9 ms·

Senior House at MIT Dies, and a Crisis Blooms at Colleges (2017)

112 points by aj7 8y ago

api 8y ago
Behind a very thin veil of social liberalism, we are in fact living in a profoundly conservative and conventional era. It's like this weird bohemian puritanism, or the 50s with Tinder. The big difference is the religion. Back then it was nationalism and Christian puritanism. Now it's the worship of GDP and corporatism. These things are cyclic. In any case this is too bad. The first time I went to Boston my first stop after the airport was to be dragged to Senior House. Seemed like something out of a movie.
- xfitm3 8y ago
  I don't follow your point exactly but we both agree that the closure of the Senior House is too bad.
  - api 8y ago
    I was talking about the social trend it represents, but it was kind of an incomplete thought.
- nbhuik 8y ago
  > Behind a very thin veil of social liberalism, we are in fact living in a profoundly conservative and conventional era. Maybe. Or it might be that social liberalism, at least in its current form, isn't that nice. Social liberalism compared to something like social democracy, or even various forms of "capitalism", takes the position that favorable rules are what grants you personal freedom. But it seemingly turns out that a lot of the things we care about exists in the practical realm. Having spent some, but fortunately not a lot of, time in oppressive countries it is always disappointing when you get back to the west and realize that overall it is still remarkably similar.
  - inawarminister 8y ago
    humans are humans, anywhere in the world.
  - swingline-747 8y ago
    Nawh. The change started in the 1980's but came into its own in the 1990's: people whom call themselves liberal behaving illiberally with a tiny vocal fringe telling the greater constituency what to do and what's acceptable: political correctness, crybully outrage tantrums and shouting-down opponents rather than making better arguments. It's not a left/right thing (partisanship is dumb) but an identity crisis meets identity politics/victimhood celebration thing. Let the Milo's and the other nutters speak. It's like any book that a group wants to burn or ban is probably a book worth reading. It shows integrity to be consistent and have thicker skin. Also, faculty, staff and parents have to set better examples and boundaries by not put up with crazy, unreasonableness or ridiculousness... extending adolescence longer and wrapping kids in a bubblewrap, reality-unmoored, spoiled artificial life is a fundamental disservice that's going to hit them harder when they get out in the real world.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Religion is simply a selection of social values that individuals hold to be above evidence, critique, or question. We've replaced one religion with another. As the article states: "..the administration allege that those norms were exactly the problem in Senior House—that the strong culture in the dorm, far from being welcoming and supportive as the students contend, had become toxic, a negatively reinforcing environment. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle." It's funny actually. Anywhere you see the word 'toxic' replace it with 'against wholesome family values' and we've simply traversed to another side the horse shoe. And this didn't start in the 80s. This all goes in an oddly regular 20 year cycle. The liberal 20s, conservative 40s, liberal 60s, conservative 80s, liberal 00s, and now we're headed into the 20s. And it's the exact same pattern over and over, it starts out great but then as the dominant position reaches critical mass they appproach insanity and we start a trend in the other direction again reaching it's peak after about 10 years before it too ends up headed into insanity and we reverse once again. Well at least everybody can look forward to the 2030s!
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    Except Americans gain freedoms over time such as civil rights for minorities, ability to choose abortion, gay marriage, environmental rights, etc. It’s not just bouncing back and forth, there is progress being made, unfortunately some keep trying to reverse it.
    - yspeak 8y ago
      Abortion only liberates men from responsibility. https://bit.ly/2puUc4J https://bit.ly/2puUc4J
  - homonculus1 8y ago
    "toxic" is the new "problematic" is the new "offensive" is the new "sinful".
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  Worship of the GOP and corporatism? Give me a break. At least neoliberalism or late stage capitalism make sense. The GOP are in such a position of power in the universities that there isn’t a single science, physical or social l, humanity, or other field of study where there are more Republicans than Democrats. As to corporatism the US has much, much higher turnover in high cap companies than France or Germany. I think it’s akso substantially higher than the U.K. That points at something more akin to business friendliness/capitalism/creative destruction than fascist or ordo-liberal corporatism.
  - trurl 8y ago
    There is perhaps a correlation between worshiping the GOP and worshiping the GDP, but they are two very different things.
  - barbecue_sauce 8y ago
    You may want to put your glasses on and reread the post you're replying to.
- throwobvs 8y ago
