As a Senior House alum and former instructor at MIT, what bothers me the most is how MIT is teaching horrible standards of ethical behavior through their actions.
Improper use of metadata to track down individuals in a confidential survey about mental health and substance abuse would end a scientist's career. MIT did it.
Collective punishment of a group for the actions of a few is an educational and social antipattern. MIT did it.
An "end justifies means" mentality is a classic tool used by the strong against the powerless. MIT embraced it.
Removing completely innocent people from their homes and their supportive social structure, while MIT's right, would face justified outrage in any public context.
Using these tools on anyone, let alone the students you thought brilliant and worthy enough to admit, teaches a mindset abusive of power and lacking in humanity. A mindset that is all too common in our society.
MIT has plenty of honorable and fair people. If they didn't know enough to stand up for Senior House specifically, why didn't they stand up against the tools that the administration used that they know are wrong?
I have found "we teach as we live, we live as we teach" a pretty powerful and positive philosophy.
I'm not sure how I feel about Senior House overall, but the misuse of the survey data enraged me. We have such a hard time getting people at MIT to seek help for mental health issues and stupid bullshit like this is exactly why. People should not he punished for trying to seek help, health data should never be shared with people who are not health care professionals, and it's astoundingly unethical to use people's health care data or metadata to run studies without their explicit consent.
What happened to the MIT Administration? Ever since Aaron Swartz death, it seems the administration of the school has been corrupted by some influence.
My guess is that, like so many universities in this country, the administration is not answerable to students or even alumni.
As college morphs into High School+, and society extends their definition of 'childhood' to cover up to age 25, steps will be taken to destroy the autonomy and personality of these 'children.' Children are entitled no rights, no difference of opinion from them is respected, and any degree of control over them, no matter how extreme, is always seen as warranted.
My sentiment has been that this high school-level authoritarianism seems to be in vogue on a larger cultural level than just educational settings. Largely, status quo maintenance is seen as a positive, so don't rock the boat, don't get out of line. In another era, I would have referred to this as "conservatism" but the silly political posturing makes this term less useful (since this authoritarianism has no political boundaries it seems).
Even now, I'm hesitant to discuss this here (or most places) because, despite the best intentions in arguing a position (even out of pure rhetoric), I face the high probability of being punished for going against "the collective's" thoughts. Because disagreement means punishment is in order. You're wrong, I know it, fuck you, downvote, whatever. And, if the collective severely disagrees with you, it is, apparently, acceptable to let it be known to your employer, spouse, parents, local pizza shop, etc.
At 18, a "child" can enlist in the military without parental consent.
There are fighter pilots younger than 25 who are entrusted to fly SOLO in a $180m F-22 Raptor with live missiles.
How do these so called High school administrators justify protecting "children" from every theoretically possible harm? While forgetting that in less than 2 years these same students might be going into combat as a member of the armed forces.
"Extended" ? If I look back 20 years, there was certainly a component of university life that was ... a bit less than adult.
Remembering some Latin texts from in high school, I get the distinct impression the same could be said of Grammar schools in ancient Rome. Having (quite a bit of) wine with colleagues and even with the teachers on occasion was pretty normal. Living together was a necessity in many places, even for the rich.
Biggest difference with High School being that having good grades was pretty much rewarded, even socially. Not everywhere, but more than a bit.
A related question is, what other equivalent email/postal mail do parents get about their kids? Things may be different recently, but my parents got nothing from MIT short of bills, grades, and fundraising. The article seems to confirm this is still true.
Back then, there seemed to be an implicit understanding that MIT, maybe unlike other places, gave you a lot of rope, and it was your job as a student to use it wisely. No parent got a letter saying their kid was caught on a roof (unless they were jumping, an idiot, or hurt somebody).
On the other hand, one autumn a few years after I graduated when I was still advising, I was at a brunch for the parents of new students. The Dean of Students at the time addressed the gathering by saying, "Trust in us. We will take care of your children".
I found it jarring then, and I find it jarring now. One dean, one speech, one fall, but wrong at so many levels.
I wonder if there'll ever be another Steve Jobs or RMS. I wonder if we've destroyed all the places where brilliant weirdos can thrive and closed off all the paths to success other than a handful of narrowly prescribed routes. I wonder how many of the greatest minds of our generation are flipping burgers or making coffee.
