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.
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.
It's not about this particular dorm, it's about a broader social trend towards greater conformity and fewer second chances.
Woz and Jobs started out in business selling blue boxes to illegal bookmakers. Imagine a world in which they had been subject to the modern surveillance panopticon and the sort of prosecutorial malice that was levelled against Aaron Swartz. RMS slept under his desk in the AI lab for many years and is notoriously bad at politicking, political correctness and basic etiquette. Would a young RMS survive the administrative culture of modern academia?
Steve Jobs graduated high school with 2.65 GPA. How many opportunities are there today for someone with a 2.65 GPA?
> How many opportunities are there today for someone with a 2.65 GPA?
Just as many as there used to be, it's just never been easy. Actually I thought about it some more, and there are actually probably more opportunities today than before with the internet and the democratization of knowledge.
> Woz and Jobs started out in business selling blue boxes to illegal bookmakers.
> Imagine a world in which they had been subject to the modern surveillance panopticon and the sort of prosecutorial malice that was levelled against Aaron Swartz.
I think you're looking at it wrong, Woz and Jobs started selling niche items directly to a small group of customers, that still exists today, they just wouldn't be selling blue boxes, maybe it'd be an interesting SaSS today.
I didn't think it was meant to be a political post. The entire thread is about a purported cultural shift that's starving out the environment that people like Steve and Woz thrived in.
In fact, I would be disappointed if it was meant to be about politics because it'd come across as an attempt to shoehorn politics into a discussion about much broader social trends
I don't feel it is useful to narrow this to a political issue rather than a broader social trend.
I also don't particularly appreciate the tone of your replies and especially statements like "the failure to recognise that is harmful to your understanding", which come across as somewhat condescending and less about seeking a proper conversation than about attempting to lecture.
Steve Jobs had an acquaintance in college named John Draper (aka "Captain Crunch" in the hacking world) who if I remember right taught Jobs said blue box skills. He possibly represents the endpoint which the OP fears.
I've met him at a couple of raves back in the 1990s back when he was basically wandering around the rave scene. My impression: brilliant guy, but incredibly eccentric.
I don't know much more about him beyond Wiki articles etc., but apparently he has had a bit of a tough time employment wise, due to a combination of his phone fraud convictions and his eccentric personality. This despite his heavy tie-in to early Apple history, and a fairly strong coding resume. Then again, from what I saw, his personality is not the type that would embrace Standard Corporate to begin with, I'm sure. But said personality means he never got rewarded much for what he did. If I remember right, he actually had to crowdfund for some medical issues recently. I think its fair to say at any rate that his talent potential ended up being underutilized.
You are right that it's possible that there are more opportunities for these sort of weirdos, but in order for that to exist, there has to be a space for the small corporation that is more willing to give eccentricity space. One of the dangers of corporate consolidation is exactly this: large corporations are probably more likely to exclude people with mild criminal records because checklists, and they are less likely to give space to people that don't fit into corporate cultures. Consolidation tends to kill innovation; perhaps this is one of the ways.
Likewise, from a university perspective, it won't matter as much if Big University kills off culture that "doesn't fit in" if there are small universities that welcome the eccentric weirdo. However, if only the Big University Degree matters in life, then it's also entirely possible for the eccentric but brilliant weirdos will end up being outside the system. Maybe they will form their own collective and create something new. The alternative is the Draper like scenario where one more just drifts.
Steve Jobs lived in a commune with some millionaires who went to prison for selling LSD. Certainly not a path most MIT students (or current Reed students) would be encouraged to take today.
And for a tie-in back to the main article here, it is a path lots of MIT students took in the past. Bexley House manufactured LSD for quite a while back in the 1970s.
Bexley closed four years ago for repairs, and was demolished with no plans to open a new dorm as a continuation. This seems unpleasantly relevant.
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.
I've noticed this pattern too. I think people who manage to make it in profitable physical trades seem to have a stronger grasp on what is an illusion and what is real.
Artist/bohemian collectives across the US harbor these same kinds of people as well.
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.
There's also http://3564020356.org/ (Actually I misremembered this one - you gain access by reading an intro to crypto and then answering a question about it. As I recall you get additional access by solving other, more challenging tests)
That's true, and it offers a way for those types of people to group together. However, if those kinds of people aren't given a way to succeed in college or any other kind of upper-class signalling system, they won't ever get into positions of power where they can thrive.
More and more, college is selecting for a certain kind of personality while weeding out those outside of the norm.
Love to find one in Los Angeles. Tried making one, a free hackers coworking space for years, but could never get it off the ground. It was there, Drop Labs, for years, free and empty. Evening events drew people, but beer always does that.
This makes the case that colleges are not those places in the same way they used to be, and so colleges are now missing some of the utility they once provided. Both to students and to society at large.
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.
The dude wrote EMACS, GNU, GCC and the GPL license. He more or less single-handedly invented the concept of Free software. If RMS isn't a genius, then I don't know who is.
GNU as an organization pushing the idea of free software long predates the GPL. The people creating the BSD licensed BSD NET/2 explicitly aknowledged the GNU influence on their decision to release.
He started the free software "movement" to _preserve_ the existing ethos of software sharing at MIT and elsewhere, which he saw as being destroyed by corporate influence.
He also played a big part in ITS, the lisp machines and published multiple papers on Lisp, AI, and CS. Unlike Jobs and Gates he made actual contributions to the whole field.
You're comparing Gates with his poor quality virusware to RMS who has written incomparably important parts of the Unix operating system and made it free for all. Then you decide to act like RMS is the one that doesn't belong in the list. LOL
The core code of Unix will live on long past the current incarnation of Windows.
Gates is a ruthless business man and thats the only reason his name is larger in your mind. His most striking quote was about how you give Windows licenses for free to Africa so they get addicted and have to keep buying it even though they can't afford it and Unix is free due to familiarity. Meanwhile RMS labored quietly to build a better world.
Can't help but laugh at anyone who would downvote this. Sorry I insulted someone on the Forbes wealthiest list. I know how that offends your capitalist sensibilities.
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.
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.
I think the idea was that MIT and Stanford don't even care about the "two pieces of flair" (i.e. extracurriculars), but most successful applicants to those schools will have them so they can also apply to Harvard etc., which effectively require them.
The result is that even the non-academic stuff those students have done has an academic target.
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.
Its ironic how the safe space movement seems to have led to the destruction of the most prominent safe space of all. The article failed to mention Harvard's censure of its finals clubs, but we should take notice when top universities fight their own students for control over independent environments.
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...
This is so sad. I found the quote "one way to destroy a culture, with lots of white paint" very poignant. Institutions everywhere increasingly seem to want to just make everything bland and safe.
I also find that its is not even individuals in the institutions but somehow the collective that causes this. I do not think this is the end of such places though as this kind of stuff has happened before and I think people will always find and make new spaces to make their own culture, the destruction of such places seems almost inevitable as they gain more and more notoriety.
It's also likely that these sorts of places will move off campus if there is truly a need for them. There are plenty of well-off alumni of Senior House, and erecting a building and maintaining the culture of Senior House off campus is something they could do if it is really that important to them.
> Institutions everywhere increasingly seem to want to just make everything bland and safe.
Can you really blame them when the alternative is college campuses burning because they invited a speaker who was committing wrongthing and wrongspeak?
This is something that has been demanded by a growing percentage of the student body over the last two decades. The schools are giving the students what they want.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are calls to return to the 'in loco parentis' days where schools had much more control over the discipline of their students - all in the name of safety, of course.
Yes, this is clearly a reaction to political correctness, which is why they got rid of housing for the ~privileged~ straight white men and--oh, what? This was traditional housing for exactly the sort of queer people, minorities, and lower-income students who get blamed for hating "speakers who commit wrongthink"? While protests that don't do much are referred to as "burning campus," the people actually hurt by real actions are just the people all those dang SJWs keep saying are being hurt? Weird.
You have no idea what you're talking about. I have good friends who are senior house alums. Ive been following the timeline of this action for years. This was managerial capitalism squeezing out non-conformity in order to maximize statistics and minimize liability for problem students. How dare you blame this on any student? No where did this article mention identity politics but you decided to bring it up anyway. People like you are insufferable. You are completely off base.
its the same in the UK there is a scandal where high schools are kicking out sixth form students and refusing to enter them for A levels to flatter the schools place in the league tables - this is actually illegal.
its like you where kicked out of your US high school and not allowed to graduate
Colleges have become an echo chamber centered around profits and "the experience". A library card is a better investment; one that comes with more freedom.
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.
That's one thing that really struck me as weird in this article. I'm not living in America but just like I would expect my boss to only contact my parents in an emergency, I would expect my University to only contact my parents in an emergency (and graduation).
That's very generous of you. When my parents got married, my grandparents paid for their honeymoon. Had the resort where they were staying reported to their parents what they did there, they would have been outraged. Would something like this also be accepted in America?
I don't know what he's doing, I know what grades he got a few times a year.
He asked for money. One of the terms for my giving him money was to know whether or not my money is having the desired outcome. If he didn't like that he could get money elsewhere on far worse terms. Welcome to adulthood!
For the sake of argument, take the university at their word: that they believed there was an unsafe environment fostered in this dorm, and that the students were markedly underperforming their peers. As such the University is selling a defective good to the parents, and they are trying to remediate it.
That sounds quite reasonable to me.
However, are they infantilizing the students and preventing them from growing in maturity and judgement in the process?
Yep, they sure are.
The problem US universities are finding themselves in, is when parents are ponying up small fortunes, they are not interested in preserving 'freedom to fail' which is necessary for growth.
