Still, when they're talking about you, they're not talking about
someone else. Any publicity can be *turned into* good publicity if
you have the right team. In this case, I believe the crisis spin is a
scandalously-pious stance of "We're so sorry MIT is so far and above
everyone else's sorry asses in academia that we *have* the problem of
multi-million dollar student-faculty conflicts..."
Essentially, a goodly chunk of Journal readership is inclined to
knock academia anyway, and to see a department this plugged-in to
commercial concerns is a *plus* -- and the whole piece definitely
reinforces the meta-message that "MIT is the real thing" for Internet
technology.
Mind you, it's utterly false, and the screwed-up moral compass of PR
is what got me out of that business: but that doesn't mean it's
important to recognize sweet-smelling bullshit when you see it... and
hire them :-)
Rohit