Consider Hal Lewis’ resignation from the American Physical Society:
“When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.”
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/reasonmclucus/reasonmclucus/15835660/professor-emiritus-hal-lewis-resigns-from-american-physical-society/
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Lewis resigned because of his disgust with the corrupt global warming scam, but he nailed it when he zeroed in on money as the principal cause of the corruption.

shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.”

So yes, of course you’re right, but I still think MIT as an institution will get over this and clean its act. This sort of thing happened with a lot of major advances in science.

“No such institution is going to be immune from bigotry in some of its members.” Immune is one of those absolutist, black and white sort of words. Of course absolute immunity cannot happen. However, the response of the majority still matters. The fact that only about 25 students showed up for the LENR class would imply that intimidation at MIT is effective. A few wandering down to the LENR lab, and telling their friends and professors is all it takes to bring the truth to light. The fear of curiosity that is clearly operating at MIT is pitiful.

When this technology breaks through the shroud of silence, hopefully a lot of MIT students, professors and grads practice a little navel gazing, and realize how closed-minded they have become. Probably not.

Overall, the record of MIT has been good at pursuing weird science, and it’s most likely only a few in MIT who did this particular stomping. No such institution is going to be immune from bigotry in some of its members – it’s just unfortunate that in this case they were and remain influential.

Basically, the cachet of being backed by MIT will be still worth getting, but the opposition of MIT won’t be worth as much.

1 – Back when Pons and Fleischmann announced their discovery (admittedly not through standard channels) NASA replicated it. MIT, on the other hand, worked very hard to discredit this phenomenon.
2 – On of MITs own scientists has a working product just down-campus from the professors who are discrediting the claims. These scientists haven’t demonstrated the curiosity or intellectual honesty to to check out the claims of their own guy. Instead they have blindly discredited him.

MIT’s approach to this incredible discovery will cause their name to be discredited far more than checking out a possible example of “pathological science” falsified ever would.

In the name of self-protection they will damage their good name. Smart, very smart.

LENR has been classed in the same group as Orgone energy, magnetic motors and perpetual motion. As such, they have been trying to protect the “good name” of MIT by stopping people from being encouraged to investigate things that they truly believe can’t be truth. Science has always been this way, with the established science saying what is possible because it’s been proved, and also saying things are impossible because they have not yet been unequivocally measured to have happened.

If MIT started research into a perpetual-motion machine that used gravity as its motive force, would you believe that it could be true? I still wouldn’t believe it until I measured the results myself (and maybe could buy one in Wal-Mart).

In the case of LENR, enough people have continued to do good work on tiny funding (again that’s pretty standard if you look at history) and now we are very near the point when you can go buy one at the local hardware store (maybe in a few years, anyway).

The problem with institutions such as MIT will continue – that is basically the reason they are there, to defend the world of science against crackpot ideas that waste time and money. Meantime the crackpots will continue researching whatever they want to and can afford to, and if they are right then the world changes (again). It’s the way things have worked in the past and although it may delay progress in some ways it also stops a lot of peoples’ time and money being wasted on things that really can’t work. It’s hard on individuals with good ideas, but it also stops the real crackpot ideas from getting common currency.

Overall, I don’t think the system’s broke, and any attempt at fixing it, other than maybe shaming the most venal offenders, would probably do more harm than good.

However, it is not the time yet to address this wrong. We must wait until the “duh” moment happens to the world on LENR. At that point the bad apples within these two organizations need to discover how painful it is to be strung up by the short hairs.

In my opinion MIT is itself a bad apple, so the degree of reform necessary to put an end to such sabatage (both physical and psychological) to the “cold fusion program” there. I am sick of all these people complusively defending MIT – that is the reason this sort of things is tolerated, because the sabatage is minimized in importance, and the necessary corrective action is minimized to a couple bad apples rather than correctly diagnosed as institutional.

I would hope this situation will be corrected so as to see that Professor Hagelstein receives his private grant for this well deserved and valuable research.

For me, this is very exciting. Between McKubre’s video and this Hegelstein’s MIT based video, naysayers are either not paying attention, are being paid to be naysayers, or are pathological.