It's sad that there is a need to apologize such as you did.

This is one of these issues in which ordinary discourse is not possible. You would have to spend so much time padding your thoughts about what you might think to lessen the impact on those that are highly sensitive for one reason or another.

I'm always loath to say what amounts to "take what they say with a grain of salt, they're heavily emotionally invested." It's fair to say that that's the case here, though. I say that as someone who thinks MIT does have some level of culpability and have had the pleasure of interacting with the wonderful and brilliant person that Taren is.