  >Behind a very thin veil of social liberalism, we are in fact living in a profoundly conservative and conventional era. It's like this weird bohemian puritanism, or the 50s with Tinder. The big difference is the religion. Back then it was nationalism and Christian puritanism. OK you know what, you big bigot, "safe", behind your keyboard, I wish I could have a copy of every word you've said or typed, even "anonymously" or to a romantic partner who was "okay with it" - so that I could take it to your HR department and get you fired. Matter of fact I'm going to look through your post history now to see if I can put two and two together and figure out how to dox you. Views like yours have NO PLACE in society.. Expect to hear from HR by Monday afternoon. Just kidding. But I gave you a scare didn't I? The reason I gave you a scare is that the sentiment I've just expressed is PERFECTLY REASONABLE IN 2018. Perfectly reasonable people can behave this way with full support from the media. I'm not conservative, because to me conservative means keeping slaves and a lack of progress. But this isn't progress.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  The current crop of leaders grew up through the 1960s and 1970s, and seem absolutely determined to prevent that era from ever happening again.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Reminds me of the one hilarious thing about the USSR and when you look into their histories. They were basically exactly as uptight as the US despite lack of any religious motivations, convinced that the west was out to corrupt the youth just as the US was convinced the same about teenagers. They abhorred homosexuality despite a lack of religious basis for it and no real costs - it would save the state money to have their 'confirmed bachelor's living together openly. Really it is an authoritarianism thing over any other professed values. As generations of teenagers have told anyone who will listen what they really can't tolerate is anyone openly deviating from the norms - not as a result of any actual harm but because they fear and hate anyone who questions them. A non-authoritaran system doesn't give a fuck about trivial things and has a live and let live attitude.
- purplezooey 8y ago
  Great point but put on your helmet. Here comes the right wing comment avalanche.
wegs 8y ago
Insider here: The sort of shit which happened here -- with "confidential" student data misused -- is rampant at MIT. Survey map to dorms isn't even the tip of the iceberg. My guess is that at some point, we'll have a Watergate-grade scandal, but I've been wrong about these things before (Equifax is trading above where it was January 2017).
- Thriptic 8y ago
  I've personally never heard of any other incident quite like this happening at MIT, at least not in the last 7 years or so when I was on campus; could you provide any other examples? The only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is psych data being used to send people home on forced mental health leave. The handling of this incident made me very angry, principally because it's so hard to get MIT students to seek mental health counseling because they are very fearful of retaliation for doing so. The misuse of the mental health survey totally validated their concerns and severely damaged the fragile trust that various orgs student health orgs unaffiliated with this incident at MIT had worked hard to build with students. Also, this article does a poor job of explaining the recent history leading up to the closing of Senior House, which better explains why the closing of the house was viewed as a total attack on alternative culture. MIT didn't just close senior house, they also knocked down Bexley, another alternative dorm, a few years earlier under somewhat dubious circumstances (suddenly refusing to repair the dorm post flooding iirc?) without proper student input, and I believe there was controversy about a third alternative dorm as well. The students' interpretation of this was that the MIT administration was fundamentally targeting alternative culture and were not negotiating in good faith during any of these closures.
  - wegs2 8y ago
    The incidents I know about haven't been publicly exposed. If I spoke about them in specifics, the Institute would retaliate. One I can bring up -- since I don't think it exposes me -- is email. In essence, if you use an institutional email account (or keep personal data on Athena or otherwise) you can presume administration will read it without permission. If you get into conflict with the Institute, personal emails can come up and be used against you. MIT has a lot of good people, but "unaffiliated" is a difficult word to use here. The problems come from the very top of the administration. Just because a particular mental health organization is good and built up trust doesn't mean they have the power to not get overruled by the Central Administration later. Until and unless the Institute institutes some real checks and balances, students absolutely should go outside for mental health.
pcl 8y ago
Mods: please add [2017] to the title
denzil_correa 8y ago
> MIT’s dismantling of Senior House is part of a nationwide trend on college campuses, a shift that places a premium on safety, orderliness, and minimal bad publicity above all. Experts trace the roots of this shift to the 1980s. Since then, college tuition has skyrocketed and with it the competition for students who can afford it. Parents footing the bill are paying a lot more attention. The world has become more litigious and more corporate. One of things - amongst many others - which the 1980s keep on giving.
- ReallyAnonymous 8y ago
  I'm a Duke '91 graduate and had several sigma chi friends and witnessed this game many times. Don't know if it still takes place now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwmpLZHKF4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwmpLZHKF4Y
shuntress 8y ago
Kill the past and learn from autopsy. MIT should understand that tradition leads to loss of knowledge. If a party dorm that draws pride from pit roasts and drunken mud wrestling is worth having, it will be re-made.
- __blockcipher__ 8y ago
  I’m not an MIT grad but that sounds like downplaying the unique culture of SH imo.
- Veen 8y ago
  Tradition is a form of knowledge, and one that is not so easily reconstituted once it's been destroyed.
ghaff 8y ago
