---------- Past Transmitted Message ---------

From: A. Azma <azma@mit.edu>

Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2015 19:43:26 -0400

Subject: Re: Second SB

To: Joan L Flessner-Filzen <jlfilzen@mit.edu>

Cc: D Kim <dhkim@mit.edu>, Jennifer C. Donath <jconnoll@mit.edu>, Martha M Janus <mjanus@mit.edu>

Dear Joan,

I have re-read your prior reply several times in the past few months, and it is clear to me that you are equivocating away the statements written by yourself and Dean Hastings that this particular degree program would remain available to students like me. No amount of condescendingly telling me how proud I should be of my MIT degree will erase my awareness that I worked toward an education that turned out to be a complete mirage. I am not the only MIT student who had a plan for his education and stuck it out through difficult circumstances, but I may be the only member of the Class of 2011 who was falsely promised that his academic objective existed, only to see it disappear at the hands of the very administrators who made those promises.

I am hopeful that in the future, when the Committee on Curricula implements policies, you stick to them as a matter of respect for the integrity of the Institute. Your decisions affect, on an individual level, students' lives, plans, and self-perspective. Moreover, my potential feelings of happiness at receiving an MIT degree were permanently and entirely extinguished by the realization that it is an Institute governed not by rules and policies, but by the whims of individuals. I left the country instead of attending my own graduation last June.

I write this only to convey my unshakeable disappointment in the contradictory way that MIT has enforced its degree policies. I gave up arguing in October when I realized that you were writing things that were not true, and that I would not be able to change that by simply pointing to the facts.

Very Sincerely,

Arya

P.S. -- there are electronic archives of the MIT bulletin available at http://web.mit.edu/catalog/archive.html for anyone who wishes to fact-check your prior email.