I was chatting with a guy on the plane the other day who was bemoaning the disappearance of old-school BBSes and rise of homogeneous social media sites. I think my answer to his concern and yours are the same:
There are still places for clever weirdos. Particularly online. I know of at least two hacking communities, for instance, which only let in people who can hack the invite process. At that point, you can assume with some degree of safety that you're with like-minded individuals. Even if people cheat the system, that at least means they cared enough to cheat and it also means they probably won't get very far with the additional tests once they get in (or they do, which requires they learn something, so everyone benefits).
Okay, but all that's online. What about actual physical places? Hackerspaces/makerspaces are probably the place to start. Places where what you're passionate about making is more important than who you are.
Both are iconic, but as far as I can tell, neither lived in a particularly eclectic dorm. RMS was at Currier house at Harvard, but rented an apartment at MIT. I don't know whether Jobs stayed in a dorm in his brief college stint.
All the brilliant weirdos I know are independent. Lampworkers, machinists, turbine engineers, fabricators, inventors. None affiliated with any educational system, no degrees. None making burgers either. All 'shop rats,' in garages, sheds, and machine shops.
It's not like I have done a comprehensive study on this but at least here at umich there are still places to live that embrace weirdness, they are just not owned by the university. These days I think it is just too hard for a big university to let things fly for a multitude of reasons. I hope there will always be such places and it is sad to see such an iconic and important one go but I have faith that brilliant weirdos are very capable of finding space for themselves.
20+ years ago I had this conversation with a senior mentor, who was bemoaning that I was the only young person he had met in the last few years who seemed to "get it". That every college student was taking underwater basketweaving or "management information science", which meant COBOL and flowcharts.
Survivorship bias is real. Things sneak up on you when you aren't looking. Linux had only just made it into the 1.2 kernel series.
If you think it's likely that we have great minds flipping burgers now, it stands to reason there were minds greater than Jobs, Gates, etc (RMS? really?) flipping burgers then, too.
I've seen this sentiment expressed before and it always struck me as the intellectual equivalent of "kids these days!" without much merit.
Some people will waste their talent. Some people won't.
SJ didn't go to a big university but do I fear for MIT/Stanford type schools.
To get in now you need to be a robot who can ace standardized tests, who spends their whole childhood doing math problems and has no real contact with the real world aside from two pieces of flair suggested by a guidance counseller in order to get into an ivy.
What's the actual story here? "Four students tried to buy cocaine" isn't the story. That happens all the time, at every college, in every other MIT dorm, and in most city high schools.
Not sure of the context of your question exactly, but a quick summary for non-alums: MIT has had a dorm system for many decades where students choose where they are going to live. This tends to aggregate similar personalities/lifestyles into various dormitories. Senior House was a dorm with a reputation: It tended to attract a personality that might be described as "edgy", and was perceived as a place with higher-than-avg drug use. It has had that reputation for decades.
The current MIT chancellor looked at GPAs and other metrics and decided that Senior House was under performing and perhaps harmful to students. She put the dorm into "turnaround", and when that didn't pan out, she evicted all of the undergrad students. It is now a grad dorm.
[That last paragraph reads like a corporate action, a similarity that has been noted by others.]
Many alums have noted the administration has been trying to disperse Senior House for decades (I saw it in the 90s), it looks like Chancellor Barnhart was the executor.
Looks like there are several different stories going on at once, but one major story is the fact that MIT abused a mental health survey to gather data about the inhabitants of this dorm.
Imagine if you responded to an "anonymous" mental health survey stating that you abused some drug, and then the city kicked you out of your house because they used that survey to determine that there were too many drug users on your block.
MIT used what were supposed to be anonymous lifestyle survey responses to justify shutting down a longstanding dorm with a very strong culture of drug use, with no warning to the community.
The drug culture of this dorm goes much further than sporadic cocaine use. Frankly, without generalizing about individual residents, it's fair to say that drug use was an identifying component of the culture of the dorm. Yet that culture had existed for many, many years, so its existence alone didn't precipitate the closure of the dorm.
