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

https://www.wired.com/story/a-weird-mit-dorm-dies-and-a-crisis-blooms-at-colleges

by MrsPeaches • 9 years ago

225 189 9 years ago

jdietrich3• 9 years 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• 9 years 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_Instit...

jdietrich3• 9 years 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?

JustAnotherPat• 9 years 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.

breadmaster• 9 years ago

Hey, Administrators need to feel like they're doing something.

daemin• 9 years 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?

mtreis86• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

indigochill4• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

Would love to learn more about those communities that require a hack of the invite system to get in.

Balgair• 9 years ago

Black Rock City also comes to mind.

TheAdamAndChe• 9 years ago

That's true, and it offers a way for those types of people to group together. However, if those kinds of people aren't given a way to succeed in college or any other kind of upper-class signalling system, they won't ever get into positions of power where they can thrive.

More and more, college is selecting for a certain kind of personality while weeding out those outside of the norm.

bsenftner• 9 years ago

Love to find one in Los Angeles. Tried making one, a free hackers coworking space for years, but could never get it off the ground. It was there, Drop Labs, for years, free and empty. Evening events drew people, but beer always does that.

Gargoyle2• 9 years ago

This makes the case that colleges are not those places in the same way they used to be, and so colleges are now missing some of the utility they once provided. Both to students and to society at large.

seriff2• 9 years ago

What online communities are you talking about?

pc86• 9 years 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.

jdietrich3• 9 years 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.

snakeanus2• 9 years ago

RMS? really?

Yes, Jobs and Gates can't even compare to him.

mrgordon5• 9 years ago

You're comparing Gates with his poor quality virusware to RMS who has written incomparably important parts of the Unix operating system and made it free for all. Then you decide to act like RMS is the one that doesn't belong in the list. LOL

The core code of Unix will live on long past the current incarnation of Windows.

Gates is a ruthless business man and thats the only reason his name is larger in your mind. His most striking quote was about how you give Windows licenses for free to Africa so they get addicted and have to keep buying it even though they can't afford it and Unix is free due to familiarity. Meanwhile RMS labored quietly to build a better world.

cynisme2• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

seanmcdirmid2• 9 years ago

Neither MIT nor Stanford are Ivies.

dsr_• 9 years 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.

ilamont• 9 years 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-...

1. https://boingboing.net/2017/03/09/making-and-breaking-hardwa...

2. http://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/star.html

3. "... e-mails illustrate how MIT energetically assisted authorities in capturing him and gathering evidence — even prodding JSTOR to get answers for prosecutors more quickly — before a subpoena had been issued." https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/29/the-inside-stor...

graphitezepp• 9 years ago

This is so sad. I found the quote "one way to destroy a culture, with lots of white paint" very poignant. Institutions everywhere increasingly seem to want to just make everything bland and safe.

cynisme2• 9 years ago

I also find that its is not even individuals in the institutions but somehow the collective that causes this. I do not think this is the end of such places though as this kind of stuff has happened before and I think people will always find and make new spaces to make their own culture, the destruction of such places seems almost inevitable as they gain more and more notoriety.

justaman• 9 years ago

Colleges have become an echo chamber centered around profits and "the experience". A library card is a better investment; one that comes with more freedom.

otakucode2• 9 years 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.

djsumdog2• 9 years ago

That argument makes sense as they mailed the kids parents; when universities are all about recognizing the students as adults.

mejin3• 9 years 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).

vfclists2• 9 years ago

Isn't America the place where in some states it is a criminal offence for 21 year olds who serve in the military to consume alcohol?

candiodari• 9 years ago

"Extended" ? If I look back 20 years, there was certainly a component of university life that was ... a bit less than adult.

Remembering some Latin texts from in high school, I get the distinct impression the same could be said of Grammar schools in ancient Rome. Having (quite a bit of) wine with colleagues and even with the teachers on occasion was pretty normal. Living together was a necessity in many places, even for the rich.

Biggest difference with High School being that having good grades was pretty much rewarded, even socially. Not everywhere, but more than a bit.

otakucode2• 9 years ago

Originally society saw everyone as fundamentally the same with age not being a factor so much as experience and learning. Children were seen as tiny adults that simply hadn't been trained yet. Then as things advanced, children were seen as fundamentally different from adults, with children seen as barely trainable animals that had to be beaten into shape. Things persisted like that for awhile. Then the Industrial Revolution came, and the class of 'adolescent' was invented because factory owners did not want to pay inexperienced workers enough to raise a family on. Prior to that, adolescents became adults at 12 or 13, went to work as apprentices and could usually take care of whatever children they sired.