Actually it's not a gift. If it was a gift, it would exceed the amount of money I can give him and would trigger taxes for him, and I'd need to give him _more_ money to pay those taxes.
I don't know how this works legally, but I do know (because I asked) that this isn't considered a gift according to the IRS.
I disagree with you. It's your choice to engage financially with the university, and you should do so knowing that if you want to know how it's going, you need to talk to the student, not the university -- we have laws like FERPA for a reason.
He told the university to disclose grades to me. No laws are being broken. This is his choice, just like it's my choice to send them a crapton of money.
He told the school to disclose grades to you. Not his personal conduct. Most parent's accept that their kids are going to drink, and have sex, and maybe do some drugs in college. They probably aren't happy about it but they know it's going to happen to some degree or another. That is a huge difference from having your only communication with the school be basically a PSA that your kid is living in some sort of college sponsored hippie, drug den that's going to cause them to fail out. That's what people are taking issues with.
Maybe they were right to contact parents. I've never been to Senior House and don't know the ins and outs what went on there. But as someone who has worked in ResLife and been responsible for kids, I can say without a doubt MIT took the nuclear option. At most colleges, you can be put on academic probation, and even kicked out without the university notifying your parents directly.
As I said above, I don't endorse MIT's behavior. However, there is a spectrum here. It sounds like you think it's ok for him and I to make an agreement that the school will disclose his grades to me in return for getting a free (to him) education.
If I'd taken this further, and asked him to disclose his personal conduct, and he agreed, would you have a problem?
Keep in mind I actually don't care about his personal conduct. I care whether or not he's taking school seriously, and I am using grades as a proxy for that. I take the money seriously, and if he's not going to take the benefits the money is purchasing seriously, then I have the option to stop paying for it.
The problem I see is that this is a slippery slope. Suppose your kid gets into two schools -- say a cheap(er) in-state school and MIT. Either way you're paying for it, and you know the kid will get a perfectly good CS education at either school. However, having MIT on their resume will be worth something, as will the relationships they make. Perhaps it's even worth the huge additional expense, assuming they take full advantage of it. At what point does the additional value beyond the curriculum, which the school is happy to charge for, give me some interest (both intellectual and legal) in how all of that is going?
I ask not to argue that MIT is correct here, but to try and illustrate some of the complexity. I am not an ethicist but it seems like an interesting question to me.
Ok, that's a bit different than how I read your earlier post, I thought you were saying that parents/relatives should be entitled to that info solely on the basis of footing the bill.
Then you should expect the school to tell you these things because the student asked them to, not because you're paying for it. The first and second halves of your first sentence are unrelated to each other.
It's not a choice. In Canada at least you are disqualified from financial aid (including loans) based on your parents' tax returns. The law expects you to pay for your kids' school if you earn a middle class income or more.
Ok, I can see it from that perspective -- we have similar financial aid limits in the U.S. I still think it's a choice, even if it's one that's structurally difficult for many people to make.
However, this is mostly orthogonal to the issue that most university students are adults, and the university has no business sharing their personal information on their behalf (without their explicit consent of course).
Same in the US; I had a friend who was estranged from her parents, and so they refused to sign a FAFSA form, which made her unable to qualify for pretty much all financial aid. The college president had to step in to have an exception made for her, since all need-based scholarships provided by that college (and most others) are based upon FAFSA.
I ask him about birth control and whether or not he's using it as an adult. When I have to pay the school thousands of dollars a month (averaged out), I asked for the ability to find out directly from the school how it's going, and thankfully there was a way to make that happen. Seems like my request was not considered out of the ordinary...
If you can't trust your nephew to give you honest answers to your questions and discussions, how can you trust him to utilize your gift to its fullest extent? Or at least come out of it in a good way?
I was dirt poor, and similarly had a family member help with my college when, even after a full tuition scholarship and some government grants there was still a lot of bills left to pay. It wasn't a large sum that he paid, but he never grilled me about my status. His position on it was "You are a smart kid and you've earned this opportunity"
Meanwhile, years earlier my sister squandered large amounts of money partying at a supremely expensive private school. We couldn't exactly afford it in the first place, and attempting to exert influence over long distances caused huge amounts of stress on our family.
Do be careful. To some people, the worry of disappointing or angering the one funding the opportunity can be overwhelming. Having positive and supportive, yet frank discussions with your nephew would really help him, especially if/when he fails. But being overbearing could in fact make his college experience less positive and beneficial.
Hope I wasn't too condescending with my overly long rant
That's not how it works, assuming your nephew is an adult. You, as an adult, are making a decision to give another adult a lot of money. That gift creates zero obligations on any third party, and should not even create any obligations by your nephew unless you explicitly arranged for this in advance.
From what I hear, a lot of parents have your attitude. They call up the school asking about grades and performance with the attitude that they deserve to know because they're paying for it. They inevitably get shot down, because not only is giving out this information to paying parents not what's expected, but it's explicitly illegal to do so under federal law without the student's written permission.
I'm giving the money to the school, not to him to give to the school. The mechanics of this are perhaps irrelevant, except that the school offers this option for me to get his grades sent to me by them, similar to how I give the money to them.
My "attitude" is that I told him I would pay for his school if I got to see his grades. Pretty simple. I'd be happy not to pay and not see his grades -- I'm not his parent, and for my own kids (while this is further into the future), if they can pay for school without my help then I don't think I should know anything they don't want to tell me.
The school doesn't care that you're paying, nor should they. If you made this a condition of paying, then that's fine, but that's between you and your nephew. The school's involvement is limited to accepting his written permission to give you his information.
Your attitude about this is reasonable, but you're extrapolating to a position that is harder to defend.
Your agreement with your nephew is defensible and enforceable. You fund his education, he provides you with his grades. That makes sense.
But that agreement is between you and your nephew, not you and your nephew's school. So much is that the case that at some state schools (I know it's at least true at Illinois, where we just sent our son), they won't allow students to sign FERPA consent forms for release of grades on days when parents are likely to be present.
> Speaking as someone paying what is effectively a second mortgage so my nephew can go to school, I expect the school to let me know how it's going.
Why? If you're paying your spouses' medical bills, do you expect to be included on personal, private conversations between the spouse and his or her doctor? (Spoiler: you need the spouse's consent for that!)
No one is forcing parents (or you) to pay for someone else's college, but as adults, the university should manage the students' autonomy by not sending "nastygrams" home.
Why do you think you're entitled to invading your nephew's privacy simply because you gave him some money?
I guess he invaded his own privacy, by agreeing that he would arrange for his grades to be sent to me by the school.
Also, while your straw man was amusing, it's also mostly wrong. The rules regarding PHI disclosure from covered entities to spouses is fairly complex -- not to mention non-spouses. You might be interested in this link:
I went to univ. in the USA. My father paid most of my term bills, and not once asked me to talk about how school was going. I screwed up my first semester, realized I was wasting a bunch of money, and straightened myself out. My state university never contacted them even though I was clearly on the path of failing. HUGE life lesson, maybe one I'd avoid if I had a parent that was more involved with my schooling, but I certainly learned a lot about why it's important to apply yourself.
So, at least in the 2000s, it wasn't established at my particular State University to contact parents.
"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.
Originally society saw everyone as fundamentally the same with age not being a factor so much as experience and learning. Children were seen as tiny adults that simply hadn't been trained yet. Then as things advanced, children were seen as fundamentally different from adults, with children seen as barely trainable animals that had to be beaten into shape. Things persisted like that for awhile. Then the Industrial Revolution came, and the class of 'adolescent' was invented because factory owners did not want to pay inexperienced workers enough to raise a family on. Prior to that, adolescents became adults at 12 or 13, went to work as apprentices and could usually take care of whatever children they sired.
For reasons that I've not figured out despite decades of study, even though all of the socioeconomic pressures which inspired the changes that came with the Industrial Revolution have gone away, we preserve their practices. And appear to want to extend and expand them, further removing the young from society, etc. The thing that worries me is that there are critical periods of brain development. And brain development occurs exclusively as a result of experience. Remove experience, and brain development halts. And miss the critical period, and that development can never occur regardless of attempts to force it to occur.
Without knowing it, we may have passed a critical period. This is just a personal guess. But it seems 2 or 3 generations ago, parents who were really not entirely mature began raising their own children. As raising children is a very challenging task, demanding a great deal of maturity from a person (refusing to let your personal desire to have the child depend upon you and need you override your duty to turn the child into an adult as early as possible), this results in them over-sheltering their child, depriving the following generation of necessary experiences for brain development, and it continues.
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.
I think you're getting it backwards. Real life isn't taking notes from high school authoritarianism. High-school authoritarianism is modeled after real-life authoritarianism. It's teaching kids how to "behave" as members of society.
Don't do what we say? Go to "time-out". Slowly have your freedoms taken away from you until you're compliant.
See these officers? They are here to make sure you listen to every one of our ridiculous requirements.
Better tuck in that shirt and only wear a brown or black belt! Want to dye your hair? Individuality is distracting and will not be tolerated!
You forgot: if you pay money you get away with bending the rules, as seen here (it's a fundraiser for a sister school washed away by Hurricane Harvey):
Oh yeah, that one too. I grew up dirt poor and never really was able to take advantage of that aspect. My biggest takeaway from high school was to get as tight as possible with the authoritative figures who have direct control over you in order to have the highest degree of freedom. To appeal to their intellectual side. I went to several different high schools and this strategy kept me out of a lot of trouble and provided many opportunities.
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.
> 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.
Helicopter parents [1] and freely available student loans subsidized/backed by the federal government. The child/parent are the consumers of the service, but the negative externalities are dumped onto society.