You are load balancing 5 servers. One has a latency issue that causes response time to be 2x the others. What do you do? You wait, it goes to 4x. Now what?
You take it offline, spin up a new instance and investigate.
MIT put them on notice (a year earlier), there was no attempt to improve and the bluff was called.
I wish this wasn't happening, but sometimes you have to actually DO something.
MIT alum (<10 years) here. While i didn't live in senior haus myself, I lived in a dorm very much related to SH, had many friends there and overall jolly time (^^).
One thing under-emphasized in all these SH shut down stories is the "rampant" drugs availability across the dorm. For non-MIT folks: SH was the go-to dorm to acquire any drug you wished. If you went to their parties (steer roast being the main one), kids were rolling on all sorts of substances (outside, inside, in their rooms, everywhere), and anyone with half a brain could get their fix. And, imho, this was not a "small minority"...
Now, the twist here is that all their (official) parties had campus police all over, and they knew exactly what was going on in there. Oh, and did I mention the MIT president's residence was right next doors (across a fence)?
So as long as the flow of substances into the dorm was somewhat monitored by the campus police, with them being (theoretically) able to track & control the environment, all was fine.
Fast forward a couple years, students are getting stuff on silk road with bitcoins, anonymously from unknown sources. Campus police loses their control, and even worse, this may leak to city/state/federal cops, which is obviously the last thing MIT (or the cops) want.
Seems like a non-unreasonable decision (from the administrator's POV) to shut it down. You obviously can't admit the years-long substances-situation publicly, but it just-so-happens that it correlates negatively with graduation rate/GPA/you name it. Boom, easy, done.
Now, don't get me wrong, I had a great time at SH, and would prefer to see it stay there. But please stop romanticizing how MIT was going against disadvantaged students, minorities, etc.etc.
>> Registrar data showed that the hall’s graduation rate was lower than any dorm on campus—21.1 percent of Senior House students were failing to graduate, versus the campus average of 7.7 percent. In addition, the email cited data that suggested higher-than-average drug use in the house.
So perhaps these kinds of people have a lower graduation rate. By spreading them around campus, they will probably be less happy. So the questions are: what if any effect will that have on their graduation rate? On their happiness?
It'll diffuse the negative effect throughout so it won't be visible to MIT detractors. The happiness is likely inconsequential.
I speak strongly and pessimistically about this because of some very fresh in my mind experiences from my university, where I watched drug abuse (and some far more heinous acts) be covered up and untreated as long as they could be by staff, and then pushed under the rug after kicking out the students who likely could have been helped earlier with tactful interventions (of which dissolving the house/support structure in OP certainly is not). The incentives at many universities are heavily misaligned to what I believe we'd like them to be.
[Edit] As a postscript; I'd add in a ramble, as there's another thought weighing on me: (as there seem to be two stories here, "are we properly helping students" and "what's happening to the heterogeneity of universities")
My own undergrad would have been remarkably less positive if I didn't have my own groups of "outsiders" to associate with, whom I'll openly admit likely correlated with increased drug use, dropout rates, and lower GPAs, as a side effect of being composed of students who might have different priority systems, not as some corrupting effect. Without these groups I likely wouldn't have landed a majority of my professional-life jobs, I wouldn't have shared in a vast amount of their knowledge and experience, and I would have lost both many good friends, and likely my wife. In the decade since then, I've seen a "real world" in which I've been told to my face, "we avoid hiring nonconformists". And while I can understand the "business justification" for that, and the university changes, I have some fear for what will be lost resulting from a push to dissolve these pockets.
The interesting thing about a school at the top of the pile is that even the dropouts will have their educational background described as "MIT dropout" for the rest of their lives, and it will mostly be used as an oddly positive descriptor.
In the bigger picture, even those MIT student who don't graduate MIT enhance the school's prestige. And it enhances the student's prestige. Only now the school will be less likely to appeal to this set of students in the first place.
Once could argue that it is a good thing that old rebel spaces are closed as those places have a tendency go stale and turn into a cargo cult shadow of itself the more it's legacy is celebrated.
The world don't need more safe-spaces where a bunch of well of kids can pretend they are changing the world, without having to deal with the fact that the movement's they pay homage to have been pacified and subverted since at the first Clinton administration.
