My name is Rafael Reif and I am the President of MIT. I'm here because
my dear friend, well, actually, my soon to be former dear friend
the President of Harvard Drew Faust and some colleagues of mine,
the MIT Edgerton Center, actually, my soon to be former colleagues of mine
from the Center, they issued a challenge for me to accept:
the ALS Ice Bucket proposition. I'm here to accept it because it is a
very important cause. It is important to raise awareness to ALS; to the
illness and devastating disease and its important to raise funds to
find a cure for ALS. As you can see this takes a great deal of courage
and I brought all the friends I could find to help me cheer up and
to do it with me. Next to me is the Chancellor of MIT Cindy Barnhart,
and next to her is MIT's Provost Marty Schmidt and hopefully they'll
get a little bit more water than I will. I would like to challenge the next
team for this proposition and I want to start with two student leaders.
Shruti Sharma the president of the Undergraduate Association and
Kendall Nowocin the president of the Graduate Student Council,
I'm sure they'll be thrilled to hear about this. I also want to challenge
three university Presidents of academic institutions that I highly
admire. Tom Rosenbaum, the president of CALTECH
Nicholas Dirks, the chancellor of the UC Berkeley and Christina Paxon,
the president of Brown University. So all of you have 24 hours to
respond. Either get the ice bucket or pay $100 or do the right thing and
do both. I want to dedicate this challenge to Karolina Fraczkowska.
Karolina is from the MIT Class of 2001. She wrote me yesterday to
thank me for doing this and to tell me she had three little children
and to tell me that her husband died of the disease two months ago.
So I want to dedicate this to Karolina and to many others like her
who have suffered this tragedy and Karolina and your children,
this is for you. This concoction here, it works, right? This contraption
here was built by the members of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity.
This is the fraternity that Lou Gherig was a member of when he
was a student at Columbia University. And this fraternity has been
very involved promoting a solution for the ALS disease. I would like
to say that there is another contraption over there that you cannot see
but I'm going to join them in a moment. I'm going to do this twice
because unfortunately I got challenged twice. This one here, from
Phi Delta Theta is to respond to Drew's challenge. And the one from
Pi Lamba Phi, which is over there, if I survive this one I'm going to do
that one and that one is in response to the MIT Edgerton Center's
challenge. So, with that, there are two important things I need to do
one is to give my glasses to Mrs. Reif, where are you Mrs. Reif?
Cindy, do the honors. Cindy Barnhart: "OK everyone join me, three,
two, one!
Drew, we'll have a chat. OK on to the next one.