these things, then I’m not going to engage with that because that’s how we change the story and start focusing on the petty little fights as opposed to the big fight that needs to happen.

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Arwa Mboya. Image from MIT Media Lab

Epstein: When I read your Medium blog, I realized, this is a woman who was the absolute dream for the publicity department of the Media Lab and for MIT, with what you had written about this place and how excited you were to come here. I mean, they can’t buy that kind of publicity.

You were on record multiple times saying that this is the best place in the world for you. You’re practically saying, this is the best place in the world period. If people are going to ask you to speak your mind in a positive way, then they’ve got to be prepared for you to be disappointed.

Mboya: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I got comments like, ‘Oh, you’re mad that Joi didn’t give you more than 15 minutes.” I’m like, “I don’t care about Joi. I don’t want to sit with him at his office for more than 15 minutes.”

Epstein: I thought you were illustrating something [by commenting on his use of a countdown timer in meetings with students]. I’ve been in the offices of a lot of important people actually over the years and never seen what you talked about Ito doing. Actually, I’ve had a lot of short and one-time meetings with important people because it’s not like those people tend to want to keep meeting with me.

But for example, I was in the office of Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts at the time, it was a brief meeting, but it was respectful. He made direct eye contact and he sure as hell didn’t have a time clock. That strikes me as something you do to cultivate an intimidation factor.

Mboya: Yeah. It stuck with me because I felt the same way. I’ve also been in rooms with way more important people, way more busy people: the President of Kenya, the CEOs of Disney-like companies; big people who are really busy and that’s not how they interact.

It’s true it rubbed me the wrong way, but I certainly didn’t take it personally. I didn’t have time for that. It wasn’t like I was waiting for Joi to do something wrong [after that].

The other thing people said is, “Oh, you’re just following Ethan Zuckerman’s lead, [because] you’re his student. He’s telling you to do this.” [Those people] assume I can’t think for myself. That I can’t have an idea and say it, that it has to come from somebody else, that I have to be a pawn of somebody else’s machinations, that I’m not able to actually say what I’m saying with the levelheaded mind.

Epstein: For a place like this — the destination for creative thinking and innovation — It doesn’t strike me as very innovative to forget that a woman like you has your own autonomy and that you’re going to think about these issues and want to say something about them.

In any case, what does it feel like to get The Bold Prize? Have you taken a look?  You’ve been awarded this crowd-funded prize that, at last check was over $12,000.

Mboya: Wow. Okay. That’s the first I know of how much [money was raised].

Epstein: There are TV stars, tech leaders and academics contributing to it. I went to see who had given a lot of money to it and found a lot of great new people to follow on Twitter.

Mboya: Wow. Thank you. Sabrina [Hersi Issa, the human rights technologist who created the prize] is a rockstar obviously. She reached out and was like, “Hey, I’m texting with some friends to see if you can do something for you.” Then she sends me a thing saying we’re live.

Then I see this website, and I felt like it’s more than I deserve. But especially after the New Yorker article, where Ronan Farrow speaks, and suddenly everyone’s like, “Oh, this is an outrage!” What is new here? It’s literally the same information, just more detailed.

Epstein: I didn’t know about the Bill Gates [giving $2 million to the Media Lab at Jeffrey Epstein’s behest, according to Farrow — Gates has since denied that Epstein was the reason he gave] thing.

Mboya: Yeah. That’s new. But everyone was like, “Oh, we didn’t know the extent that [Ito] went to, to cover it up.

I was like, “Well, we didn’t know about it. He must have covered it up. Isn’t that what the email was apologizing for?” Now you know how he covered it up. But the information I had gotten was that we were taking money from Epstein and nobody knew about it, so they had to have hidden it. Ito’s calendar is public. I can look at it, anyone can look at it. If it was written on the calendars, like, “Jeffrey Epstein visit to the Media Lab,” as it does, even when Rihanna comes through, we would know about it.

But we didn’t know about it because [it was] hidden. So I didn’t understand why everyone was being very dramatic. But it was just really emotional for me and satisfying to see someone recognize the difficulties of the past couple of weeks, and to be supported on it, and to have people who are also fighting for equality and justice and recognize the costs of doing that.

But intentionally, I said, “Okay, this is amazing. I’m not going to look at the money.” Because I wasn’t expecting even a dollar.

Epstein: Well, it’s meaningful, in any case.

Mboya: It’s very meaningful and I’m really grateful to Sabrina and everyone else however much money they put in.

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Image via Getty Images / berya113

Epstein: Now that you’ve been through this whole experience, at some point your goal, as you’ve stated, is to go home, to Africa — is that fair to say?

Mboya: Mm-hmm.

Epstein: And to work with young people in particular on this idea of radical civic imagination in Africa, as you’ve described elsewhere. What would it look like for a young person, in the Africa you’re envisioning a generation from now, to have radical civic imagination?

Mboya: Yes, what does that look like? Just to clarify, civic imagination is a term coined by Henry Jenkins. We use it differently. So I actually don’t use the term civic imagination anymore just because of that. But what I’m hoping is to have spaces where the systematic oppression of Africa from outside and within can be broken through radical thinking.

That might be radical thinking politically, it could be innovatively, it could be in science and technology, it could be in education, it could be in anything.

This may sound cliche, [but I want young Africans to] dare to dream, or dare to reimagine what our society could look like. People are already doing that. There’s so much cool stuff back on the continent now.

Every time I go home there’s so much for me to take in, and I go home very often. For me it’s like, can we use civic tech to engage young people in a way they haven’t had the opportunity to engage with, in their own lives, and in society.

Epstein: Well, I have lots of questions about the specifics, but I will look forward to writing you up at a later point in your work when the specifics are ready for examination.

The last question at the end of all my interviews for TechCrunch: how optimistic are you about our shared human future?

Mboya: Honestly, I’m really optimistic. I am. I am optimistic specifically because there are some really radical women doing some really radical things and I think it’s just a matter of time before they get their due and that society adjusts. When Oprah Winfrey said “time’s up,” I think it was that moment.

I think it was up, then, and everything else is just cleaning up. I’m still in a place where my colleagues and the work that surrounds me blows my mind every single day.

As the world becomes more integrated and more diverse, we will come out victorious. I believe it.

Epstein: We’re here in a place that preaches and teaches courage, and everybody can have courage. Whistleblowing takes courage. But also, people who’ve screwed up horribly can have courage to think that there’s a second act for them, where they can take responsibility and do something else that will feel better for them. People who’ve failed to recognize the truth that you were speaking to power can have courage that they can get it right the next time.

Mboya: Exactly.

Epstein: We can all have courage together: that’s the message that I get from you.

Mboya: Yeah, I’m optimistic for everyone, even for Joi [Ito]. I know he must be going through a very hard time, but you can only go up from there.

Epstein: You’ve inspired me to be more optimistic. I know you’re going to go way up from here. You’re in a great place, and I’m excited to follow your journey as it goes along.