Pretty much everyone I know who has some first-hand experience with the situation with Senior House agrees that 1.) MIT handled the situation quite badly but 2.) There were issues and no outcome was going to leave everyone involved satisfied. As someone who has stayed peripherally involved with a couple of colleges over the years, I'd also make a general observation. Do at least US colleges have more rules and regulations than they used to? Absolutely. At the same time, there also seems to be less self-regulation than often happened in the past related to alcohol and other things. I'm certainly not suggesting that people were saints in the past but there seemed to have been fewer of the sort of incidents that involved hospitals and other serious consequences.
- dantheman 8y ago
  I think in the past it was harder to hear about incidents happening and there were less people overall. I doubt that there were less incidents per person.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    There's definitely some of that. A lot of things that would have just been ignored or glossed over a few decades ago now tend to lead to (for both better and worse) investigations and news stories. That said, I do think that, to at least some degree, rules have tended to replace self-regulation.
  - slededit 8y ago
    If it were common I’m sure I would have seen it though... it’s not like most of us weren’t in uni for at least 4 years.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  The culture has changed in ways that I don’t understand. I was an adjunct for a class a few years ago. I was shocked/mystified that parents actually travelled in to see some project presentations, and were fussy about seating and picture taking.
  - 8y ago
jancsika 8y ago
> Campus lore has it that Senior House residents used to burn kittens in the house furnace. Ok, I'll bite... Let's say I sent a message to some FSF/Gnu info mailing list that reads, "Hi. Someone on HN has said that the AGPL is a viral license and can end up infecting non-AGPL-licensed software running on the same machine. I've never heard this before. Is this true?" Past experience tells me that someone at FSF/Gnu sends me back an email either full of relevant information, or with relevant and helpful links where I can read valuable information. And I don't hold FSF/Gnu to be some bastion of social grace. Now, let's say I walked into Senior House after hearing this myth, and I say, "Hi. Someone on campus is saying that Senior House used to burn kittens in the furnace. Is this true?" What would have been the likely response to me in this case? A social response with relevant and useful information like Gnu/FSF, or an anti-social response?
- dfee 8y ago
  I’d hope that if some random person walked up to their dorm and said something anti-social along the lines of: > “Hi. Someone on campus is saying that Senior House used to burn kittens in the furnace. Is this true?” You’d indeed get an adequately anti-social response. If you were to follow it up with: > “Past experience tells me that someone at FSF/Gnu sends me back an email either full of relevant information, or with relevant and helpful links where I can read valuable information.” I would hope that you’d get an increasingly anti-social response. Why would you think that some 21 year old seniors, let alone anyone over the age of 14, feel the obligation to respond to random bystanders’ questions of lore? For the FSF it’s an academic mission they’re trying to bring into the world and spread. I’d say that doesn’t appear to be the case with Senior House (and that’s OK).
- marssaxman 8y ago
  A question that ridiculous and impertinent would deserve an answer equally ridiculous and unhelpful. One particularly beneficial "social response" would be to mess with the questioner as hard as possible.
  - haus2001 8y ago
    "... and, sadly, the 3 to 4 months for the kitten to grow was ultimately what doomed Bonsai Kitten's chances of being the most successful startup out of Senior House." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten
todd8 8y ago
Something dramatic started to happen in the late 60's at US colleges. Student demonstrations over the Vietnam War were raging across the country in 1968, 1969, and 1970. MIT, like other schools, found itself with a student body and faculty largely unhappy with the status quo[1]. I was a first year student there in 1969. It was the cusp of a philosophical sea change taking place on campuses fueled by the Civil Rights and Black Power movement[2], the anti-Vietnam War movement, the hippy/free-love movement[3], feminism[4], the birth control pill, and a new wave of recreational hallucinogens. Marxism seemed like a real alternative to capitalism and was actively promoted by student groups (e.g. the SDS , Students for a Democratic Society). I believe that somewhere around 1969, MIT adjusted it's admission parameters to admit a more conservative, perhaps less disruptive, set of students. In my experience, the students admitted before 1969 were more open to radical ideas and the entrants it admitted in subsequent years, while I was there, seemed a bit less likely to espouse or act in such ways. The older students were more concerned with the Vietnam War and being drafted. They schemed to stay in school, getting advanced degrees, and many of these with the more radical views ended up as post-docs and eventually, the elder faculty at universities today. The students that followed me were spared the existential threat of the draft, it ended in 1971. I lived off campus and my MIT girlfriend moved into Senior house in 1971 or 1972 so I spent a lot of time there. The year before, she lived in the woman's dorm where most of the women on campus lived. At the time, few women attended MIT and the woman's dorm, McCormick Hall, was a modern, traditional dorm for women. It had a check-in desk for guests, and guests were expected to be escorted throughout the dorm, just like almost all women's dorms at other colleges. Senior House was completely different, and I was quite surprised to see that they had co-ed bathrooms! MIT is a great university, and I felt like this was a wondrous time at MIT: big ideas were discussed and debated openly in a safe atmosphere where differing views could be held. Sadly, it doesn't appear to me that university life is like that anymore. In my view, MIT has an admirable mission, to advance science and engineering for all humanity; how much should it manage it's students and their lives to best pursue this goal? I'm no sociologist, so its probably best to take my random recollections with a grain of salt. [1] http://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2016/7/8/v7rxigo0aw4it8niy6k4szbm4yiq2i http://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2016/7/8/v7rxigo0aw4it8... [2] https://www.thoughtco.com/civil-rights-movement-timeline-from-1965-to-1969-45431 https://www.thoughtco.com/civil-rights-movement-timeline-fro... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture_of_the_1960s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture_of_the_1960s [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism
