Whats Wrong With ReEngineering at MIT?
It should be no surprise to you that the pundits who came up with the revolutionary slogan “reengineering,” Michael Hammer and James Champy, both obtained MIT degrees before they developed their system for “revitalizing” corporate America. Their reengineering formula is now being applied to the administration of MIT, in order, according to its proponents, to improve the administration’s relationship with its “customers:” staff, students, and faculty. The “formula” is prescribed in their seminal book, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, as “the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvement in contemporary measures of performance…” What may surprise you, though, is that the MIT administration’s reengineering effort tears the fabric of the very community it professes to protect. By narrowly defining the MIT community along elitist lines, the administration has marginalized entire segments of the communit
