Molten Metal Technology tenure case

A junior MIT materials faculty member receiving MMT research funding from Nagel was denied tenure after Tom (as department head) refused to suppress his publication. Tom alleges his predecessor as department head, who was on MMT's scientific advisory board, polluted the tenure case by influencing external letters (notably from Professor Fuwa of Tohoku University). The professor was later denied tenure at MIT and became a tenured full professor at Boston University.

I asked the question about what metallurgists would think this was a good process. It turns out the former head of the materials department was on the Molten Metal Technology scientific advisory board. In 1995, I was department head, and Chris Nagel had given some of his fifteen or thirty million dollars to a junior faculty member at MIT to do some research in slag behavior of these steel baths — what would be the best slag to use in the Molten Metal Technology system. Chris came to me and sat in my office and said, "This professor should not publish this work, because we funded it and we think it's proprietary, and he should not be allowed to publish it." I said, "What am I supposed to say?" I didn't know he owned stock now, folks. So I said, "I'll look into it."