The wealthy left leaning demographics that dominate the press have always had a strange counterproductive relationship with a glorious past it was not a part of to the point where half of them don’t even realize they ran a Goldwater republican for president in 2016 and lost to Donald the foreign policy moderate baboon because his brand of dementia was less scary then Clinton’s brand of dementia to the general public.
From your comment, you appear to have no personal experience with Senior House. Your comment thus comes across as incredibly misinformed and naive. Senior House was not a place where people pretend they are changing the world as the article made emphatically clear. Many of the world's greatest technologists were taught and inspired at Senior House to pursue their life's work. This has absolutely nothing to do with Hillary Clinton despite the tired attempt to frame everything as Trump vs. Clinton. You are minimizing the loss of a truly creative and ingenious community in an attempt to advance the same old political argument.
Perhaps because we now see childhood as extending much further, and college as more an extension of highschool? I mean, you stay on your parents health insurance until 26, and most students are having the bills largely paid by parents. According to this report, its 41% parents/relatives (savings+loans), 34% scholarships, 25% students (income/loans). So 75% of the tuition is the University and the Parents, and that's not even counting all the other sundry expenses.
That and we now are emphasizing college as a must-have entry to getting a legitimate career, so we have to make it prettier and more mainstream since huge masses of people are willing to spend large amounts of money. Decades ago, it was for the few who wanted to pursue higher education out of genuine pursuit of knowledge, and was much less expensive.
I think the trend at MIT is not just about dorms. It's about groups that are too independent, too strong-willed, or just too different getting hammered down or spit out, in favor of corporate-friendly programs and people that are more willing to toe the administration's line and/or promote its designated priorities.
The quirky but long-lived program I took part in recently had its leader of 10+ years dismissed, with the program merged into another new group. This was a huge loss, as this person (himself a graduate of the program) carried a great deal of institutional knowledge. Because there is no shared classes or overlap between graduates from different years, he was key to enabling cultural continuity. He is not being replaced.
I don't believe this is an isolated incident. I've seen it happen recently in another non-academic unit at MIT, where a high-profile leader was abruptly shown the door. This person was doing really wonderful things in many areas that (in my opinion) greatly benefited the institute. I doubt his replacement will have the same mandate.
Then there's talk of Walker Memorial being transformed (what will happen to WMBR or The Muddy?), the news at Senior House, and collaboration with the Skolkovo project, a startup hub established by Russian pols and an allied oligarch and "co-managed" by MIT in return for a reported $300 million (0).
Finally, let's not forget MIT's poor treatment over the years of risk-taking researchers, activists, and students such as Andrew "bunnie" Huang (1), Star Simpson (2), and Aaron Swartz (3).
Of course, there are still fantastic people and groups thriving at MIT and doing great things. But I see many signs that the institute continues to drift toward a more corporate/legalistic environment that emphasizes established measures of excellence (rankings, acceptance rates, numbers of graduates, published papers, alumni donations, corporate partnerships, etc.) while sidelining or shutting down quirky departments, campus groups, and personalities.
3. "... e-mails illustrate how MIT energetically assisted authorities in capturing him and gathering evidence — even prodding JSTOR to get answers for prosecutors more quickly — before a subpoena had been issued." https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/29/the-inside-stor...
The way they use privacy rules is incredibly cynical. Whenever it's something they want to do or something they want known they can slice through red tape with ease. If it's something they don't want to talk about their hands are suddenly tied.
It might be interesting to compare Senior House to fraternities and sororities that are off campus and have their own buildings. If they were off-campus perhaps they wouldn't have been shut down?
As someone who made a decent career for himself in tech without having been given a four year party immediately after high school, I am having a hard time seeing what I should be objecting to in this development. As far as I know, all of these students are welcome to roast a steer as often as they'd like after college, ideally on their own property.
This is why no institutional embrace of weirdness or "diversity" will ever be sufficient. Institutions don't value difference; they see it as a threat. What we've accomplished by celebrating weirdness and diversity is that our institutions see it as a positive threat, like a company sees another company's cool product as a threat. Instead of stamping it out, they copy it or acquire it. And of course once it's in house, it gets controlled, improved, enhanced with the "competitive advantages" of the institution, etc. Stunted and erased, in other words.
