Campus opinions- MIT

CAMBRIDGE—At MIT, much of the political debate, unsurprisingly, seems to revolve around the candidate’s positions on important science and technology issues including energy, global climate change, net neutrality, and the importance of basic research. More than any other presidential race in recent years, science and technology policy issues have been at the forefront of the debate on the national scale.

When before would we have imagined a presidential candidate, when asked for a list of his top priorities, mentioning something as prosaic as making improvements to the national power grid?

When the group MIT for Obama was solicited to write an endorsement column in The Tech for their candidate, one of the main selling points was that Senator Obama is “the overwhelming choice of the scientific community” and that “every American winner of a 2008 Nobel Prize has endorsed him.”

Senator McCain also speaks to science and technology issues, but generally these have been received less enthusiastically at MIT. This is in large part due to seemingly conflicting messages on the part of his campaign.

McCain calls for an all out effort to support the development of alternative energy, while simultaneously refusing to end subsidies that the government pays to oil companies. He extols the virtues of basic research in biotechnology and energy as key to our economic competitiveness, while at the same time his running mate flippantly disparages the funding of “fruit fly research in Paris, France.” Decades of research on fruit flies has provided much of today’s understanding about the mechanisms of chromosome segregation and replication.

Boston.com solicited the opinions of six local college newspaper editors on the mood of their campus as the election nears.