This is tangentially related to why Elon Musk[0] likes to ask potential interns and employees how "they" solved a particularly difficult problem[1]. If they personally solved the problem, they are going to know the details of the solution. A student who relies on a "helicopter parent" is significantly less likely to understand the details of how to solve difficult problems.
People really do need to get some perspective on real problems. The safe spaces and coloring books for students after Trump got elected was pathetic. 18 year olds stormed Normandy, now they are crying over the democratic process. I say this as a college student myself.
People will always find a reason to be miserable, so now that almost every major issue has been taken care of we have increasingly small things being brought up like "microaggressions".
> The safe spaces and coloring books for students after Trump got elected was pathetic. 18 year olds stormed Normandy, now they are crying over the democratic process.
Isn't the sensitivity of the next generation a positive, and not a negative? I wish my father had emotional awareness instead of being part of a generation that customarily hid or pushed emotions away. The march of social progress is a good thing, not a bad thing - or, perhaps, do you believe that through progress in the modern world we are all not entitled to mental security as well as personal security?
The stronger, more confident civilization and culture wins, not the most progressive or sophisticated. Rome was wiped out by barbarians and the dark ages followed. Western civilization is weak and divided, some don't even think it's worth defending. This is mainly due to outside influences intentionally creating division to weaken the United States from within.
Western civilization is far from perfect but I think it's preferable to any alternative I've seen.
edit: As far as what people are entitled to, I feel I'm entitled to nothing, not even the air I breath, unless I'm willing to work for it or fight for it. Most of the human rights we take for granted are only there because our ancestors fought to defend them. If you sit on your ass and feel entitled to something because you exist don't be surprised when someone takes it away.
The historians cannot even agree on a date for the fall of Rome, let alone a cause. Especially once we remember that Italy were one of the poorer regions of the empire by the time we start seeing any major change to it's structure.
Maybe we should be a bit cautions about what lessons we draw from a an even we cannot even data correctly. As there is a lot more to the story that most introduction textbooks have time to cover, or that the empire as such collapsed as the capital of Constantinople was not sacked until the 4th crusade in the 12th century, and not by barbarians but Christian knights.
When it comes to history we have a tendency to invent the lesson we want to learn and then go look for a way to spin history to fit an existing narrative rather then work the other way around, and let history teach us a lesson.
It was not so much that the barbarians beat the Roman army as it was that the Roman army had been outsourced to a bunch of former barbarian tribes while everyone rich fled east that led to Rome being looted and taxed by the barbarians(but not exactly sacked) And that was centuries after Rome gave up all pretence of being an republic with many deities. The fact that the barbarians weren’t exactly pagan but Christians of a slightly different denomination is also left of of most textbooks.
18 year olds fight in Iraq and Afghanistan right now. In fact, children who weren't even alive during 9/11 will soon be eligible to fight in one of your glorious wars
Not all of them. Many are in grants and scholarships, others on student loans.
If parents are paying the bills, that's between them and their kids. They can demand to see grades/results or cut funding. But if you'd teaching students they are adults-then that responsibility falls to the families in the situations where they are dependent on them for funding.
One of my housemates hated his parents and funded everything himself taking pc support jobs at a print shop and car dealership.
That's between us and our kids. At Illinois orientation this year, they were super clear with us: your kids are 18, adults, and they're our clients, not you; if you call us with questions about them, we're unlikely to answer them, and in some cases legally can't.
That felt right.
My kid's college calling me about other people's behavior in a dorm? That feels very, very wrong.
Mine was similar, the University made it clear they straight up cannot discuss medical issues, or anything else which is confidential with with the parent/guardian of anyone over 5e age of 18.
This. My parents paid for much of my education, but got information about my academics through me. I allowed them to access my grades because it was often easier than any alternatives, but actually stopped doing that after they got worried about some things without context. I, and I think they, would have been surprised and appalled if my school had emailed them about the conduct of other students.
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.
>> 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.
Perhaps its a problem of empathy? Many of the Professors and Administrators I've come across are, to use the article's crude term, egg-heads. They have not experimented with drugs or alternate lifestyles; or perhaps have had bad experiences with them. They are usually socially "upstanding" people: married, with mortgage, spouse and kids. So they just can't see why a place like Senior House would exist; they can't see the purpose of leaving alone an environment which, however disgusting it might feel to them personally, seemed to have provided a lot of comfort to a lot of students from different backgrounds.
A college education is much more than just graduating and getting a piece of paper. The metrics for measuring progress are really fucked up IMO.
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.
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.
Completely agree, and it puts this aspect of the case into an interesting legal realm. There is certainly a question of misuse of protected health information, which can be treated quite harshly by the US government, especially when involving potentially vulnerable populations.
I don't know if this question has been investigated.
> I don't know if this question has been investigated.
One should hope that this will be thoroughly investigated, lest we set precedent on an issue that leads to so many worrisome open doors for abuse in the future. These are not medical professionals bound by an oath and consequences; this feels like where I draw the line.
From that link, it seems there's evidence MIT did not actually anonymize the data -- i.e., used non-aggregated data and violated explicit guarantees of anonymity, so my analysis below seems irrelevant.
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Data aggregation / anonymization and the ease of de-aggregating reveals a major loophole in current US health privacy regulation (HIPAA). Once aggregated, personal health information (PHI) loses most protection.
So, here if the mental health team aggregated the data, that is 'ok'. Then sharing that aggregated data with administrators is also 'ok' because it's no longer PHI. The exception would be if the disclosures of the mental health department to its patients prohibited this use of the data.
I don't see a crime here, other than moral.
Anecdote: I have sat across the table from a health data purveyor whose entire business model is buying aggregated data from multiple sources, de-anonymizing and monetizing it (for ad-based stuff and risk-scoring for life insurance and key man insurance provider type customers). That was a few years ago and I believe there has been some guidance that would make that business model much more difficult today if it was ever legal. We didn't get past the discussion phase based on that model's risk to our patient-centric model.
I'm a lawyer in healthcare turned dev, but readily admit not to be a health law expert. Most of my work was corporate and transactional, so please take my opinion above with a healthy dose of salt. And if I'm wrong or have woefully outdated info, please correct!
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.
This is unfortunately too close to the truth. While there are still many who enjoy teaching and guiding undergraduates, a Professors life is consumed by first, the pursuit of tenure and then the pursuit of more and more research funding for projects (not to mention doing the actual research). In that context, issues with undergraduate administration seem like an unsavory part of their jobs: often, offering very little in returns.
Professors aren't the ones dealing with undergraduates, it's the administration. The administration is answering to the MIT Corporation and the Board of Directors, whose interest has long become to grow the "investment vehicle" (endowment, professorial industry nexus, bureaucracy, etc.) through commercial and real-estate ventures, patents, and the cultivation of the brand. Students, graduate or undergraduate, and their lives are all nuisance, and you can tell from how they are treated in financial transactions relative to the aforementioned beneficiaries on whose behalf the Institute truly works.
You must have had a different interaction with the MIT Corp: I've found that they have nothing other than the best interests of MIT at heart. Most of the members are alums, and several of them have made very significant donations (with not a whole lot of recognition imo.)
I'm not saying the MIT Corp hasn't made mistakes, but I've never questioned their motives for doing the right thing.
I don't even think you are contradicting me here. It's just that "MIT" has grown to be a lot lot more than educating its students (for better or for worse), and its ... "interests" much more varied as a result. After all, the students are there for a few years and then leave. Who are the real long-term stakeholders here? As I pointed out already, it's the bureaucracy, the professors, all the commercial interests wanting in on the MIT pie, and an institutional leadership interested in all the powers that accrue to overseeing a larger endowment with a greater capital return.
How MIT's immediate neighborhood has developed into an unlivable office park is a vivid example of what I say.
The legal doctrine under which the MIT administration feels pruessure to do these things is called In Loco Parentis and its incarnation at MIT is particularly influenced by the death of Scott Krueger[1]. MIT has to at least appear[2] to be taking issues of student safety and the use of intoxicating substances seriously.
[1] http://news.mit.edu/1998/da-0923
[2] In the aftermath of a GHB overdose incident at Senior House's annual party Steer Roast in spring of 2008, there were rumblings that Steer Roast would be prohibited. I was part of a group working with the administration to allow Roast to continue. Rather than being just a CYA, The members of the administration whom I worked with appeared to genuinely and sincerely care about safety in this domain.
MIT doesn't have to act in loco parentis for anyone over the age of majority (18). Anyone over 18 is an adult, and making their own choices. This happens to be the baseline age for most college entrants.
I don't know what agreements are in place, if any, for younger students.
Several professors spoke out against President Hockfield's quickly formulated comments against Star. Patrick Winston, who received his BS, MS, and PhD at MIT before joining the faculty, is among them.
The problem with MIT is that while MIT students are well, MIT students, and MIT faculty are MIT faculty, MIT administrators are generic college administrators, hopping from school to school as they hunt chances at promotion.
This is especially true of the curricular administrators in the registrar's office, and S^3. You find a lot of folks in positions of authority who just don't get what it's like to be an undergraduate student at MIT.
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.
The demise of Senior House is emblematic of a larger shift on campuses across the US. Last year my own alma mater, Wesleyan University, closed down its countercultural house Eclectic, which had existed for a century. A few years ago Cal-Tech shuttered its countercultural dorm Ricketts. “If it were just Senior House I would be upset and sad,” says alumna Christine Corbett Moran, an astrophysicist and engineer who, after graduation, helped write the code for the encrypted chat app Signal. “But I really see it as a harbinger of MIT and other colleges homogenizing and corporatizing.”
