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,

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