Noted!
I think the problem with the “comprise” debate is that you have some very, very intelligent people at MIT, with very, very strong opinions, and a lot of confidence in the power of those opinions. As such, it can difficult to convince some of those people that their expertise in, say, optics doesn’t always translate directly to an expertise in language and grammar.
Some of them are quite grateful to let someone else make their words sound all pretty and stuff! Others are quite sure that the word “comprise” must never ever ever be followed by an “of,” and that anyone who suggests otherwise is a complete moron who should be immediately terminated from their position, possibly executed in public.
And sometimes, you just gotta pick your battles, ya know?
(My wife ran into a similar sort of tension when she ran a theatre company in a small college town. Lots of tenured mathematics professors insisting that their aesthetic preferences were inherently more valuable, and that their interpretations of artwork therefore were not only objectively correct but also should be prioritized in all future artistic discussions and programming.)