Counterculture is a threat to the current liberal elite status quo. After the defeat of Hillary Clinton, her corporate cronies are trying to consolidate power and develop an army of mindless millennial drones.
Still, somehow I doubt SH is being shut down because "Clinton's corporate cronies" "consolidate power" by "cracking down" on cocaine-fueled "counter-cultural" threat to the "current liberal elite status quo".
I think on this issue we can take administration at their word. They prefer clean high-performing students to drug-using mediocre students.
Do I think that's a damn shameful way to frame the situation? Sure. But straight-shooting administrators who just simply don't care about counter-cultural values -- one way or the other -- seems like a infinitely more likely explanation than sinister political plot to undermine free-thinking individuals.
Don't ascribe to political conspiracy what can be explained by bean-counting and political indifference.
No not really. Have you gone to Senior House? There are plenty of communist ideals all over the walls. I'm sure plenty of Hilary supporters though I haven't been there this recent election
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.
So if that's it, this is just a numbers story. MIT is an extremely selective school. They're loathe to reject 92% of their applicants only to send people they accept to a dorm that increases by double digits the likelihood that they'll fail. The dorm is a support system for the colleges; the colleges are not support systems for the dorms. When that problem persists for years on end, eventually it becomes the administration's job to "solve" it with finality.
There's a story to write about how a relentless focus on academic performance starves out countercultural values, and probably another to write about how dispersing a 15% increase in failure-to-graduate-rate just hides the problem numerically.
But not as much of a story to write about intrigue and malfeasance at MIT.
If all that is true, my major critique would be that MIT themselves seemed unable to be adults about the whole thing. They should have just set a deadline and a specific performance metric, with a clear up-front warning that missing that metric would mean closing the dorm. No interviews, no notes to parents, no "cancelling the steer roast".
Thought 1: Correlation/causation. It's not clear if the house causes the higher likelihood of failure or if the folks who are more likely to fail are drawn to the house. I can see arguments for both.
Thought 2: I don't think Wired is trying to write a story about intrigue as much as using the Senior House story to illustrate the larger trend of universities becoming more homogenous.
Writing a story that says "Universities are getting boring. 3 universities closed their counter-culture houses in the past year. Here's some quotes from people" is going to be, frankly, boring to read. On the other hand, a story that says "3 universities closed their counter-culture houses in the past year. Here's the story of one of them" is going to be much more compelling. It makes the story more personal, and therefore easier to understand and relate to.
Right, but the same correlation/causation problem recurs for the "homogenizing" narrative if all that's really happening here is that administrations won't tolerate dorms freighted with double digit increases in dropout rates.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about this story. There does appear to be a misuse of survey information possibly gathered under false pretenses, The "corporatizion" angle is also bothersome. I'd note that the other "counterculture" dorm was closed down a number of years back when the building needed renovation and MIT determined the renovation didn't make sense. There's also been a broad crackdown on fraternities over the years.
That said, my sense from some continuing involvement with a couple different schools is that there's less self-regulation of activities in many living and other groups than there's been at various times in the past. (Binge drinking, etc.) It's hard for me to tell if Senior House just represents part of an ongoing crackdown or if it's a genuine response to worsening issues of academic performance and other activities. I suspect it's a bit of both.
> But not as much of a story to write about intrigue and malfeasance at MIT.
MIT is a big place with a lot of opinions about "what makes it MIT". The admins have one point of view. Sometimes that aligns with the current students and alums.
There was an element of cerebral creativity in Senior House that one might argue does not fit well in the corporate mold or play well to the numbers game Barnhart chose. It nevertheless strikes me as a societal loss to see it go away. To steal an analogy from the article: Tor will not make its Senior House creators rich, or bring in gobs of cash to the MIT endowment. So the numbers story tells us it's a pretty terrible return, and we should shut it down, but the real error is that my chosen monetary numbers don't tell the story.
I actually think that this points to the larger issue. We are seeing homogenization by numbers. It seems intuitive to me that counterculture groups absolutely will have worse aggregate numbers than conformist groups, particularly when graded pass/fail (in this case graduate/no graduate).
If you disallow people sorting themselves into groups where some have much higher drop-out rates than others, it becomes a de-facto ban on counterculture groups. To me that's almost more scary than the administration consciously setting themselves opposed to counterculture groups because it sets a goal that is much harder to fight.
To the extent that that's a story, the more important part of that story is happening long before dorm selection, in Sophomore and Junior year of high school. I think that is a big issue, in particular with securing access to opportunity for people in lower-income communities. But I don't think availability of counterculture dorms is a super important part of the story.
That sounds about right. Based on a few visits to campus and my old dorm, I can see positive and negative trends: There are a lot more women, which is very good. There is a greater emphasis on support and success rather than sink or swim. That's good. There are also signs of more conformity and solid evidence of less tolerance of "hacks" in the traditional MIT way: Roofs, tunnels, and other prohibited areas are seriously secured and alarmed, and campus police are armed even though Cambridge is thoroughly gentrified, even gilded in places like Kendall Sq. Rafael Reif's hiding the identities and protecting the people who tragically escalated the Aaron Swartz matter from a no-harm-no-foul trespassing case to a federal prosecution outright stinks.
Senior House had a decades-long record of problems and was in many ways a liability. Everybody knew this. There was no need to do anything in secret. It was a needlessly lousy approach and stinks of second-rate leadership.
I graduated from MIT 10 years ago and went to one of the last "cool" Steer Roasts my freshman year where the halls were inundated with drunk and drugged strangers invited randomly from the street even. Of course then later you find out some one or people got hurt but it's an afterthought to many who complain the school is infringing on their rights.
This "issue" around the culture at Senior house is a lot more pervasive than you imagine and to say the school has given them time is the understatement of the year. The issue really is the culture that freshman are inundated by every year. It's one thing to have this be practiced in your room or among your friends but the culture in the dorms at MIT tends to be much more in your face. One professor described such environments to actually be more conformist and that aligns with my experience.
I personally feel confident that the students can hold onto the good aspects of the culture through this transition. I don't think the school is obligated to perpetuate or support it either on their own property. I can't really speak for how they went about it thought because I wasn't following closely.
> the halls were inundated with drunk and drugged strangers invited randomly from the street
That's a big cultural shift. There used to be a term in local dialect for non-MIT people in the dorms: urchins. (even defined in HowToGAMIT a bazillion years ago, iirc.)
I wonder if that change was brought about gentrification of the area? (The bio building on Ames used to be a factory, eg.)
I think the only malfeasance is how MIT used the study results. Taking a study that you're told is anonymized but isn't in ways that you will perceive to be directly harmful to you is messed up.
A large amount of research is collected on undergrads, and for this research to be accurate there needs to be a certain amount of trust between students and the university. I could easily see this story skewing the results of any studies (especially any that involve drug use or other undesirable behavior) in the future because of this violation.
I agree, of course, but would root-cause that down to the simpler, less lurid observation that the "survey" was itself infantilizing. MIT should have set objective metrics for the performance of students in the dorm, communicated them clearly, and made decisions quickly and dispassionately based on the results.
The rumor that I heard was that the student leadership of Senior House was dealing cocaine to students, and was using their clout to do so (for example, by advertising to mailing lists of Senior House residents). Which might have been fine normally, but this was during this turnaround process, which made MIT administration think that people were not taking this seriously. At one point MIT thought it would be fine to allow only those students who were taking the turnaround seriously, and sort of recreate the image of Senior House. Then Senior House alumni started internet harassment campaigns against specific people in the MIT administration, so MIT decided to just shut the dorm down.
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.
My undergrad randomly assigned students to freshman-only housing. 100% turnover in every freshman dorm every year. It took 36 hours from student arrival to the first hospitalization. Was that "dorm culture"?
You're exactly right about bureaucracy - as long as your standards are sufficiently overbroad, all the actual decision-making happens via selective enforcement.
I suppose the best question to ask of a story like this isn't "why?" but "why now?"
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....
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 have to disagree specifically with health care costs... the way the system is structured, with the costs involved, decent healthcare for most sub 26 year olds would break them financially... because the healthcare system is broken, not because the young people are. As a parent with a 17 and 19 yr old, I'm happy I will be allowed to continue my children with decent healthcare at a time when the system is so screwed up, and they will be primarily students in university and grad school.
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.
But the greater narrative pushed by wired have pretty much everything to with the great battle for the future of America’s history.
It's not about Trump vs Clinton it's about yesterdays failed rebels failing to let at new generation emerge as it's own thing and that's universal for both parties, and not even confined to just America. Whatever senior house was 10 years ago it cannot be 10 years from now because the world aren’t static so maybe it had to go to give way for something new the alumni have no right or reason to expect to be a part of.
We are turning into a society of loud senior citizens and subdued youths because of the reverence today’s youth are told to have for the communities that were created by past generations despite those communities failure to tackle that many big problems head on and that’s a dangerous thing to have because it cannot lead to anything but cultural stagnation.
Thats not what happened here. Current and former students are overwhelmingly united on the same side. The administration misused some voluntary response data as a pretext for shutting down a community that they didn't like. There are no loud senior citizens subduing youths unless you mean the administration. Au contraire, the students and alums were fighting together to prevent Senior House from being replaced with a generic dorm with no community spaces that will lead to cultural stagnation and isolation.
Do you see how you're still trying to force a narrative that has nothing to do with the reality of the situation?
If we have to force a political analogy, a better example would be if veterans and current military personnel banded together to prevent closing an important base that had produced tons of great ideas, high ranking generals, etc. because the Trump administration decided there was too much risky homosexual activity and partying going on.