The irony of today's institutional elites patting themselves on the backs for bringing the counterculture into boardrooms and college administrations is such a cliché that even David Brooks has written about it, but somehow it's impossible to see when you are part of it. We are easily fooled by the fact that we are all intellectual and spiritual heirs of the counterculture. Unfortunately, this doesn't tell us very much about ourselves. Elites can't regard themselves as permanent revolutionaries simply because they employ the same tools and rhetoric to maintain order as they did to create change. But just like successful revolutionaries patrolling the streets of a police state who can't help seeing their guns and spies as tools of liberation, college administrators can't help seeing their administrative initiatives as caring and supportive. They think they are helping these students by erasing an environment that is associated with self-destructive behavior and lower metrics of student success. Their suffocating, stodgy oppression is phrased in the progressive language of their hopeful youth. Instead of seeing "alternative" students as a source of evil, they see them as providing great value to the institution and deserving the greatest support and care, which just happens to be exactly the same action that scratches their administrative itch to snuff out difference. They took the lesson of their revolution -- care for vulnerable people and nurture change -- and they systematized it and made it part of their institutions. Now, in order to safeguard that change, they have to guard their system against threat. Appreciation for difference and capacity for change are baked into the system, so anything that doesn't fit must be something else.
I'm not saying this kind of thinking is always bad. It is necessary for democracy, for example: you institutionalize one kind of change (transfer of power via elections) and delegitimize others (coups, for example.) I'm just saying that perhaps they should be a little more honest about who they are. They're the wielders of institutional power, looking to improve the world by pushing their control from 90% to 95%, 95% to 98%, erasing one island of nonconformity after another.
But this sounds contradictory to them. They are the champions of nonconformity. They are going to rescue nonconformity from these harmful conditions and help it thrive. Plus ça change....
[+] [-] mhalle|8 years ago|reply
Improper use of metadata to track down individuals in a confidential survey about mental health and substance abuse would end a scientist's career. MIT did it.
Collective punishment of a group for the actions of a few is an educational and social antipattern. MIT did it.
An "end justifies means" mentality is a classic tool used by the strong against the powerless. MIT embraced it.
Removing completely innocent people from their homes and their supportive social structure, while MIT's right, would face justified outrage in any public context.
Using these tools on anyone, let alone the students you thought brilliant and worthy enough to admit, teaches a mindset abusive of power and lacking in humanity. A mindset that is all too common in our society.
MIT has plenty of honorable and fair people. If they didn't know enough to stand up for Senior House specifically, why didn't they stand up against the tools that the administration used that they know are wrong?
I have found "we teach as we live, we live as we teach" a pretty powerful and positive philosophy.
[+] [-] Thriptic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rothbardrand|8 years ago|reply
My guess is that, like so many universities in this country, the administration is not answerable to students or even alumni.
[+] [-] otakucode|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yusyusyus|8 years ago|reply
Even now, I'm hesitant to discuss this here (or most places) because, despite the best intentions in arguing a position (even out of pure rhetoric), I face the high probability of being punished for going against "the collective's" thoughts. Because disagreement means punishment is in order. You're wrong, I know it, fuck you, downvote, whatever. And, if the collective severely disagrees with you, it is, apparently, acceptable to let it be known to your employer, spouse, parents, local pizza shop, etc.
[+] [-] neurotech1|8 years ago|reply
There are fighter pilots younger than 25 who are entrusted to fly SOLO in a $180m F-22 Raptor with live missiles.
How do these so called High school administrators justify protecting "children" from every theoretically possible harm? While forgetting that in less than 2 years these same students might be going into combat as a member of the armed forces.
[+] [-] djsumdog|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocschwar|8 years ago|reply
WHile college freshmen get babied like this, others the same goddamn age are going into combat. Large numbers of them.
[+] [-] candiodari|8 years ago|reply
Remembering some Latin texts from in high school, I get the distinct impression the same could be said of Grammar schools in ancient Rome. Having (quite a bit of) wine with colleagues and even with the teachers on occasion was pretty normal. Living together was a necessity in many places, even for the rich.