For reasons that I've not figured out despite decades of study, even though all of the socioeconomic pressures which inspired the changes that came with the Industrial Revolution have gone away, we preserve their practices. And appear to want to extend and expand them, further removing the young from society, etc. The thing that worries me is that there are critical periods of brain development. And brain development occurs exclusively as a result of experience. Remove experience, and brain development halts. And miss the critical period, and that development can never occur regardless of attempts to force it to occur.

Without knowing it, we may have passed a critical period. This is just a personal guess. But it seems 2 or 3 generations ago, parents who were really not entirely mature began raising their own children. As raising children is a very challenging task, demanding a great deal of maturity from a person (refusing to let your personal desire to have the child depend upon you and need you override your duty to turn the child into an adult as early as possible), this results in them over-sheltering their child, depriving the following generation of necessary experiences for brain development, and it continues.

yusyusyus• 9 years ago

My sentiment has been that this high school-level authoritarianism seems to be in vogue on a larger cultural level than just educational settings. Largely, status quo maintenance is seen as a positive, so don't rock the boat, don't get out of line. In another era, I would have referred to this as "conservatism" but the silly political posturing makes this term less useful (since this authoritarianism has no political boundaries it seems).

Even now, I'm hesitant to discuss this here (or most places) because, despite the best intentions in arguing a position (even out of pure rhetoric), I face the high probability of being punished for going against "the collective's" thoughts. Because disagreement means punishment is in order. You're wrong, I know it, fuck you, downvote, whatever. And, if the collective severely disagrees with you, it is, apparently, acceptable to let it be known to your employer, spouse, parents, local pizza shop, etc.

kakarot2• 9 years ago

I think you're getting it backwards. Real life isn't taking notes from high school authoritarianism. High-school authoritarianism is modeled after real-life authoritarianism. It's teaching kids how to "behave" as members of society.

Don't do what we say? Go to "time-out". Slowly have your freedoms taken away from you until you're compliant.

See these officers? They are here to make sure you listen to every one of our ridiculous requirements.

Better tuck in that shirt and only wear a brown or black belt! Want to dye your hair? Individuality is distracting and will not be tolerated!

ocschwar2• 9 years ago

What boggles my mind is how this morphing continues 16 years after 9/11.

WHile college freshmen get babied like this, others the same goddamn age are going into combat. Large numbers of them.

neurotech12• 9 years ago

At 18, a "child" can enlist in the military without parental consent.

There are fighter pilots younger than 25 who are entrusted to fly SOLO in a $180m F-22 Raptor with live missiles.

How do these so called High school administrators justify protecting "children" from every theoretically possible harm? While forgetting that in less than 2 years these same students might be going into combat as a member of the armed forces.

toomuchtodo• 9 years ago

How do these so called High school administrators justify protecting "children" from every theoretically possible harm? While forgetting that in less than 2 years these same students might be going into combat as a member of the armed forces.

Helicopter parents [1] and freely available student loans subsidized/backed by the federal government. The child/parent are the consumers of the service, but the negative externalities are dumped onto society.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_parent

CptMauli• 9 years 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?

cuckcuckspruce2• 9 years ago

The parents are paying the bills.

ryanx435• 9 years ago

This probably isn't true: students loans exist

djsumdog2• 9 years 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.

tptacek8• 9 years 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.

sannee• 9 years ago

As an european this really sounds odd to me - my university does not even know what my parents names are, let alone their emails.

mhalle5• 9 years ago

A related question is, what other equivalent email/postal mail do parents get about their kids? Things may be different recently, but my parents got nothing from MIT short of bills, grades, and fundraising. The article seems to confirm this is still true.

Back then, there seemed to be an implicit understanding that MIT, maybe unlike other places, gave you a lot of rope, and it was your job as a student to use it wisely. No parent got a letter saying their kid was caught on a roof (unless they were jumping, an idiot, or hurt somebody).

On the other hand, one autumn a few years after I graduated when I was still advising, I was at a brunch for the parents of new students. The Dean of Students at the time addressed the gathering by saying, "Trust in us. We will take care of your children".

I found it jarring then, and I find it jarring now. One dean, one speech, one fall, but wrong at so many levels.

phkahler2• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

pm902• 9 years 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.

phkahler2• 9 years ago

And yet everyone preaches the value of diversity...

Gargoyle2• 9 years ago

The interesting thing about a school at the top of the pile is that even the dropouts will have their educational background described as "MIT dropout" for the rest of their lives, and it will mostly be used as an oddly positive descriptor.