As an aside, your blanket classification of MIT alums as "yesterdays failed rebels" is comically inaccurate. Lawrence Summers lived in this dorm for crying out loud.
the reality of the situation is that a dorm was closed by the people whom it's financial viability depended on because it never grew into something fully independent, nor into something that the people running MIT's budget found especially useful.
Already there we have a narrative break, sure a lot of people who's identity have gotten mixed with a particular community feels they lost something but that don’t mean society did. And the fact that one of the people responsible for tanking the US economy lived there don’t actually change anything.
This debate is classic and symptomatic for any kind of bohemian community, who always have a super important pedigree until it have to be quantified at which point the super important narrative kind of falls apart, and this is not a isolated case every city on every continent have it's Senior House.
The problem is that your asking people to fight for something utterly insignificant(more of a local petting zoo then a civil rights landmark) as if it had an impact on the battles worth fighting which it frankly don’t.
Yes there is a trend on the way towards the institutions to stop financing and sanctioning counter culture but again what good is a counter culture that only exists when it's sanctioned and financed by the establishment?
Its a college dorm. It was never meant to be "fully independent" and there is absolutely nothing wrong with a dorm being "sanctioned and financed by the establishment." MIT made a decision to cover their own asses in case anything went wrong in the dorm as they've been doing since famous hazing / suicide cases happened in other dorms / living groups fifteen years ago. More college-bound eccentric geniuses will end up considering other institutions of learning if MIT's campus becomes devoid of spaces that they find inspiring, creative, fun, etc. Luckily MIT still has some solid living groups despite this but removing two undergraduate dorms in quick succession will definitely have an effect.
Society doesn't know enough to judge whether they lost something. That doesn't really matter ultimately as MIT is the one that made the decision. If MIT could have gotten everyone in the dorm to sign a legal waiver then they would have been more than happy to let it stay.
You say the people running MIT's budget didn't find it "especially useful". It is a dorm that houses people. Its not like the option is to have no dorm. They still need a dorm. It was a specific cultural purge to shield legal liability.
How could Steer Roast be cancelled? Based on my understanding of the article, Steer Roast is a 3 day party. Can't the students (18+ adults) just rent a campground nearby and have it there?
Steer Roast was one of the more insane events on campus. Certainly you can throw a party anywhere, but student-organized parties probably wouldn't happen far away; There is barely enough time for logistics while handling MIT's course load.
Apocryphal story: In 1987, MIT made Playboy's list of Party Schools. [1] Sounds crazy, right? The backstory: The writer/reviewer was in Boston, and somebody convinced him to check out Steer Roast. Around day #2 of party, the writer asked somebody was it like this all the time? To which the resident said yes, interpreting "this" to mean Steer Roast as opposed to the more general party atmosphere of MIT.
Edit: I should mention that the actual picnic (Sat afternoon) is an event that alums/families/profs used to show up. Eg. Doc Edgerton was a regular, and really seemed to enjoy himself the years I saw him.
A former housemaster at Senior House, Jay Keyser, wrote a memoir (Mens et Mania), in which about a quarter of the book was about how much he loathed the place. While reading it, I imagined a version of Animal House where Dean Wormer had to live with the Deltas and try to do research while a toga party was going on around him.
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.
When I first heard about it, I noticed that McCormick had the highest GPA and SH the lowest. So I helpfully suggested moving all the SH residents to McCormick and are there any other campus problems you would like me to solve this morning? Only a few were amused.
Considering that students are more akin to customers than worker bees, the obvious questions to that line of reasoning are:
What is the MIT administration attempting to measure by using graduation rate as a metric?
Why has the administration chosen to optimize for graduation rate?
And the more general elephant in the room:
What does/should a research university in general, and MIT in particular, seek to accomplish? And How does/should the administration classify emergent behaviors of the large group of people into helping/harming those ends?
"Citizen" might be the best analogy for students: Neither the pay-and-be-served attitude of consumers, nor the shut-up-and-work of labor. Instead, a sense of both empowerment as well as responsibility.
MIT tries to select students who will make it through MIT, and then get them through. If you get in, you have a 93% chance of graduating. That's an unusually high success rate for a serious engineering school.
(That may be the influence of Harvard, 97.5% graduation rate. It's hard to get into Harvard, but it's not hard to get through Harvard.)
There are lower tier engineering schools with huge drop-out rates. Cal Poly flunks out about half their engineering students. It's much easier to get in, but the first year is designed to get rid of the unqualified students. MIT is trying not to go there.
All of the exclusive universities sell degrees for a fortune. Their delivery rate is their graduation rate.
The admissions process is gamed to hell by wealthy people and the graduation rate is still 95%+. Hmmm...
The whole thing is a scam where the truly deserving students are a cover for the majority.
It's the same reason they don't worry about giving away online courses. Education isn't their product. Their product is a piece of paper that ensures your child won't be serving burgers alongside Will Hunting.
I would alternatively suggest not treating groups of people, particularly young people, like monolithic machines.
"Put them on notice": who is "them"? Senior House, like any dorm, is a bunch of people living together. Some were even assigned there without choosing it (I was one). Each resident has no responsibility for the behavior of others. Why should someone following the rules (and they are the huge majority) have any obligation to MIT to "DO something"?
It is easy and understandable to think of groups as monolithic. But that doesn't make it fair.
MIT administration, on the other hand, acts as a single official entity. And it is the one doling out collective punishment.
To be clear, I'm not saying do nothing when problems come up. But there are plenty of established mechanisms to deal with the individuals creating those problems (Committee on Discipline, Committee on Academic Performance, Campus/Cambridge Police, ...). While not perfect, they are mature, they have known rules, they apply to everyone the same.
Unlike what happened at Senior House, apparently, at least you're allowed to have a faculty representative with you when you appear before COD or CAP.
It's at least a yellow flag for me when it becomes necessary to create new procedures and enlist new powers to special case a problem.
It's not like they expelled everyone who had been living there. They just have to find new housing. Presumably nothing is going on their record about it. I know they don't like it, understandably, but as punishment goes it seems pretty light.
I don't completely disagree with you, though. It does seem like more effort could have been made to find out which individuals were causing the problems and focus on those.
One bit of useful context is that MIT has way more culture and persistent identity tied to its dorms than most schools.
My undergrad shuttled students to a new building every year, and wouldn't let anyone stay in dorms over the summer. "Dorm culture" was basically nonexistent. At MIT, students have significant choice of dorm, can stay in one place for four years, and can stay on campus in their room over summers. There's a lot of culture embedded in choice of housing.
I'm not sure I would call this collective punishment, but it's got something in common with evicting everyone in an apartment building because some of them are noisy. Certainly it's much closer to that than it would be at most colleges.
Thanks for bringing this point up. Without that context, this issue could seem fairly trivial. I would go as far as to say that living group culture (e.g, which side of campus, living group, floor, and even finer grain) is the strongest social bond that most MIT undergrads establish.
While students participate is a wide variety of activities and intramural sports, living groups are where you come home to. If you didn't fit in the rest of your life, your living group is usually your best bet to make bonds in a pretty brutal academic environment.
To be fair, that's also probably why MIT is cranked up about places like Senior House and Bexley (whole other story) if it gets the (simplistic) idea that bad forces might lead the innocent astray.
> To be fair, that's also probably why MIT is cranked up about places like Senior House and Bexley (whole other story) if it gets the (simplistic) idea that bad forces might lead the innocent astray.
Also a good point. I don't think the MIT administration is so clueless that they assume this behavior will disappear when the dorm closes. I suspect they're hoping to change behavior at the margins - that somebody who might have tried acid because so many of their suitemates in Senior did will make a different choice.
I think the decision is a mistake regardless, and I think the reasons given are generally pretty small-minded. Does MIT of all places really need to juice its graduation rate? Are the students who don't graduate being harmed, or just taking a different path? But I can certainly see why MIT might take aim at dorms as a means to changing culture.
Well, that's certainly a suitably nerdy analogy :-)
I never lived in Senior House, but I hung out with friends there quite a bit. From what I've read, I've tentatively, and sadly, come to the same conclusion: there were persistent problems with the culture of the dorm, and the administration probably had no choice.
If the articles' portrayal is accurate, I have doubts that there ever was a problem.
Yes, the rate of drop-outs was 3x the average (20% vs 7%). But it appears as if this dormitory draws its population from a subset of freshman that already starts out different than the average population.
College admission should make a few bets on misfits with potential here and there. And if the mark of MIT's drug-infested den is that only 80% of them graduate MIT, it seems like they're still doing ok in absolute terms.
The only real problem is that Wall Street has apparently infected MIT, and they're taking the love-yourself (and keel over with heart failure) drug.
In an interview around the announcement of the plan, we got this exchange:
Tech interviewer: Do you, was there any sort of control for, sort of, selection bias. Maybe that people less likely to graduate are more likely to select Senior House? For example, maybe like, students who ranked Senior House first but didn’t get in, how they did?
Chancellor Barnhart: Yeah, oh, that’s actually a really good way to think about that. So, that’s something we’ll look at.
This was after the initial decision to bar freshmen came through.
In the analogy, I think it's a mistake to compare to spinning a server up and down - that's a low-consequence, low-cost decision. Maybe compare to decommissioning a physical server and buying a new one. I think before throwing away the high-latency server, it'd be worthwhile to make very sure that the problem wasn't about some process running on the server that would simply carry over to the new machine.
I'm worried that MIT has decided to solve a problem by shuffling 'hardware' without any clear evidence on whether that's the layer with the problem. Every university has populations with higher and lower graduation rates, and we know that Senior House attracted a lot of groups who might have been at high risk (e.g. people with financial difficulties or substance abuse issues). If those people just end up in other dorms with no more support, this might become a costly change (financially and culturally) with no real benefits.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadThere is a list of some notable Senior House alumni on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Massachusetts_Instit...