Biggest difference with High School being that having good grades was pretty much rewarded, even socially. Not everywhere, but more than a bit.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tosser350|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CptMauli|8 years ago|reply
> then all undergraduate parents
Can somebody explain why the University would email the parents? What do they have to do with it? The students are of age, right?
[+] [-] mhalle|8 years ago|reply
Back then, there seemed to be an implicit understanding that MIT, maybe unlike other places, gave you a lot of rope, and it was your job as a student to use it wisely. No parent got a letter saying their kid was caught on a roof (unless they were jumping, an idiot, or hurt somebody).
On the other hand, one autumn a few years after I graduated when I was still advising, I was at a brunch for the parents of new students. The Dean of Students at the time addressed the gathering by saying, "Trust in us. We will take care of your children".
I found it jarring then, and I find it jarring now. One dean, one speech, one fall, but wrong at so many levels.
[+] [-] sannee|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cuckcuckspruce|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdietrich|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indigochill|8 years ago|reply
There are still places for clever weirdos. Particularly online. I know of at least two hacking communities, for instance, which only let in people who can hack the invite process. At that point, you can assume with some degree of safety that you're with like-minded individuals. Even if people cheat the system, that at least means they cared enough to cheat and it also means they probably won't get very far with the additional tests once they get in (or they do, which requires they learn something, so everyone benefits).
Okay, but all that's online. What about actual physical places? Hackerspaces/makerspaces are probably the place to start. Places where what you're passionate about making is more important than who you are.
[+] [-] tyingq|8 years ago|reply
There is a list of some notable Senior House alumni on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Massachusetts_Instit...
[+] [-] mtreis86|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cynisme|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsr_|8 years ago|reply
Survivorship bias is real. Things sneak up on you when you aren't looking. Linux had only just made it into the 1.2 kernel series.
[+] [-] pc86|8 years ago|reply
I've seen this sentiment expressed before and it always struck me as the intellectual equivalent of "kids these days!" without much merit.
Some people will waste their talent. Some people won't.
[+] [-] ThomPete|8 years ago|reply
I actually have much higher hopes for technology allowing those greatest minds to be pushed forward than before.
[+] [-] breadmaster|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rb808|8 years ago|reply
To get in now you need to be a robot who can ace standardized tests, who spends their whole childhood doing math problems and has no real contact with the real world aside from two pieces of flair suggested by a guidance counseller in order to get into an ivy.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tptacek|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpmattia|8 years ago|reply
Not sure of the context of your question exactly, but a quick summary for non-alums: MIT has had a dorm system for many decades where students choose where they are going to live. This tends to aggregate similar personalities/lifestyles into various dormitories. Senior House was a dorm with a reputation: It tended to attract a personality that might be described as "edgy", and was perceived as a place with higher-than-avg drug use. It has had that reputation for decades.
The current MIT chancellor looked at GPAs and other metrics and decided that Senior House was under performing and perhaps harmful to students. She put the dorm into "turnaround", and when that didn't pan out, she evicted all of the undergrad students. It is now a grad dorm.
[That last paragraph reads like a corporate action, a similarity that has been noted by others.]
Many alums have noted the administration has been trying to disperse Senior House for decades (I saw it in the 90s), it looks like Chancellor Barnhart was the executor.
[+] [-] mikeash|8 years ago|reply
Imagine if you responded to an "anonymous" mental health survey stating that you abused some drug, and then the city kicked you out of your house because they used that survey to determine that there were too many drug users on your block.
[+] [-] austenallred|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] totalZero|8 years ago|reply
The drug culture of this dorm goes much further than sporadic cocaine use. Frankly, without generalizing about individual residents, it's fair to say that drug use was an identifying component of the culture of the dorm. Yet that culture had existed for many, many years, so its existence alone didn't precipitate the closure of the dorm.
[+] [-] anon853941|8 years ago|reply
You are load balancing 5 servers. One has a latency issue that causes response time to be 2x the others. What do you do? You wait, it goes to 4x. Now what?
You take it offline, spin up a new instance and investigate.
MIT put them on notice (a year earlier), there was no attempt to improve and the bluff was called.
I wish this wasn't happening, but sometimes you have to actually DO something.