In the bigger picture, even those MIT student who don't graduate MIT enhance the school's prestige. And it enhances the student's prestige. Only now the school will be less likely to appeal to this set of students in the first place.

mhalle5• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

mhalle5• 9 years 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.

rothbardrand• 9 years ago

What happened to the MIT Administration? Ever since Aaron Swartz death, it seems the administration of the school has been corrupted by some influence.

My guess is that, like so many universities in this country, the administration is not answerable to students or even alumni.

meddlepal• 9 years ago

Undergrad students are a nuisance for a school like MIT nowadays. These are giant research corporations masquerading as academic institutions.

afarrell2• 9 years ago

The legal doctrine under which the MIT administration feels pruessure to do these things is called In Loco Parentis and its incarnation at MIT is particularly influenced by the death of Scott Krueger[1]. MIT has to at least appear[2] to be taking issues of student safety and the use of intoxicating substances seriously.

[1] http://news.mit.edu/1998/da-0923 [2] In the aftermath of a GHB overdose incident at Senior House's annual party Steer Roast in spring of 2008, there were rumblings that Steer Roast would be prohibited. I was part of a group working with the administration to allow Roast to continue. Rather than being just a CYA, The members of the administration whom I worked with appeared to genuinely and sincerely care about safety in this domain.

rasz• 9 years ago

You are forgetting Star Simpson 5 years earlier. MIT was always like that.

ocschwar2• 9 years ago

The problem with MIT is that while MIT students are well, MIT students, and MIT faculty are MIT faculty, MIT administrators are generic college administrators, hopping from school to school as they hunt chances at promotion.

selimthegrim• 9 years ago

Ricketts wasn't shuttered, just put on notice.

tptacek8• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

The story is the administration was looking for a reason to shut it down.

tptacek8• 9 years ago

Right. Why?

jpmattia6• 9 years ago

What's the actual story here?

Not sure of the context of your question exactly, but a quick summary for non-alums: MIT has had a dorm system for many decades where students choose where they are going to live. This tends to aggregate similar personalities/lifestyles into various dormitories. Senior House was a dorm with a reputation: It tended to attract a personality that might be described as "edgy", and was perceived as a place with higher-than-avg drug use. It has had that reputation for decades.

The current MIT chancellor looked at GPAs and other metrics and decided that Senior House was under performing and perhaps harmful to students. She put the dorm into "turnaround", and when that didn't pan out, she evicted all of the undergrad students. It is now a grad dorm.

[That last paragraph reads like a corporate action, a similarity that has been noted by others.]

Many alums have noted the administration has been trying to disperse Senior House for decades (I saw it in the 90s), it looks like Chancellor Barnhart was the executor.

tptacek8• 9 years ago

So if that's it, this is just a numbers story. MIT is an extremely selective school. They're loathe to reject 92% of their applicants only to send people they accept to a dorm that increases by double digits the likelihood that they'll fail. The dorm is a support system for the colleges; the colleges are not support systems for the dorms. When that problem persists for years on end, eventually it becomes the administration's job to "solve" it with finality.

There's a story to write about how a relentless focus on academic performance starves out countercultural values, and probably another to write about how dispersing a 15% increase in failure-to-graduate-rate just hides the problem numerically.

But not as much of a story to write about intrigue and malfeasance at MIT.

If all that is true, my major critique would be that MIT themselves seemed unable to be adults about the whole thing. They should have just set a deadline and a specific performance metric, with a clear up-front warning that missing that metric would mean closing the dorm. No interviews, no notes to parents, no "cancelling the steer roast".

mikeash5• 9 years ago

Looks like there are several different stories going on at once, but one major story is the fact that MIT abused a mental health survey to gather data about the inhabitants of this dorm.

Imagine if you responded to an "anonymous" mental health survey stating that you abused some drug, and then the city kicked you out of your house because they used that survey to determine that there were too many drug users on your block.

totalZero4• 9 years ago

MIT used what were supposed to be anonymous lifestyle survey responses to justify shutting down a longstanding dorm with a very strong culture of drug use, with no warning to the community.

The drug culture of this dorm goes much further than sporadic cocaine use. Frankly, without generalizing about individual residents, it's fair to say that drug use was an identifying component of the culture of the dorm. Yet that culture had existed for many, many years, so its existence alone didn't precipitate the closure of the dorm.

forgottenpass2• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

ah the old "Elf and safety ruse" beloved of beurocrats every where

Bartweiss6• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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/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• 9 years 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.

Stranger433• 9 years 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.

mrgordon5• 9 years 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.

Stranger433• 9 years 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.

mejin3• 9 years 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?

jpmattia6• 9 years 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-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• 9 years ago

the plot of Animal House with an unhappy ending?

seanmcdirmid2• 9 years ago

More like Real Genius.

rglovejoy• 9 years 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.

anon853941• 9 years 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.

jpmattia6• 9 years 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.

mrgordon5• 9 years ago

Yeah lets move everyone to McCormick where all the suicides happen. Oh wait...

forgottenpass2• 9 years 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?

matt40772• 9 years 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.