Woz and Jobs started out in business selling blue boxes to illegal bookmakers. Imagine a world in which they had been subject to the modern surveillance panopticon and the sort of prosecutorial malice that was levelled against Aaron Swartz. RMS slept under his desk in the AI lab for many years and is notoriously bad at politicking, political correctness and basic etiquette. Would a young RMS survive the administrative culture of modern academia?
Steve Jobs graduated high school with 2.65 GPA. How many opportunities are there today for someone with a 2.65 GPA?
Just as many as there used to be, it's just never been easy. Actually I thought about it some more, and there are actually probably more opportunities today than before with the internet and the democratization of knowledge.
> Woz and Jobs started out in business selling blue boxes to illegal bookmakers.
> Imagine a world in which they had been subject to the modern surveillance panopticon and the sort of prosecutorial malice that was levelled against Aaron Swartz.
I think you're looking at it wrong, Woz and Jobs started selling niche items directly to a small group of customers, that still exists today, they just wouldn't be selling blue boxes, maybe it'd be an interesting SaSS today.
You're completely missing GPs point, which is specifically about politics. Talking about an "interesting SaSS" is a red herring.
In fact, I would be disappointed if it was meant to be about politics because it'd come across as an attempt to shoehorn politics into a discussion about much broader social trends
This sort of thing is a prime example of politics, the failure to recognise that is harmful to your understanding.
Politics isnt just voting for congress-critters and presidents.
I also don't particularly appreciate the tone of your replies and especially statements like "the failure to recognise that is harmful to your understanding", which come across as somewhat condescending and less about seeking a proper conversation than about attempting to lecture.
So I won't be replying further to this thread.
I've met him at a couple of raves back in the 1990s back when he was basically wandering around the rave scene. My impression: brilliant guy, but incredibly eccentric.
I don't know much more about him beyond Wiki articles etc., but apparently he has had a bit of a tough time employment wise, due to a combination of his phone fraud convictions and his eccentric personality. This despite his heavy tie-in to early Apple history, and a fairly strong coding resume. Then again, from what I saw, his personality is not the type that would embrace Standard Corporate to begin with, I'm sure. But said personality means he never got rewarded much for what he did. If I remember right, he actually had to crowdfund for some medical issues recently. I think its fair to say at any rate that his talent potential ended up being underutilized.
You are right that it's possible that there are more opportunities for these sort of weirdos, but in order for that to exist, there has to be a space for the small corporation that is more willing to give eccentricity space. One of the dangers of corporate consolidation is exactly this: large corporations are probably more likely to exclude people with mild criminal records because checklists, and they are less likely to give space to people that don't fit into corporate cultures. Consolidation tends to kill innovation; perhaps this is one of the ways.
Likewise, from a university perspective, it won't matter as much if Big University kills off culture that "doesn't fit in" if there are small universities that welcome the eccentric weirdo. However, if only the Big University Degree matters in life, then it's also entirely possible for the eccentric but brilliant weirdos will end up being outside the system. Maybe they will form their own collective and create something new. The alternative is the Draper like scenario where one more just drifts.
I don't know what Elon Musk's GPA was, I don't think anybody cares.
I don't see a trend towards conformity...in the real world.
Bexley closed four years ago for repairs, and was demolished with no plans to open a new dorm as a continuation. This seems unpleasantly relevant.
Otherwise why have so many Administrators, or need to hire more Administrators if there is not enough to do?
Artist/bohemian collectives across the US harbor these same kinds of people as well.
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.
There's also http://3564020356.org/ (Actually I misremembered this one - you gain access by reading an intro to crypto and then answering a question about it. As I recall you get additional access by solving other, more challenging tests)
More and more, college is selecting for a certain kind of personality while weeding out those outside of the norm.
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.
The dude wrote EMACS, GNU, GCC and the GPL license. He more or less single-handedly invented the concept of Free software. If RMS isn't a genius, then I don't know who is.
Yes, Jobs and Gates can't even compare to him.
The core code of Unix will live on long past the current incarnation of Windows.
Gates is a ruthless business man and thats the only reason his name is larger in your mind. His most striking quote was about how you give Windows licenses for free to Africa so they get addicted and have to keep buying it even though they can't afford it and Unix is free due to familiarity. Meanwhile RMS labored quietly to build a better world.
Meanwhile due to Gates we're stuck with "worse is better": https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
I actually have much higher hopes for technology allowing those greatest minds to be pushed forward than before.
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.
The result is that even the non-academic stuff those students have done has an academic target.
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.
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...
Can you really blame them when the alternative is college campuses burning because they invited a speaker who was committing wrongthing and wrongspeak?
This is something that has been demanded by a growing percentage of the student body over the last two decades. The schools are giving the students what they want.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are calls to return to the 'in loco parentis' days where schools had much more control over the discipline of their students - all in the name of safety, of course.
its like you where kicked out of your US high school and not allowed to graduate
I'm not saying MIT is in the right here, but if you want parents or others completely disengaged, then you need to not engage them financially.
He asked for money. One of the terms for my giving him money was to know whether or not my money is having the desired outcome. If he didn't like that he could get money elsewhere on far worse terms. Welcome to adulthood!
For the sake of argument, take the university at their word: that they believed there was an unsafe environment fostered in this dorm, and that the students were markedly underperforming their peers. As such the University is selling a defective good to the parents, and they are trying to remediate it.
That sounds quite reasonable to me.
However, are they infantilizing the students and preventing them from growing in maturity and judgement in the process?
Yep, they sure are.
The problem US universities are finding themselves in, is when parents are ponying up small fortunes, they are not interested in preserving 'freedom to fail' which is necessary for growth.
The university is selling a possibly "defective" good to the student. The parents are gifting money to the student to pay for that service.
I don't know how this works legally, but I do know (because I asked) that this isn't considered a gift according to the IRS.
Maybe they were right to contact parents. I've never been to Senior House and don't know the ins and outs what went on there. But as someone who has worked in ResLife and been responsible for kids, I can say without a doubt MIT took the nuclear option. At most colleges, you can be put on academic probation, and even kicked out without the university notifying your parents directly.
If I'd taken this further, and asked him to disclose his personal conduct, and he agreed, would you have a problem?
Keep in mind I actually don't care about his personal conduct. I care whether or not he's taking school seriously, and I am using grades as a proxy for that. I take the money seriously, and if he's not going to take the benefits the money is purchasing seriously, then I have the option to stop paying for it.
The problem I see is that this is a slippery slope. Suppose your kid gets into two schools -- say a cheap(er) in-state school and MIT. Either way you're paying for it, and you know the kid will get a perfectly good CS education at either school. However, having MIT on their resume will be worth something, as will the relationships they make. Perhaps it's even worth the huge additional expense, assuming they take full advantage of it. At what point does the additional value beyond the curriculum, which the school is happy to charge for, give me some interest (both intellectual and legal) in how all of that is going?
I ask not to argue that MIT is correct here, but to try and illustrate some of the complexity. I am not an ethicist but it seems like an interesting question to me.
However, this is mostly orthogonal to the issue that most university students are adults, and the university has no business sharing their personal information on their behalf (without their explicit consent of course).
I was dirt poor, and similarly had a family member help with my college when, even after a full tuition scholarship and some government grants there was still a lot of bills left to pay. It wasn't a large sum that he paid, but he never grilled me about my status. His position on it was "You are a smart kid and you've earned this opportunity"
Meanwhile, years earlier my sister squandered large amounts of money partying at a supremely expensive private school. We couldn't exactly afford it in the first place, and attempting to exert influence over long distances caused huge amounts of stress on our family.
Do be careful. To some people, the worry of disappointing or angering the one funding the opportunity can be overwhelming. Having positive and supportive, yet frank discussions with your nephew would really help him, especially if/when he fails. But being overbearing could in fact make his college experience less positive and beneficial.
Hope I wasn't too condescending with my overly long rant
From what I hear, a lot of parents have your attitude. They call up the school asking about grades and performance with the attitude that they deserve to know because they're paying for it. They inevitably get shot down, because not only is giving out this information to paying parents not what's expected, but it's explicitly illegal to do so under federal law without the student's written permission.
My "attitude" is that I told him I would pay for his school if I got to see his grades. Pretty simple. I'd be happy not to pay and not see his grades -- I'm not his parent, and for my own kids (while this is further into the future), if they can pay for school without my help then I don't think I should know anything they don't want to tell me.
Your agreement with your nephew is defensible and enforceable. You fund his education, he provides you with his grades. That makes sense.
But that agreement is between you and your nephew, not you and your nephew's school. So much is that the case that at some state schools (I know it's at least true at Illinois, where we just sent our son), they won't allow students to sign FERPA consent forms for release of grades on days when parents are likely to be present.
Why? If you're paying your spouses' medical bills, do you expect to be included on personal, private conversations between the spouse and his or her doctor? (Spoiler: you need the spouse's consent for that!)
No one is forcing parents (or you) to pay for someone else's college, but as adults, the university should manage the students' autonomy by not sending "nastygrams" home.
Why do you think you're entitled to invading your nephew's privacy simply because you gave him some money?
Also, while your straw man was amusing, it's also mostly wrong. The rules regarding PHI disclosure from covered entities to spouses is fairly complex -- not to mention non-spouses. You might be interested in this link:
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/488/does-hip...
So, at least in the 2000s, it wasn't established at my particular State University to contact parents.
https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/7/26/1398179/-18-year-ol...
