15 ms·

MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges

225 points by MrsPeaches 9y ago

jdietrich 9y ago
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.
- tyingq 9y ago
  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. There is a list of some notable Senior House alumni on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology_undergraduate_dormitories#Senior_House https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Massachusetts_Instit...
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    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?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - BoorishBears 9y ago
      > 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.
      - andrewflnr 9y ago
        > I think you're looking at it wrong... You're completely missing GPs point, which is specifically about politics. Talking about an "interesting SaSS" is a red herring.
        BoorishBears 9y ago
        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
        throwaway2048 9y ago
        What exactly do you beleive politics to be? 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.
        BoorishBears 9y ago
        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. So I won't be replying further to this thread.
    - TYPE_FASTER 9y ago
      Facebook was started by somebody who followed bg's path of dropping out of Harvard. 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.
      - seriff 9y ago
        Those are significantly rare outliers and not the reality for the vast majority of people.
  - JustAnotherPat 9y ago
    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.
    - Bartweiss 9y ago
      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.
- breadmaster 9y ago
  Hey, Administrators need to feel like they're doing something.
  - daemin 9y ago
    Basically like Politicians, have to be seen doing something, even if it's completely useless or gets reversed soon after. Otherwise why have so many Administrators, or need to hire more Administrators if there is not enough to do?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mtreis86 9y ago
  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.
  - dmartinez 9y ago
    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.
- indigochill 9y ago
  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.
  - wolco 9y ago
    Would love to learn more about those communities that require a hack of the invite system to get in.
    - indigochill 9y ago
      https://www.hackthebox.eu/en https://www.hackthebox.eu/en is one There's also http://3564020356.org/ 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)
      - totony 9y ago
        I tried hackthebox.eu... https://i.imgur.com/Axq0GPu.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Axq0GPu.jpg
        Veelox 9y ago
        I think that is what you are suppose to see.
- pc86 9y ago
  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.
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    >RMS? really? 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.
    - AlphaSite 9y ago
      I’m fairly certain OSS predates him by a reasonable margin.
      - dublinben 9y ago
        You'd be wrong. The Free Software movement predates the "Open Source" movement by 15 years or so.
        eropple 9y ago
        The BSD license predates the GPLv1.
        throwaway2048 9y ago
        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.
      - wrs 9y ago
        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.
- cynisme 9y ago
  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.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  The good thing is that today you don't need an education to educate yourself dorm rooms aren't the only places where weirdos han out. I actually have much higher hopes for technology allowing those greatest minds to be pushed forward than before.
- rb808 9y ago
  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.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Neither MIT nor Stanford are Ivies.
    - Bartweiss 9y ago
      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.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  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.
Invictus0 9y ago
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.
ilamont 9y ago
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. 0. https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/31/russia-hopes-the-skolkovo-tech-city-will-produce-its-great-leap-forward/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/31/russia-hopes-the-skolkovo-... 1. https://boingboing.net/2017/03/09/making-and-breaking-hardware.html https://boingboing.net/2017/03/09/making-and-breaking-hardwa... 2. http://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/star.html 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-story-mit-and-aaron-swartz/YvJZ5P6VHaPJusReuaN7SI/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/29/the-inside-stor...
otakucode 9y ago
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.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  That argument makes sense as they mailed the kids parents; when universities are all about recognizing the students as adults.
  - mejin 9y ago
    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).
    - sulam 9y ago
      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. 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.
      - mejin 9y ago
        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?
        sulam 9y ago
CptMauli 9y ago
> five minutes later they started emailing our parents—and > 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?
- cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
  The parents are paying the bills.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    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.
  - ryanx435 9y ago
    This probably isn't true: students loans exist
  - tptacek 9y ago
    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.
    - AlphaSite 9y ago
      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. It’s straight up illegal.
phkahler 9y ago
>> 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?
- existencebox 9y ago
  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.
  - pm90 9y ago
    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.
mhalle 9y ago
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.
- Thriptic 9y ago
  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.
  - mhalle 9y ago
    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.
    - 9y ago
selimthegrim 9y ago
Ricketts wasn't shuttered, just put on notice.
tptacek 9y ago
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.
- austenallred 9y ago
  The story is the administration was looking for a reason to shut it down.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Right. Why?
    - g-clef 9y ago
      From the article: 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.”
    - JustAnotherPat 9y ago
      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.
      - throwawayjava 9y ago
        Yes, because Senior House was full of Trump voters /s
        9y ago
forgottenpass 9y ago
Barnhart told the student newspaper The Tech that “we received highly credible reports of unsafe and illegal behavior in Senior House.” 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.
- walshemj 9y ago
  ah the old "Elf and safety ruse" beloved of beurocrats every where
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  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?"
dkarl 9y ago
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....
program_whiz 9y ago
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. http://news.salliemae.com/files/doc_library/file/HowAmericaPaysforCollege2016FNL.pdf 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.
- peapicker 9y ago
  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.
Stranger43 9y ago
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.
- mrgordon 9y ago
  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.
  - Stranger43 9y ago
    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.
mejin 9y ago
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?
- jpmattia 9y ago
  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. [1] http://www.fiestafrog.com/playboys-1987-top-40-party-colleges/ 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.
liveoneggs 9y ago
the plot of Animal House with an unhappy ending?
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  More like Real Genius.
- rglovejoy 9y ago
  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.
deleted 9y ago
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anon853941 9y ago
Senior House alum here... 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.
- jpmattia 9y ago
  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. PS. Former EC guy here. PPS. Sorry for the inside baseball.
  - mrgordon 9y ago
    Yeah lets move everyone to McCormick where all the suicides happen. Oh wait...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- forgottenpass 9y ago
  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?
  - matt4077 9y ago
    "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.
skybrian 9y ago
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? (Not that I know anything about it.)
hexis 9y ago
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.
throwawaySH555 9y ago
(Throw-away for obvious reasons). 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.
kchoudhu 9y ago
Remember kids: the administration doesn't care if you blow your brains out -- they just care that you don't do it on campus. There's a reason I always told people to seek help off campus.
patmcguire 9y ago
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.