[+] [-] throwawaySH555|8 years ago|reply
MIT alum (<10 years) here. While i didn't live in senior haus myself, I lived in a dorm very much related to SH, had many friends there and overall jolly time (^^).
One thing under-emphasized in all these SH shut down stories is the "rampant" drugs availability across the dorm. For non-MIT folks: SH was the go-to dorm to acquire any drug you wished. If you went to their parties (steer roast being the main one), kids were rolling on all sorts of substances (outside, inside, in their rooms, everywhere), and anyone with half a brain could get their fix. And, imho, this was not a "small minority"...
Now, the twist here is that all their (official) parties had campus police all over, and they knew exactly what was going on in there. Oh, and did I mention the MIT president's residence was right next doors (across a fence)?
So as long as the flow of substances into the dorm was somewhat monitored by the campus police, with them being (theoretically) able to track & control the environment, all was fine.
Fast forward a couple years, students are getting stuff on silk road with bitcoins, anonymously from unknown sources. Campus police loses their control, and even worse, this may leak to city/state/federal cops, which is obviously the last thing MIT (or the cops) want.
Seems like a non-unreasonable decision (from the administrator's POV) to shut it down. You obviously can't admit the years-long substances-situation publicly, but it just-so-happens that it correlates negatively with graduation rate/GPA/you name it. Boom, easy, done.
Now, don't get me wrong, I had a great time at SH, and would prefer to see it stay there. But please stop romanticizing how MIT was going against disadvantaged students, minorities, etc.etc.
[+] [-] phkahler|8 years ago|reply
So perhaps these kinds of people have a lower graduation rate. By spreading them around campus, they will probably be less happy. So the questions are: what if any effect will that have on their graduation rate? On their happiness?
[+] [-] existencebox|8 years ago|reply
I speak strongly and pessimistically about this because of some very fresh in my mind experiences from my university, where I watched drug abuse (and some far more heinous acts) be covered up and untreated as long as they could be by staff, and then pushed under the rug after kicking out the students who likely could have been helped earlier with tactful interventions (of which dissolving the house/support structure in OP certainly is not). The incentives at many universities are heavily misaligned to what I believe we'd like them to be.
[Edit] As a postscript; I'd add in a ramble, as there's another thought weighing on me: (as there seem to be two stories here, "are we properly helping students" and "what's happening to the heterogeneity of universities")
My own undergrad would have been remarkably less positive if I didn't have my own groups of "outsiders" to associate with, whom I'll openly admit likely correlated with increased drug use, dropout rates, and lower GPAs, as a side effect of being composed of students who might have different priority systems, not as some corrupting effect. Without these groups I likely wouldn't have landed a majority of my professional-life jobs, I wouldn't have shared in a vast amount of their knowledge and experience, and I would have lost both many good friends, and likely my wife. In the decade since then, I've seen a "real world" in which I've been told to my face, "we avoid hiring nonconformists". And while I can understand the "business justification" for that, and the university changes, I have some fear for what will be lost resulting from a push to dissolve these pockets.
[+] [-] Gargoyle|8 years ago|reply
In the bigger picture, even those MIT student who don't graduate MIT enhance the school's prestige. And it enhances the student's prestige. Only now the school will be less likely to appeal to this set of students in the first place.
[+] [-] Stranger43|8 years ago|reply
The world don't need more safe-spaces where a bunch of well of kids can pretend they are changing the world, without having to deal with the fact that the movement's they pay homage to have been pacified and subverted since at the first Clinton administration.
The wealthy left leaning demographics that dominate the press have always had a strange counterproductive relationship with a glorious past it was not a part of to the point where half of them don’t even realize they ran a Goldwater republican for president in 2016 and lost to Donald the foreign policy moderate baboon because his brand of dementia was less scary then Clinton’s brand of dementia to the general public.
[+] [-] mrgordon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] program_whiz|8 years ago|reply
http://news.salliemae.com/files/doc_library/file/HowAmericaP...
That and we now are emphasizing college as a must-have entry to getting a legitimate career, so we have to make it prettier and more mainstream since huge masses of people are willing to spend large amounts of money. Decades ago, it was for the few who wanted to pursue higher education out of genuine pursuit of knowledge, and was much less expensive.
