Calling it his "reasoning" with all the connotations that come with that word goes way too far.
This was his polite implicit criticism of the new core, which among other things also teaches much less in the way of EE fundamentals, a topic he's cared about very much since at least the late '70s (i.e. 6.002 is no longer a required course for all EECS majors).
The bottom line is that in the post-dot.com crash panic which saw MIT EECS enrollment drop by more than half, after it had been steady at 40% of the undergraduates for decades, one result was "MIT" deciding that what a MIT EECS degree meant would be substantially different.
It may have been that it just took 7 years to actually get a new course in place, but it wasn't until fall 2007 that MIT officially got rid of 6.001 as required course, well after the dot com crash.
There were a TON of changes that happened with the MIT EECS curriculum at that time, so perhaps it was a holistic response to the dot com crash that was beyond just 6.001.
I think "panicked spasm" is more accurate than "holistic response", at least in connotation, but as I recall the only real changes were in what was required, terminating the use of Scheme in the entire required curriculum with extreme prejudice, and adding, what, 6.005? Where they claimed to teach most of what was in 6.001/SICP, but using Java, a language which is "not even wrong" for that purpose.
Yeah, MIT has become a Javaschool, plus Python....
And just when the failure of Dennard scaling was making functional programming a lot more important.
No, there were many changes to the curriculum, and for a variety for reasons.
They created 6.01, which serves at an "intro to EECS" so it involves both EE and CS, as opposed to the old intro 6.001 which was really an introduction to CS. Some argue that this course is easier (I never took it, so I can't say) which could definitely be argued is to make EECS a little more gentle and open in response to the dot com crash.
They also broke up 2 very difficult courses, 6.046 introduction to algorithms and 6.170 lab for computer science, and at least put some of their course work into new courses. Again this could be seen as making the entire major a little gentler.
They also changed requirements. In the past there had been a lot of CS focused students who were uninterested in doing any EE, and were choosing to major in 18.c (math with computer science) to avoid an EE course load. The department right thought it was a little crazy that people were leaving the CS department in order to focus more on CS, so they lightened the required EE coursed for 6.3 (a major focused on CS) and vice versa.
This is all my recollection from the 07-09 era and from talking to some students since. There could be some errors in details.
This was his polite implicit criticism of the new core, which among other things also teaches much less in the way of EE fundamentals, a topic he's cared about very much since at least the late '70s (i.e. 6.002 is no longer a required course for all EECS majors).
The bottom line is that in the post-dot.com crash panic which saw MIT EECS enrollment drop by more than half, after it had been steady at 40% of the undergraduates for decades, one result was "MIT" deciding that what a MIT EECS degree meant would be substantially different.