And technically a person is in their 21st year of life in the year leading up to their 21st birthday.
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.
For reasons that I've not figured out despite decades of study, even though all of the socioeconomic pressures which inspired the changes that came with the Industrial Revolution have gone away, we preserve their practices. And appear to want to extend and expand them, further removing the young from society, etc. The thing that worries me is that there are critical periods of brain development. And brain development occurs exclusively as a result of experience. Remove experience, and brain development halts. And miss the critical period, and that development can never occur regardless of attempts to force it to occur.
Without knowing it, we may have passed a critical period. This is just a personal guess. But it seems 2 or 3 generations ago, parents who were really not entirely mature began raising their own children. As raising children is a very challenging task, demanding a great deal of maturity from a person (refusing to let your personal desire to have the child depend upon you and need you override your duty to turn the child into an adult as early as possible), this results in them over-sheltering their child, depriving the following generation of necessary experiences for brain development, and it continues.
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.
Don't do what we say? Go to "time-out". Slowly have your freedoms taken away from you until you're compliant.
See these officers? They are here to make sure you listen to every one of our ridiculous requirements.
Better tuck in that shirt and only wear a brown or black belt! Want to dye your hair? Individuality is distracting and will not be tolerated!
Students may wear sweaters or hats for a donation
Administrators can get you permission to use the cool new AV equipment to record the demo for some project thing you're doing.
Janitors work just as well in a pinch though.
WHile college freshmen get babied like this, others the same goddamn age are going into combat. Large numbers of them.
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.
Helicopter parents [1] and freely available student loans subsidized/backed by the federal government. The child/parent are the consumers of the service, but the negative externalities are dumped onto society.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_parent
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/paularmstrongtech/2017/06/19/th...
[0.1] (archive/no adblock) http://archive.is/RxqQg
[0.2] (archive/no adblock) http://archive.is/uJmoD
[1] https://www.inc.com/anna-hensel/the-1-incredibly-detailed-jo...
People will always find a reason to be miserable, so now that almost every major issue has been taken care of we have increasingly small things being brought up like "microaggressions".
Isn't the sensitivity of the next generation a positive, and not a negative? I wish my father had emotional awareness instead of being part of a generation that customarily hid or pushed emotions away. The march of social progress is a good thing, not a bad thing - or, perhaps, do you believe that through progress in the modern world we are all not entitled to mental security as well as personal security?
Western civilization is far from perfect but I think it's preferable to any alternative I've seen.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cy2XPPUXcAACD43.jpg
edit: As far as what people are entitled to, I feel I'm entitled to nothing, not even the air I breath, unless I'm willing to work for it or fight for it. Most of the human rights we take for granted are only there because our ancestors fought to defend them. If you sit on your ass and feel entitled to something because you exist don't be surprised when someone takes it away.
Maybe we should be a bit cautions about what lessons we draw from a an even we cannot even data correctly. As there is a lot more to the story that most introduction textbooks have time to cover, or that the empire as such collapsed as the capital of Constantinople was not sacked until the 4th crusade in the 12th century, and not by barbarians but Christian knights.
When it comes to history we have a tendency to invent the lesson we want to learn and then go look for a way to spin history to fit an existing narrative rather then work the other way around, and let history teach us a lesson.
It was not so much that the barbarians beat the Roman army as it was that the Roman army had been outsourced to a bunch of former barbarian tribes while everyone rich fled east that led to Rome being looted and taxed by the barbarians(but not exactly sacked) And that was centuries after Rome gave up all pretence of being an republic with many deities. The fact that the barbarians weren’t exactly pagan but Christians of a slightly different denomination is also left of of most textbooks.
> 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?
If parents are paying the bills, that's between them and their kids. They can demand to see grades/results or cut funding. But if you'd teaching students they are adults-then that responsibility falls to the families in the situations where they are dependent on them for funding.
One of my housemates hated his parents and funded everything himself taking pc support jobs at a print shop and car dealership.
That felt right.
My kid's college calling me about other people's behavior in a dorm? That feels very, very wrong.
It’s straight up illegal.
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.
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?
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.
A college education is much more than just graduating and getting a piece of paper. The metrics for measuring progress are really fucked up IMO.
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.
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 don't know if this question has been investigated.
One should hope that this will be thoroughly investigated, lest we set precedent on an issue that leads to so many worrisome open doors for abuse in the future. These are not medical professionals bound by an oath and consequences; this feels like where I draw the line.
From that link, it seems there's evidence MIT did not actually anonymize the data -- i.e., used non-aggregated data and violated explicit guarantees of anonymity, so my analysis below seems irrelevant.
---
Data aggregation / anonymization and the ease of de-aggregating reveals a major loophole in current US health privacy regulation (HIPAA). Once aggregated, personal health information (PHI) loses most protection.
So, here if the mental health team aggregated the data, that is 'ok'. Then sharing that aggregated data with administrators is also 'ok' because it's no longer PHI. The exception would be if the disclosures of the mental health department to its patients prohibited this use of the data.
I don't see a crime here, other than moral.
Anecdote: I have sat across the table from a health data purveyor whose entire business model is buying aggregated data from multiple sources, de-anonymizing and monetizing it (for ad-based stuff and risk-scoring for life insurance and key man insurance provider type customers). That was a few years ago and I believe there has been some guidance that would make that business model much more difficult today if it was ever legal. We didn't get past the discussion phase based on that model's risk to our patient-centric model.
I'm a lawyer in healthcare turned dev, but readily admit not to be a health law expert. Most of my work was corporate and transactional, so please take my opinion above with a healthy dose of salt. And if I'm wrong or have woefully outdated info, please correct!
My guess is that, like so many universities in this country, the administration is not answerable to students or even alumni.
I'm not saying the MIT Corp hasn't made mistakes, but I've never questioned their motives for doing the right thing.
How MIT's immediate neighborhood has developed into an unlivable office park is a vivid example of what I say.
[1] http://news.mit.edu/1998/da-0923 [2] In the aftermath of a GHB overdose incident at Senior House's annual party Steer Roast in spring of 2008, there were rumblings that Steer Roast would be prohibited. I was part of a group working with the administration to allow Roast to continue. Rather than being just a CYA, The members of the administration whom I worked with appeared to genuinely and sincerely care about safety in this domain.
I don't know what agreements are in place, if any, for younger students.
The demise of Senior House is emblematic of a larger shift on campuses across the US. Last year my own alma mater, Wesleyan University, closed down its countercultural house Eclectic, which had existed for a century. A few years ago Cal-Tech shuttered its countercultural dorm Ricketts. “If it were just Senior House I would be upset and sad,” says alumna Christine Corbett Moran, an astrophysicist and engineer who, after graduation, helped write the code for the encrypted chat app Signal. “But I really see it as a harbinger of MIT and other colleges homogenizing and corporatizing.”
The most meaningful change comes from within.
There's a reason dictatorships spend a lot of effort trying to stamp out internal enemies.
I think on this issue we can take administration at their word. They prefer clean high-performing students to drug-using mediocre students.
Do I think that's a damn shameful way to frame the situation? Sure. But straight-shooting administrators who just simply don't care about counter-cultural values -- one way or the other -- seems like a infinitely more likely explanation than sinister political plot to undermine free-thinking individuals.
Don't ascribe to political conspiracy what can be explained by bean-counting and political indifference.
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.
There's a story to write about how a relentless focus on academic performance starves out countercultural values, and probably another to write about how dispersing a 15% increase in failure-to-graduate-rate just hides the problem numerically.
But not as much of a story to write about intrigue and malfeasance at MIT.
If all that is true, my major critique would be that MIT themselves seemed unable to be adults about the whole thing. They should have just set a deadline and a specific performance metric, with a clear up-front warning that missing that metric would mean closing the dorm. No interviews, no notes to parents, no "cancelling the steer roast".
Thought 2: I don't think Wired is trying to write a story about intrigue as much as using the Senior House story to illustrate the larger trend of universities becoming more homogenous.
Writing a story that says "Universities are getting boring. 3 universities closed their counter-culture houses in the past year. Here's some quotes from people" is going to be, frankly, boring to read. On the other hand, a story that says "3 universities closed their counter-culture houses in the past year. Here's the story of one of them" is going to be much more compelling. It makes the story more personal, and therefore easier to understand and relate to.
That said, my sense from some continuing involvement with a couple different schools is that there's less self-regulation of activities in many living and other groups than there's been at various times in the past. (Binge drinking, etc.) It's hard for me to tell if Senior House just represents part of an ongoing crackdown or if it's a genuine response to worsening issues of academic performance and other activities. I suspect it's a bit of both.
There are certainly those who view it that way.
> But not as much of a story to write about intrigue and malfeasance at MIT.
MIT is a big place with a lot of opinions about "what makes it MIT". The admins have one point of view. Sometimes that aligns with the current students and alums.
There was an element of cerebral creativity in Senior House that one might argue does not fit well in the corporate mold or play well to the numbers game Barnhart chose. It nevertheless strikes me as a societal loss to see it go away. To steal an analogy from the article: Tor will not make its Senior House creators rich, or bring in gobs of cash to the MIT endowment. So the numbers story tells us it's a pretty terrible return, and we should shut it down, but the real error is that my chosen monetary numbers don't tell the story.
I actually think that this points to the larger issue. We are seeing homogenization by numbers. It seems intuitive to me that counterculture groups absolutely will have worse aggregate numbers than conformist groups, particularly when graded pass/fail (in this case graduate/no graduate).
If you disallow people sorting themselves into groups where some have much higher drop-out rates than others, it becomes a de-facto ban on counterculture groups. To me that's almost more scary than the administration consciously setting themselves opposed to counterculture groups because it sets a goal that is much harder to fight.