selimthegrim 8y ago
There was an incident at Caltech recently where a student was told to take down an sign that read “Impeach” (in jest about the house/frat he lived in) because “political speech is forbidden in the dorms”. He was allowed to keep it eventually with posting an addendum saying “This is my own personal opinion, not Caltech’s”
- cuboidGoat 8y ago
  “political speech is forbidden in the dorms” That sounds a bit political. When the supervisor said this, were they inside or outside of the dorms?
- tzs 8y ago
  They may still be sensitive from the Nixon incident. In 1973 some students from Dabney Hovse hung a large "Impeach Nixon" sign on Millikan library (the tallest building on campus). This upset the founder/President of a major oil company, who cancelled a planned $1 million donation to Caltech. It also upset the Dabney family, which Dabney Hovse was named for. They disowned it. I'm not quite sure how you disown a house that is named after you, but I'd guess it includes stopping any ongoing charitable giving to the house or the school it is part of. That "Impeach Nixon" sign was quite unusual for Caltech. Students just really don't have time for such things, because the workload is large and intense. The only known organized act of public protest there before that was in early 1968, when Caltech students went to NBC's studious in Burbank to protest the cancellation of Star Trek.
  - jonjacky 8y ago
    When I was at Caltech, students organized a day-long shutdown in Spring 1970 to protest the Vietnam war, prompted by Nixon's invasion of Cambodia. This was about the same time as the Kent State killings etc. Possible outcome of the Star Trek protest: Leonard Nimoy came to campus in Spring 1972 to campaign for George McGovern in the California primary.
danmg 8y ago
I stayed there in the summer for a conference during graduate school. Even in the week or so I was there, it felt like something between a hackerspace and the headquarters of a zine than some drab campus housing. There were people showing up to practice twirling flaming batons; there were sun workstations in ever nook; there were random late night bullshit sessions.
gumby 8y ago
I am continually (pleasantly) shocked how many interesting ex-MIT people I meet turned out to have lived at SH (at random times 1970s-2000s).. Even happened at a random party just last night.
proofofconcept 8y ago
>But groups like Senior House, which define themselves by being different, also run the risk of becoming highly conformist, Packer says. The punk rock movement is a particularly vivid example of this phenomenon. “They self-describe as being different, but from the outside they all look the same,” he says. They don't want to look different from each other; they want to look different from people like him. It's really not that complicated. Spinning that into alarmism against the idea countercultures in general like this guy does is just ridiculous, and there's absolutely no way he's doing so in good faith.
- draw_down 8y ago
  Yeah. People like to make this argument as if it’s somehow super profound, but it’s facile and silly. (This is not the first time I have seen it deployed in regard to punk specifically.) Most people want a community, most people want to be around others they relate to or have things in common with. Plus it by definition doesn’t allow for diversity within the subculture in question, so it ends up disregarding that diversity to whatever extent it exists, which is ironic given the point it’s trying to make. I dunno, it’s just very lazy thinking all around.
- jl2718 8y ago
  Why would anybody define themselves as different from someone else? That’s just giving that person control over yourself. Identifying yourself with your own positive affirmation is difficult and scary and maybe the most important thing you’ll ever do.
  - Redoubts 8y ago
    lol
cbHXBY1D 8y ago
This seems very familiar to me as a former resident of Cloyne Court Hotel, the largest and most radical of Berkeley Student Cooperative's houses. It was shut down in 2014 after the settlement of a civil lawsuit about an overdose that took place four years prior. Just like Senior House it was a "a proudly anarchic community of creative misfits and self-described outcasts" and just like Senior House it was shut down for sticking out. http://www.dailycal.org/2014/03/14/co-op-board-votes-convert-cloyne-court-substance-free-academic-theme-house/ http://www.dailycal.org/2014/03/14/co-op-board-votes-convert...
nartz 8y ago
Unfortunately, Senior House isn't alone in this. It actually started much earlier, with a systematic dismantling of fraternities which were somehow deemed problematic, many of which had been around for hundreds of years. The inflection point was generally attributed to the changing of the administration - which used to be more governed by professors and the like who might empathize with students, but eventually grew to be much more bureaucratic; at some point, certain individuals at the top decided to target the living groups they disagreed with. Senior house, being a place where outsiders gathered, and having a reputation of extremes, drugs, is just the latest casualty in the cleansing war against the more tolerated traditions of yore.