225 points by MrsPeaches 9y ago

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.

tyingq 9y ago
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. There is a list of some notable Senior House alumni on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology_undergraduate_dormitories#Senior_House https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Massachusetts_Instit...
- jdietrich 9y ago
  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?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - BoorishBears 9y ago
    > 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.
    - andrewflnr 9y ago
      > I think you're looking at it wrong... You're completely missing GPs point, which is specifically about politics. Talking about an "interesting SaSS" is a red herring.
      - BoorishBears 9y ago
        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
        throwaway2048 9y ago
        What exactly do you beleive politics to be? 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.
        BoorishBears 9y ago
        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. So I won't be replying further to this thread.
  - TYPE_FASTER 9y ago
    Facebook was started by somebody who followed bg's path of dropping out of Harvard. 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.
    - seriff 9y ago
      Those are significantly rare outliers and not the reality for the vast majority of people.
- JustAnotherPat 9y ago
  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.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    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.
breadmaster 9y ago
Hey, Administrators need to feel like they're doing something.
- daemin 9y ago
  Basically like Politicians, have to be seen doing something, even if it's completely useless or gets reversed soon after. Otherwise why have so many Administrators, or need to hire more Administrators if there is not enough to do?
deleted 9y ago
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mtreis86 9y ago
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.
- dmartinez 9y ago
  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.
indigochill 9y ago
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.
- wolco 9y ago
  Would love to learn more about those communities that require a hack of the invite system to get in.
  - indigochill 9y ago
    https://www.hackthebox.eu/en https://www.hackthebox.eu/en is one There's also http://3564020356.org/ 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)
    - totony 9y ago
      I tried hackthebox.eu... https://i.imgur.com/Axq0GPu.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Axq0GPu.jpg
      - Veelox 9y ago
        I think that is what you are suppose to see.
pc86 9y ago
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.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  >RMS? really? 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.
  - AlphaSite 9y ago
    I’m fairly certain OSS predates him by a reasonable margin.
    - dublinben 9y ago
      You'd be wrong. The Free Software movement predates the "Open Source" movement by 15 years or so.
      - eropple 9y ago
        The BSD license predates the GPLv1.
        throwaway2048 9y ago
        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.
    - wrs 9y ago
      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.
cynisme 9y ago
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.
ThomPete 9y ago
The good thing is that today you don't need an education to educate yourself dorm rooms aren't the only places where weirdos han out. I actually have much higher hopes for technology allowing those greatest minds to be pushed forward than before.
rb808 9y ago
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.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Neither MIT nor Stanford are Ivies.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    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.
dsr_ 9y ago
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.