Senior House had a decades-long record of problems and was in many ways a liability. Everybody knew this. There was no need to do anything in secret. It was a needlessly lousy approach and stinks of second-rate leadership.
This "issue" around the culture at Senior house is a lot more pervasive than you imagine and to say the school has given them time is the understatement of the year. The issue really is the culture that freshman are inundated by every year. It's one thing to have this be practiced in your room or among your friends but the culture in the dorms at MIT tends to be much more in your face. One professor described such environments to actually be more conformist and that aligns with my experience.
I personally feel confident that the students can hold onto the good aspects of the culture through this transition. I don't think the school is obligated to perpetuate or support it either on their own property. I can't really speak for how they went about it thought because I wasn't following closely.
That's a big cultural shift. There used to be a term in local dialect for non-MIT people in the dorms: urchins. (even defined in HowToGAMIT a bazillion years ago, iirc.)
I wonder if that change was brought about gentrification of the area? (The bio building on Ames used to be a factory, eg.)
A large amount of research is collected on undergrads, and for this research to be accurate there needs to be a certain amount of trust between students and the university. I could easily see this story skewing the results of any studies (especially any that involve drug use or other undesirable behavior) in the future because of this violation.
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.
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.
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.
You're exactly right about bureaucracy - as long as your standards are sufficiently overbroad, all the actual decision-making happens via selective enforcement.
I suppose the best question to ask of a story like this isn't "why?" but "why now?"
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....
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.
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.
It's not about Trump vs Clinton it's about yesterdays failed rebels failing to let at new generation emerge as it's own thing and that's universal for both parties, and not even confined to just America. Whatever senior house was 10 years ago it cannot be 10 years from now because the world aren’t static so maybe it had to go to give way for something new the alumni have no right or reason to expect to be a part of.
We are turning into a society of loud senior citizens and subdued youths because of the reverence today’s youth are told to have for the communities that were created by past generations despite those communities failure to tackle that many big problems head on and that’s a dangerous thing to have because it cannot lead to anything but cultural stagnation.
Do you see how you're still trying to force a narrative that has nothing to do with the reality of the situation?
If we have to force a political analogy, a better example would be if veterans and current military personnel banded together to prevent closing an important base that had produced tons of great ideas, high ranking generals, etc. because the Trump administration decided there was too much risky homosexual activity and partying going on.
As an aside, your blanket classification of MIT alums as "yesterdays failed rebels" is comically inaccurate. Lawrence Summers lived in this dorm for crying out loud.
Already there we have a narrative break, sure a lot of people who's identity have gotten mixed with a particular community feels they lost something but that don’t mean society did. And the fact that one of the people responsible for tanking the US economy lived there don’t actually change anything.
This debate is classic and symptomatic for any kind of bohemian community, who always have a super important pedigree until it have to be quantified at which point the super important narrative kind of falls apart, and this is not a isolated case every city on every continent have it's Senior House.
The problem is that your asking people to fight for something utterly insignificant(more of a local petting zoo then a civil rights landmark) as if it had an impact on the battles worth fighting which it frankly don’t.
Yes there is a trend on the way towards the institutions to stop financing and sanctioning counter culture but again what good is a counter culture that only exists when it's sanctioned and financed by the establishment?
Society doesn't know enough to judge whether they lost something. That doesn't really matter ultimately as MIT is the one that made the decision. If MIT could have gotten everyone in the dorm to sign a legal waiver then they would have been more than happy to let it stay.
You say the people running MIT's budget didn't find it "especially useful". It is a dorm that houses people. Its not like the option is to have no dorm. They still need a dorm. It was a specific cultural purge to shield legal liability.
Apocryphal story: In 1987, MIT made Playboy's list of Party Schools. [1] Sounds crazy, right? The backstory: The writer/reviewer was in Boston, and somebody convinced him to check out Steer Roast. Around day #2 of party, the writer asked somebody was it like this all the time? To which the resident said yes, interpreting "this" to mean Steer Roast as opposed to the more general party atmosphere of MIT.
[1] http://www.fiestafrog.com/playboys-1987-top-40-party-college...
Edit: I should mention that the actual picnic (Sat afternoon) is an event that alums/families/profs used to show up. Eg. Doc Edgerton was a regular, and really seemed to enjoy himself the years I saw him.
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.
PS. Former EC guy here.
PPS. Sorry for the inside baseball.
What is the MIT administration attempting to measure by using graduation rate as a metric?
Why has the administration chosen to optimize for graduation rate?
And the more general elephant in the room:
What does/should a research university in general, and MIT in particular, seek to accomplish? And How does/should the administration classify emergent behaviors of the large group of people into helping/harming those ends?
(That may be the influence of Harvard, 97.5% graduation rate. It's hard to get into Harvard, but it's not hard to get through Harvard.)
There are lower tier engineering schools with huge drop-out rates. Cal Poly flunks out about half their engineering students. It's much easier to get in, but the first year is designed to get rid of the unqualified students. MIT is trying not to go there.
The admissions process is gamed to hell by wealthy people and the graduation rate is still 95%+. Hmmm...
The whole thing is a scam where the truly deserving students are a cover for the majority.
It's the same reason they don't worry about giving away online courses. Education isn't their product. Their product is a piece of paper that ensures your child won't be serving burgers alongside Will Hunting.
"Put them on notice": who is "them"? Senior House, like any dorm, is a bunch of people living together. Some were even assigned there without choosing it (I was one). Each resident has no responsibility for the behavior of others. Why should someone following the rules (and they are the huge majority) have any obligation to MIT to "DO something"?
It is easy and understandable to think of groups as monolithic. But that doesn't make it fair.
MIT administration, on the other hand, acts as a single official entity. And it is the one doling out collective punishment.
To be clear, I'm not saying do nothing when problems come up. But there are plenty of established mechanisms to deal with the individuals creating those problems (Committee on Discipline, Committee on Academic Performance, Campus/Cambridge Police, ...). While not perfect, they are mature, they have known rules, they apply to everyone the same.
Unlike what happened at Senior House, apparently, at least you're allowed to have a faculty representative with you when you appear before COD or CAP.
It's at least a yellow flag for me when it becomes necessary to create new procedures and enlist new powers to special case a problem.
It's not like they expelled everyone who had been living there. They just have to find new housing. Presumably nothing is going on their record about it. I know they don't like it, understandably, but as punishment goes it seems pretty light.
I don't completely disagree with you, though. It does seem like more effort could have been made to find out which individuals were causing the problems and focus on those.
My undergrad shuttled students to a new building every year, and wouldn't let anyone stay in dorms over the summer. "Dorm culture" was basically nonexistent. At MIT, students have significant choice of dorm, can stay in one place for four years, and can stay on campus in their room over summers. There's a lot of culture embedded in choice of housing.
I'm not sure I would call this collective punishment, but it's got something in common with evicting everyone in an apartment building because some of them are noisy. Certainly it's much closer to that than it would be at most colleges.
While students participate is a wide variety of activities and intramural sports, living groups are where you come home to. If you didn't fit in the rest of your life, your living group is usually your best bet to make bonds in a pretty brutal academic environment.
To be fair, that's also probably why MIT is cranked up about places like Senior House and Bexley (whole other story) if it gets the (simplistic) idea that bad forces might lead the innocent astray.
Also a good point. I don't think the MIT administration is so clueless that they assume this behavior will disappear when the dorm closes. I suspect they're hoping to change behavior at the margins - that somebody who might have tried acid because so many of their suitemates in Senior did will make a different choice.
I think the decision is a mistake regardless, and I think the reasons given are generally pretty small-minded. Does MIT of all places really need to juice its graduation rate? Are the students who don't graduate being harmed, or just taking a different path? But I can certainly see why MIT might take aim at dorms as a means to changing culture.
I never lived in Senior House, but I hung out with friends there quite a bit. From what I've read, I've tentatively, and sadly, come to the same conclusion: there were persistent problems with the culture of the dorm, and the administration probably had no choice.
Yes, the rate of drop-outs was 3x the average (20% vs 7%). But it appears as if this dormitory draws its population from a subset of freshman that already starts out different than the average population.
College admission should make a few bets on misfits with potential here and there. And if the mark of MIT's drug-infested den is that only 80% of them graduate MIT, it seems like they're still doing ok in absolute terms.
The only real problem is that Wall Street has apparently infected MIT, and they're taking the love-yourself (and keel over with heart failure) drug.
Tech interviewer: Do you, was there any sort of control for, sort of, selection bias. Maybe that people less likely to graduate are more likely to select Senior House? For example, maybe like, students who ranked Senior House first but didn’t get in, how they did?
Chancellor Barnhart: Yeah, oh, that’s actually a really good way to think about that. So, that’s something we’ll look at.
This was after the initial decision to bar freshmen came through.
In the analogy, I think it's a mistake to compare to spinning a server up and down - that's a low-consequence, low-cost decision. Maybe compare to decommissioning a physical server and buying a new one. I think before throwing away the high-latency server, it'd be worthwhile to make very sure that the problem wasn't about some process running on the server that would simply carry over to the new machine.
I'm worried that MIT has decided to solve a problem by shuffling 'hardware' without any clear evidence on whether that's the layer with the problem. Every university has populations with higher and lower graduation rates, and we know that Senior House attracted a lot of groups who might have been at high risk (e.g. people with financial difficulties or substance abuse issues). If those people just end up in other dorms with no more support, this might become a costly change (financially and culturally) with no real benefits.
(Not that I know anything about it.)
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.
There's a reason I always told people to seek help off campus.