112 points by aj7 8y ago

api 8y ago

Behind a very thin veil of social liberalism, we are in fact living in a profoundly conservative and conventional era. It's like this weird bohemian puritanism, or the 50s with Tinder. The big difference is the religion. Back then it was nationalism and Christian puritanism. Now it's the worship of GDP and corporatism. These things are cyclic. In any case this is too bad. The first time I went to Boston my first stop after the airport was to be dragged to Senior House. Seemed like something out of a movie.

xfitm3 8y ago
I don't follow your point exactly but we both agree that the closure of the Senior House is too bad.
- api 8y ago
  I was talking about the social trend it represents, but it was kind of an incomplete thought.
nbhuik 8y ago
> Behind a very thin veil of social liberalism, we are in fact living in a profoundly conservative and conventional era. Maybe. Or it might be that social liberalism, at least in its current form, isn't that nice. Social liberalism compared to something like social democracy, or even various forms of "capitalism", takes the position that favorable rules are what grants you personal freedom. But it seemingly turns out that a lot of the things we care about exists in the practical realm. Having spent some, but fortunately not a lot of, time in oppressive countries it is always disappointing when you get back to the west and realize that overall it is still remarkably similar.
- inawarminister 8y ago
  humans are humans, anywhere in the world.
- swingline-747 8y ago
  Nawh. The change started in the 1980's but came into its own in the 1990's: people whom call themselves liberal behaving illiberally with a tiny vocal fringe telling the greater constituency what to do and what's acceptable: political correctness, crybully outrage tantrums and shouting-down opponents rather than making better arguments. It's not a left/right thing (partisanship is dumb) but an identity crisis meets identity politics/victimhood celebration thing. Let the Milo's and the other nutters speak. It's like any book that a group wants to burn or ban is probably a book worth reading. It shows integrity to be consistent and have thicker skin. Also, faculty, staff and parents have to set better examples and boundaries by not put up with crazy, unreasonableness or ridiculousness... extending adolescence longer and wrapping kids in a bubblewrap, reality-unmoored, spoiled artificial life is a fundamental disservice that's going to hit them harder when they get out in the real world.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Religion is simply a selection of social values that individuals hold to be above evidence, critique, or question. We've replaced one religion with another. As the article states: "..the administration allege that those norms were exactly the problem in Senior House—that the strong culture in the dorm, far from being welcoming and supportive as the students contend, had become toxic, a negatively reinforcing environment. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle." It's funny actually. Anywhere you see the word 'toxic' replace it with 'against wholesome family values' and we've simply traversed to another side the horse shoe. And this didn't start in the 80s. This all goes in an oddly regular 20 year cycle. The liberal 20s, conservative 40s, liberal 60s, conservative 80s, liberal 00s, and now we're headed into the 20s. And it's the exact same pattern over and over, it starts out great but then as the dominant position reaches critical mass they appproach insanity and we start a trend in the other direction again reaching it's peak after about 10 years before it too ends up headed into insanity and we reverse once again. Well at least everybody can look forward to the 2030s!
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  Except Americans gain freedoms over time such as civil rights for minorities, ability to choose abortion, gay marriage, environmental rights, etc. It’s not just bouncing back and forth, there is progress being made, unfortunately some keep trying to reverse it.
  - yspeak 8y ago
    Abortion only liberates men from responsibility. https://bit.ly/2puUc4J https://bit.ly/2puUc4J
- homonculus1 8y ago
  "toxic" is the new "problematic" is the new "offensive" is the new "sinful".
barry-cotter 8y ago
Worship of the GOP and corporatism? Give me a break. At least neoliberalism or late stage capitalism make sense. The GOP are in such a position of power in the universities that there isn’t a single science, physical or social l, humanity, or other field of study where there are more Republicans than Democrats. As to corporatism the US has much, much higher turnover in high cap companies than France or Germany. I think it’s akso substantially higher than the U.K. That points at something more akin to business friendliness/capitalism/creative destruction than fascist or ordo-liberal corporatism.
- trurl 8y ago
  There is perhaps a correlation between worshiping the GOP and worshiping the GDP, but they are two very different things.
- barbecue_sauce 8y ago
  You may want to put your glasses on and reread the post you're replying to.
throwobvs 8y ago
>Behind a very thin veil of social liberalism, we are in fact living in a profoundly conservative and conventional era. It's like this weird bohemian puritanism, or the 50s with Tinder. The big difference is the religion. Back then it was nationalism and Christian puritanism. OK you know what, you big bigot, "safe", behind your keyboard, I wish I could have a copy of every word you've said or typed, even "anonymously" or to a romantic partner who was "okay with it" - so that I could take it to your HR department and get you fired. Matter of fact I'm going to look through your post history now to see if I can put two and two together and figure out how to dox you. Views like yours have NO PLACE in society.. Expect to hear from HR by Monday afternoon. Just kidding. But I gave you a scare didn't I? The reason I gave you a scare is that the sentiment I've just expressed is PERFECTLY REASONABLE IN 2018. Perfectly reasonable people can behave this way with full support from the media. I'm not conservative, because to me conservative means keeping slaves and a lack of progress. But this isn't progress.
village-idiot 8y ago
The current crop of leaders grew up through the 1960s and 1970s, and seem absolutely determined to prevent that era from ever happening again.
Nasrudith 8y ago
Reminds me of the one hilarious thing about the USSR and when you look into their histories. They were basically exactly as uptight as the US despite lack of any religious motivations, convinced that the west was out to corrupt the youth just as the US was convinced the same about teenagers. They abhorred homosexuality despite a lack of religious basis for it and no real costs - it would save the state money to have their 'confirmed bachelor's living together openly. Really it is an authoritarianism thing over any other professed values. As generations of teenagers have told anyone who will listen what they really can't tolerate is anyone openly deviating from the norms - not as a result of any actual harm but because they fear and hate anyone who questions them. A non-authoritaran system doesn't give a fuck about trivial things and has a live and let live attitude.
purplezooey 8y ago
Great point but put on your helmet. Here comes the right wing comment avalanche.