Invictus0 9y ago

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.

ilamont 9y ago

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. 0. https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/31/russia-hopes-the-skolkovo-tech-city-will-produce-its-great-leap-forward/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/31/russia-hopes-the-skolkovo-... 1. https://boingboing.net/2017/03/09/making-and-breaking-hardware.html https://boingboing.net/2017/03/09/making-and-breaking-hardwa... 2. http://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/star.html 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-story-mit-and-aaron-swartz/YvJZ5P6VHaPJusReuaN7SI/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/29/the-inside-stor...

otakucode 9y ago

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.

djsumdog 9y ago
That argument makes sense as they mailed the kids parents; when universities are all about recognizing the students as adults.
- mejin 9y ago
  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).
  - sulam 9y ago
    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. 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.
    - mejin 9y ago
      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?
      - sulam 9y ago

CptMauli 9y ago

> five minutes later they started emailing our parents—and > 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?

cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
The parents are paying the bills.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  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.
- ryanx435 9y ago
  This probably isn't true: students loans exist
- tptacek 9y ago
  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.
  - AlphaSite 9y ago
    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. It’s straight up illegal.

phkahler 9y ago

>> 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?

existencebox 9y ago
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.
- pm90 9y ago
  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.

mhalle 9y ago

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.

Thriptic 9y ago
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.
- mhalle 9y ago
  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.
  - 9y ago

selimthegrim 9y ago

Ricketts wasn't shuttered, just put on notice.

tptacek 9y ago

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.

austenallred 9y ago
The story is the administration was looking for a reason to shut it down.
- tptacek 9y ago
  Right. Why?
  - g-clef 9y ago
    From the article: 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.”
  - JustAnotherPat 9y ago
    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.
    - throwawayjava 9y ago
      Yes, because Senior House was full of Trump voters /s
      - 9y ago

forgottenpass 9y ago

Barnhart told the student newspaper The Tech that “we received highly credible reports of unsafe and illegal behavior in Senior House.” 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.

walshemj 9y ago
ah the old "Elf and safety ruse" beloved of beurocrats every where
Bartweiss 9y ago
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?"

dkarl 9y ago

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....

program_whiz 9y ago

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. http://news.salliemae.com/files/doc_library/file/HowAmericaPaysforCollege2016FNL.pdf 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.

peapicker 9y ago
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.

Stranger43 9y ago

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.

mrgordon 9y ago
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.
- Stranger43 9y ago
  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.

mejin 9y ago

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?

jpmattia 9y ago
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. [1] http://www.fiestafrog.com/playboys-1987-top-40-party-colleges/ 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.

liveoneggs 9y ago

the plot of Animal House with an unhappy ending?

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
More like Real Genius.
rglovejoy 9y ago
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.

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anon853941 9y ago

Senior House alum here... 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.

jpmattia 9y ago
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. PS. Former EC guy here. PPS. Sorry for the inside baseball.
- mrgordon 9y ago
  Yeah lets move everyone to McCormick where all the suicides happen. Oh wait...
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forgottenpass 9y ago
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?
- matt4077 9y ago
  "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.

skybrian 9y ago

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? (Not that I know anything about it.)

hexis 9y ago

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.

throwawaySH555 9y ago

(Throw-away for obvious reasons). 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.

kchoudhu 9y ago

Remember kids: the administration doesn't care if you blow your brains out -- they just care that you don't do it on campus. There's a reason I always told people to seek help off campus.

patmcguire 9y ago

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.