[+] [-] forgottenpass|8 years ago|reply
Yep. Sounds like every dormitory at any university. All they had to do was look.
This whole thing reads like the playbook of how to use the mechanisms of bureaucracy to build a palatable pretense for unpopular actions.
[+] [-] kchoudhu|8 years ago|reply
There's a reason I always told people to seek help off campus.
[+] [-] ilamont|8 years ago|reply
The quirky but long-lived program I took part in recently had its leader of 10+ years dismissed, with the program merged into another new group. This was a huge loss, as this person (himself a graduate of the program) carried a great deal of institutional knowledge. Because there is no shared classes or overlap between graduates from different years, he was key to enabling cultural continuity. He is not being replaced.
I don't believe this is an isolated incident. I've seen it happen recently in another non-academic unit at MIT, where a high-profile leader was abruptly shown the door. This person was doing really wonderful things in many areas that (in my opinion) greatly benefited the institute. I doubt his replacement will have the same mandate.
Then there's talk of Walker Memorial being transformed (what will happen to WMBR or The Muddy?), the news at Senior House, and collaboration with the Skolkovo project, a startup hub established by Russian pols and an allied oligarch and "co-managed" by MIT in return for a reported $300 million (0).
Finally, let's not forget MIT's poor treatment over the years of risk-taking researchers, activists, and students such as Andrew "bunnie" Huang (1), Star Simpson (2), and Aaron Swartz (3).
Of course, there are still fantastic people and groups thriving at MIT and doing great things. But I see many signs that the institute continues to drift toward a more corporate/legalistic environment that emphasizes established measures of excellence (rankings, acceptance rates, numbers of graduates, published papers, alumni donations, corporate partnerships, etc.) while sidelining or shutting down quirky departments, campus groups, and personalities.
0. https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/31/russia-hopes-the-skolkovo-...
1. https://boingboing.net/2017/03/09/making-and-breaking-hardwa...
2. http://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/star.html
3. "... e-mails illustrate how MIT energetically assisted authorities in capturing him and gathering evidence — even prodding JSTOR to get answers for prosecutors more quickly — before a subpoena had been issued." https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/29/the-inside-stor...
[+] [-] patmcguire|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skybrian|8 years ago|reply
(Not that I know anything about it.)
[+] [-] hexis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkarl|8 years ago|reply
The irony of today's institutional elites patting themselves on the backs for bringing the counterculture into boardrooms and college administrations is such a cliché that even David Brooks has written about it, but somehow it's impossible to see when you are part of it. We are easily fooled by the fact that we are all intellectual and spiritual heirs of the counterculture. Unfortunately, this doesn't tell us very much about ourselves. Elites can't regard themselves as permanent revolutionaries simply because they employ the same tools and rhetoric to maintain order as they did to create change. But just like successful revolutionaries patrolling the streets of a police state who can't help seeing their guns and spies as tools of liberation, college administrators can't help seeing their administrative initiatives as caring and supportive. They think they are helping these students by erasing an environment that is associated with self-destructive behavior and lower metrics of student success. Their suffocating, stodgy oppression is phrased in the progressive language of their hopeful youth. Instead of seeing "alternative" students as a source of evil, they see them as providing great value to the institution and deserving the greatest support and care, which just happens to be exactly the same action that scratches their administrative itch to snuff out difference. They took the lesson of their revolution -- care for vulnerable people and nurture change -- and they systematized it and made it part of their institutions. Now, in order to safeguard that change, they have to guard their system against threat. Appreciation for difference and capacity for change are baked into the system, so anything that doesn't fit must be something else.
I'm not saying this kind of thinking is always bad. It is necessary for democracy, for example: you institutionalize one kind of change (transfer of power via elections) and delegitimize others (coups, for example.) I'm just saying that perhaps they should be a little more honest about who they are. They're the wielders of institutional power, looking to improve the world by pushing their control from 90% to 95%, 95% to 98%, erasing one island of nonconformity after another.
But this sounds contradictory to them. They are the champions of nonconformity. They are going to rescue nonconformity from these harmful conditions and help it thrive. Plus ça change....
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] selimthegrim|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liveoneggs|8 years ago|reply