wegs 8y ago

Insider here: The sort of shit which happened here -- with "confidential" student data misused -- is rampant at MIT. Survey map to dorms isn't even the tip of the iceberg. My guess is that at some point, we'll have a Watergate-grade scandal, but I've been wrong about these things before (Equifax is trading above where it was January 2017).

Thriptic 8y ago
I've personally never heard of any other incident quite like this happening at MIT, at least not in the last 7 years or so when I was on campus; could you provide any other examples? The only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is psych data being used to send people home on forced mental health leave. The handling of this incident made me very angry, principally because it's so hard to get MIT students to seek mental health counseling because they are very fearful of retaliation for doing so. The misuse of the mental health survey totally validated their concerns and severely damaged the fragile trust that various orgs student health orgs unaffiliated with this incident at MIT had worked hard to build with students. Also, this article does a poor job of explaining the recent history leading up to the closing of Senior House, which better explains why the closing of the house was viewed as a total attack on alternative culture. MIT didn't just close senior house, they also knocked down Bexley, another alternative dorm, a few years earlier under somewhat dubious circumstances (suddenly refusing to repair the dorm post flooding iirc?) without proper student input, and I believe there was controversy about a third alternative dorm as well. The students' interpretation of this was that the MIT administration was fundamentally targeting alternative culture and were not negotiating in good faith during any of these closures.
- wegs2 8y ago
  The incidents I know about haven't been publicly exposed. If I spoke about them in specifics, the Institute would retaliate. One I can bring up -- since I don't think it exposes me -- is email. In essence, if you use an institutional email account (or keep personal data on Athena or otherwise) you can presume administration will read it without permission. If you get into conflict with the Institute, personal emails can come up and be used against you. MIT has a lot of good people, but "unaffiliated" is a difficult word to use here. The problems come from the very top of the administration. Just because a particular mental health organization is good and built up trust doesn't mean they have the power to not get overruled by the Central Administration later. Until and unless the Institute institutes some real checks and balances, students absolutely should go outside for mental health.

pcl 8y ago

Mods: please add [2017] to the title

denzil_correa 8y ago

> MIT’s dismantling of Senior House is part of a nationwide trend on college campuses, a shift that places a premium on safety, orderliness, and minimal bad publicity above all. Experts trace the roots of this shift to the 1980s. Since then, college tuition has skyrocketed and with it the competition for students who can afford it. Parents footing the bill are paying a lot more attention. The world has become more litigious and more corporate. One of things - amongst many others - which the 1980s keep on giving.

ReallyAnonymous 8y ago
I'm a Duke '91 graduate and had several sigma chi friends and witnessed this game many times. Don't know if it still takes place now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwmpLZHKF4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwmpLZHKF4Y

shuntress 8y ago

Kill the past and learn from autopsy. MIT should understand that tradition leads to loss of knowledge. If a party dorm that draws pride from pit roasts and drunken mud wrestling is worth having, it will be re-made.