Animats• 9 years ago

MIT tries to select students who will make it through MIT, and then get them through. If you get in, you have a 93% chance of graduating. That's an unusually high success rate for a serious engineering school.

(That may be the influence of Harvard, 97.5% graduation rate. It's hard to get into Harvard, but it's not hard to get through Harvard.)

There are lower tier engineering schools with huge drop-out rates. Cal Poly flunks out about half their engineering students. It's much easier to get in, but the first year is designed to get rid of the unqualified students. MIT is trying not to go there.

staunch• 9 years ago

All of the exclusive universities sell degrees for a fortune. Their delivery rate is their graduation rate.

The admissions process is gamed to hell by wealthy people and the graduation rate is still 95%+. Hmmm...

The whole thing is a scam where the truly deserving students are a cover for the majority.

It's the same reason they don't worry about giving away online courses. Education isn't their product. Their product is a piece of paper that ensures your child won't be serving burgers alongside Will Hunting.

mhalle5• 9 years ago

I would alternatively suggest not treating groups of people, particularly young people, like monolithic machines.

"Put them on notice": who is "them"? Senior House, like any dorm, is a bunch of people living together. Some were even assigned there without choosing it (I was one). Each resident has no responsibility for the behavior of others. Why should someone following the rules (and they are the huge majority) have any obligation to MIT to "DO something"?

It is easy and understandable to think of groups as monolithic. But that doesn't make it fair.

MIT administration, on the other hand, acts as a single official entity. And it is the one doling out collective punishment.

To be clear, I'm not saying do nothing when problems come up. But there are plenty of established mechanisms to deal with the individuals creating those problems (Committee on Discipline, Committee on Academic Performance, Campus/Cambridge Police, ...). While not perfect, they are mature, they have known rules, they apply to everyone the same.

Unlike what happened at Senior House, apparently, at least you're allowed to have a faculty representative with you when you appear before COD or CAP.

It's at least a yellow flag for me when it becomes necessary to create new procedures and enlist new powers to special case a problem.

ScottBurson2• 9 years ago

collective punishment

It's not like they expelled everyone who had been living there. They just have to find new housing. Presumably nothing is going on their record about it. I know they don't like it, understandably, but as punishment goes it seems pretty light.

I don't completely disagree with you, though. It does seem like more effort could have been made to find out which individuals were causing the problems and focus on those.

ScottBurson2• 9 years ago

Well, that's certainly a suitably nerdy analogy :-)

I never lived in Senior House, but I hung out with friends there quite a bit. From what I've read, I've tentatively, and sadly, come to the same conclusion: there were persistent problems with the culture of the dorm, and the administration probably had no choice.

matt40772• 9 years ago

If the articles' portrayal is accurate, I have doubts that there ever was a problem.

Yes, the rate of drop-outs was 3x the average (20% vs 7%). But it appears as if this dormitory draws its population from a subset of freshman that already starts out different than the average population.

College admission should make a few bets on misfits with potential here and there. And if the mark of MIT's drug-infested den is that only 80% of them graduate MIT, it seems like they're still doing ok in absolute terms.

The only real problem is that Wall Street has apparently infected MIT, and they're taking the love-yourself (and keel over with heart failure) drug.

Bartweiss6• 9 years ago

In an interview around the announcement of the plan, we got this exchange:

Tech interviewer: Do you, was there any sort of control for, sort of, selection bias. Maybe that people less likely to graduate are more likely to select Senior House? For example, maybe like, students who ranked Senior House first but didn’t get in, how they did?

Chancellor Barnhart: Yeah, oh, that’s actually a really good way to think about that. So, that’s something we’ll look at.

This was after the initial decision to bar freshmen came through.

In the analogy, I think it's a mistake to compare to spinning a server up and down - that's a low-consequence, low-cost decision. Maybe compare to decommissioning a physical server and buying a new one. I think before throwing away the high-latency server, it'd be worthwhile to make very sure that the problem wasn't about some process running on the server that would simply carry over to the new machine.

I'm worried that MIT has decided to solve a problem by shuffling 'hardware' without any clear evidence on whether that's the layer with the problem. Every university has populations with higher and lower graduation rates, and we know that Senior House attracted a lot of groups who might have been at high risk (e.g. people with financial difficulties or substance abuse issues). If those people just end up in other dorms with no more support, this might become a costly change (financially and culturally) with no real benefits.

skybrian• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

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

Related Stories