MIT Materials Department tenure pollution case (Dave Paul, late 1990s)

I can tell you one of the reasons I committed political suicide when I was department head: because Flemings had polluted a promotion case. These promotions, they're very strict rules. Once a department head sends out the letter, you can have no other contact with anyone involved in that process. If you do, it's called polluting the case. You don't want to influence what anyone else on the outside writes in the promotion letter. Flemings wanted me to hire one of his former students, and we had someone in the exact same field who was coming up for tenure. I got the letter back from this case — it was from Japan, and I read it, and I walked over immediately to my administrative officer, and I said, Joe, Professor So-and-So didn't write this, this was written by the man upstairs — meaning Flemings on the fourth floor. He read it and he sort of agreed with me, because everything we'd been getting back from the Japanese was they were very impressed with the work and the demonstrated accomplishments of Dave Paul, who was the professor we already had.