__blockcipher__ 8y ago
I’m not an MIT grad but that sounds like downplaying the unique culture of SH imo.
Veen 8y ago
Tradition is a form of knowledge, and one that is not so easily reconstituted once it's been destroyed.

ghaff 8y ago

Pretty much everyone I know who has some first-hand experience with the situation with Senior House agrees that 1.) MIT handled the situation quite badly but 2.) There were issues and no outcome was going to leave everyone involved satisfied. As someone who has stayed peripherally involved with a couple of colleges over the years, I'd also make a general observation. Do at least US colleges have more rules and regulations than they used to? Absolutely. At the same time, there also seems to be less self-regulation than often happened in the past related to alcohol and other things. I'm certainly not suggesting that people were saints in the past but there seemed to have been fewer of the sort of incidents that involved hospitals and other serious consequences.

dantheman 8y ago
I think in the past it was harder to hear about incidents happening and there were less people overall. I doubt that there were less incidents per person.
- ghaff 8y ago
  There's definitely some of that. A lot of things that would have just been ignored or glossed over a few decades ago now tend to lead to (for both better and worse) investigations and news stories. That said, I do think that, to at least some degree, rules have tended to replace self-regulation.
- slededit 8y ago
  If it were common I’m sure I would have seen it though... it’s not like most of us weren’t in uni for at least 4 years.
Spooky23 8y ago
The culture has changed in ways that I don’t understand. I was an adjunct for a class a few years ago. I was shocked/mystified that parents actually travelled in to see some project presentations, and were fussy about seating and picture taking.
- 8y ago

jancsika 8y ago

> Campus lore has it that Senior House residents used to burn kittens in the house furnace. Ok, I'll bite... Let's say I sent a message to some FSF/Gnu info mailing list that reads, "Hi. Someone on HN has said that the AGPL is a viral license and can end up infecting non-AGPL-licensed software running on the same machine. I've never heard this before. Is this true?" Past experience tells me that someone at FSF/Gnu sends me back an email either full of relevant information, or with relevant and helpful links where I can read valuable information. And I don't hold FSF/Gnu to be some bastion of social grace. Now, let's say I walked into Senior House after hearing this myth, and I say, "Hi. Someone on campus is saying that Senior House used to burn kittens in the furnace. Is this true?" What would have been the likely response to me in this case? A social response with relevant and useful information like Gnu/FSF, or an anti-social response?

dfee 8y ago
I’d hope that if some random person walked up to their dorm and said something anti-social along the lines of: > “Hi. Someone on campus is saying that Senior House used to burn kittens in the furnace. Is this true?” You’d indeed get an adequately anti-social response. If you were to follow it up with: > “Past experience tells me that someone at FSF/Gnu sends me back an email either full of relevant information, or with relevant and helpful links where I can read valuable information.” I would hope that you’d get an increasingly anti-social response. Why would you think that some 21 year old seniors, let alone anyone over the age of 14, feel the obligation to respond to random bystanders’ questions of lore? For the FSF it’s an academic mission they’re trying to bring into the world and spread. I’d say that doesn’t appear to be the case with Senior House (and that’s OK).
marssaxman 8y ago
A question that ridiculous and impertinent would deserve an answer equally ridiculous and unhelpful. One particularly beneficial "social response" would be to mess with the questioner as hard as possible.
- haus2001 8y ago
  "... and, sadly, the 3 to 4 months for the kitten to grow was ultimately what doomed Bonsai Kitten's chances of being the most successful startup out of Senior House." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten

todd8 8y ago

Something dramatic started to happen in the late 60's at US colleges. Student demonstrations over the Vietnam War were raging across the country in 1968, 1969, and 1970. MIT, like other schools, found itself with a student body and faculty largely unhappy with the status quo[1]. I was a first year student there in 1969. It was the cusp of a philosophical sea change taking place on campuses fueled by the Civil Rights and Black Power movement[2], the anti-Vietnam War movement, the hippy/free-love movement[3], feminism[4], the birth control pill, and a new wave of recreational hallucinogens. Marxism seemed like a real alternative to capitalism and was actively promoted by student groups (e.g. the SDS , Students for a Democratic Society). I believe that somewhere around 1969, MIT adjusted it's admission parameters to admit a more conservative, perhaps less disruptive, set of students. In my experience, the students admitted before 1969 were more open to radical ideas and the entrants it admitted in subsequent years, while I was there, seemed a bit less likely to espouse or act in such ways. The older students were more concerned with the Vietnam War and being drafted. They schemed to stay in school, getting advanced degrees, and many of these with the more radical views ended up as post-docs and eventually, the elder faculty at universities today. The students that followed me were spared the existential threat of the draft, it ended in 1971. I lived off campus and my MIT girlfriend moved into Senior house in 1971 or 1972 so I spent a lot of time there. The year before, she lived in the woman's dorm where most of the women on campus lived. At the time, few women attended MIT and the woman's dorm, McCormick Hall, was a modern, traditional dorm for women. It had a check-in desk for guests, and guests were expected to be escorted throughout the dorm, just like almost all women's dorms at other colleges. Senior House was completely different, and I was quite surprised to see that they had co-ed bathrooms! MIT is a great university, and I felt like this was a wondrous time at MIT: big ideas were discussed and debated openly in a safe atmosphere where differing views could be held. Sadly, it doesn't appear to me that university life is like that anymore. In my view, MIT has an admirable mission, to advance science and engineering for all humanity; how much should it manage it's students and their lives to best pursue this goal? I'm no sociologist, so its probably best to take my random recollections with a grain of salt. [1] http://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2016/7/8/v7rxigo0aw4it8niy6k4szbm4yiq2i http://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2016/7/8/v7rxigo0aw4it8... [2] https://www.thoughtco.com/civil-rights-movement-timeline-from-1965-to-1969-45431 https://www.thoughtco.com/civil-rights-movement-timeline-fro... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture_of_the_1960s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture_of_the_1960s [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism

selimthegrim 8y ago

There was an incident at Caltech recently where a student was told to take down an sign that read “Impeach” (in jest about the house/frat he lived in) because “political speech is forbidden in the dorms”. He was allowed to keep it eventually with posting an addendum saying “This is my own personal opinion, not Caltech’s”

cuboidGoat 8y ago
“political speech is forbidden in the dorms” That sounds a bit political. When the supervisor said this, were they inside or outside of the dorms?
tzs 8y ago
They may still be sensitive from the Nixon incident. In 1973 some students from Dabney Hovse hung a large "Impeach Nixon" sign on Millikan library (the tallest building on campus). This upset the founder/President of a major oil company, who cancelled a planned $1 million donation to Caltech. It also upset the Dabney family, which Dabney Hovse was named for. They disowned it. I'm not quite sure how you disown a house that is named after you, but I'd guess it includes stopping any ongoing charitable giving to the house or the school it is part of. That "Impeach Nixon" sign was quite unusual for Caltech. Students just really don't have time for such things, because the workload is large and intense. The only known organized act of public protest there before that was in early 1968, when Caltech students went to NBC's studious in Burbank to protest the cancellation of Star Trek.
- jonjacky 8y ago
  When I was at Caltech, students organized a day-long shutdown in Spring 1970 to protest the Vietnam war, prompted by Nixon's invasion of Cambodia. This was about the same time as the Kent State killings etc. Possible outcome of the Star Trek protest: Leonard Nimoy came to campus in Spring 1972 to campaign for George McGovern in the California primary.

danmg 8y ago

I stayed there in the summer for a conference during graduate school. Even in the week or so I was there, it felt like something between a hackerspace and the headquarters of a zine than some drab campus housing. There were people showing up to practice twirling flaming batons; there were sun workstations in ever nook; there were random late night bullshit sessions.

gumby 8y ago

I am continually (pleasantly) shocked how many interesting ex-MIT people I meet turned out to have lived at SH (at random times 1970s-2000s).. Even happened at a random party just last night.

proofofconcept 8y ago

>But groups like Senior House, which define themselves by being different, also run the risk of becoming highly conformist, Packer says. The punk rock movement is a particularly vivid example of this phenomenon. “They self-describe as being different, but from the outside they all look the same,” he says. They don't want to look different from each other; they want to look different from people like him. It's really not that complicated. Spinning that into alarmism against the idea countercultures in general like this guy does is just ridiculous, and there's absolutely no way he's doing so in good faith.

draw_down 8y ago
Yeah. People like to make this argument as if it’s somehow super profound, but it’s facile and silly. (This is not the first time I have seen it deployed in regard to punk specifically.) Most people want a community, most people want to be around others they relate to or have things in common with. Plus it by definition doesn’t allow for diversity within the subculture in question, so it ends up disregarding that diversity to whatever extent it exists, which is ironic given the point it’s trying to make. I dunno, it’s just very lazy thinking all around.
jl2718 8y ago
Why would anybody define themselves as different from someone else? That’s just giving that person control over yourself. Identifying yourself with your own positive affirmation is difficult and scary and maybe the most important thing you’ll ever do.
- Redoubts 8y ago
  lol

cbHXBY1D 8y ago

This seems very familiar to me as a former resident of Cloyne Court Hotel, the largest and most radical of Berkeley Student Cooperative's houses. It was shut down in 2014 after the settlement of a civil lawsuit about an overdose that took place four years prior. Just like Senior House it was a "a proudly anarchic community of creative misfits and self-described outcasts" and just like Senior House it was shut down for sticking out. http://www.dailycal.org/2014/03/14/co-op-board-votes-convert-cloyne-court-substance-free-academic-theme-house/ http://www.dailycal.org/2014/03/14/co-op-board-votes-convert...

nartz 8y ago

Unfortunately, Senior House isn't alone in this. It actually started much earlier, with a systematic dismantling of fraternities which were somehow deemed problematic, many of which had been around for hundreds of years. The inflection point was generally attributed to the changing of the administration - which used to be more governed by professors and the like who might empathize with students, but eventually grew to be much more bureaucratic; at some point, certain individuals at the top decided to target the living groups they disagreed with. Senior house, being a place where outsiders gathered, and having a reputation of extremes, drugs, is just the latest casualty in the cleansing war against the more tolerated traditions of yore.