What they cant do is screen talent.
For faculty positions, the competition is extreme; around 1000:1. That lends itself to people who cheat the system. In this case, it means, at the very least, overselling results, baking data, and giving TED-style talks. In many cases, it results in much worse.
The extreme competition also drives off many people who just want to nerd.
MIT isn't going away anytime soon, but that's why I think the problems may be hard to fix. The culture is broken.
With ambitions, there are different levels:
- An ambitious scientist should be driven to make ambitious discoveries
- An ambitious scientist should not be driven to steal credit, fake results, hype, oversell, and defraud
MIT's culture changed over the past 20 years. High competition (e.g. 4:1) leads to the type of people who do good work. With insane competition (e.g. 1000:1), the only way to "win" is to cheat.