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

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

#101

Post by Gargoyle »

indigochill wrote: post #10
jdietrich wrote: post #2

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.

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…

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.

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

#102

Post by JustAnotherPat »

throwawayjava wrote: post #100
JustAnotherPat wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterculture is a threat to the current liberal elite status quo. After the defeat of Hillary Clinton, her corporate cronies are trying to consolidate power and develop an army of mindless millennial drones.

Yes, because Senior House was full of Trump voters /s

Even Hillary Clinton admits she thinks she lost because of Bernie Sanders and his sexist bros.

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

#103

Post by seanmcdirmid »

rb808 wrote: post #31
jdietrich wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Neither MIT nor Stanford are Ivies.

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

#104

Post by pm90 »

existencebox wrote: post #39
phkahler wrote: post #25

>> 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. S…

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…

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.

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

#105

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

jdietrich wrote: post #12
tyingq wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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 a…

Facebook was started by somebody who followed bg's path of dropping out of Harvard.

I don't know what Elon Musk's GPA was, I don't think anybody cares.

I don't see a trend towards conformity...in the real world.

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

#107

Post by dcole2929 »

sulam wrote: post #59
rsfern wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with you. It's your choice to engage financially with the university, and you should do so knowing that if you want to know how it's going, you need to talk to the student, not the university -- we have laws like FERPA for a reason.

He told the university to disclose grades to me. No laws are being broken. This is his choice, just like it's my choice to send them a crapton of money.

He told the school to disclose grades to you. Not his personal conduct. Most parent's accept that their kids are going to drink, and have sex, and maybe do some drugs in college. They probably aren't happy about it but they know it's going to happen to some degree or another. That is a huge difference from having your only communication with the school be basically a PSA that your kid is living in some sort of college sponsored hippie, drug den that's going to cause them to fail out. That's what people are taking issues with.

Maybe they were right to contact parents. I've never been to Senior House and don't know the ins and outs what went on there. But as someone who has worked in ResLife and been responsible for kids, I can say without a doubt MIT took the nuclear option. At most colleges, you can be put on academic probation, and even kicked out without the university notifying your parents directly.

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

#108

Post by ballenf »

mhalle wrote: post #46
Thriptic wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 he…

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.

Edited to add: http://fdsal.com/doc/

From that link, it seems there's evidence MIT did not actually anonymize the data -- i.e., used non-aggregated data and violated explicit guarantees of anonymity, so my analysis below seems irrelevant.

---

Data aggregation / anonymization and the ease of de-aggregating reveals a major loophole in current US health privacy regulation (HIPAA). Once aggregated, personal health information (PHI) loses most protection.

So, here if the mental health team aggregated the data, that is 'ok'. Then sharing that aggregated data with administrators is also 'ok' because it's no longer PHI. The exception would be if the disclosures of the mental health department to its patients prohibited this use of the data.

I don't see a crime here, other than moral.

Anecdote: I have sat across the table from a health data purveyor whose entire business model is buying aggregated data from multiple sources, de-anonymizing and monetizing it (for ad-based stuff and risk-scoring for life insurance and key man insurance provider type customers). That was a few years ago and I believe there has been some guidance that would make that business model much more difficult today if it was ever legal. We didn't get past the discussion phase based on that model's risk to our patient-centric model.

I'm a lawyer in healthcare turned dev, but readily admit not to be a health law expert. Most of my work was corporate and transactional, so please take my opinion above with a healthy dose of salt. And if I'm wrong or have woefully outdated info, please correct!

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

#110

Post by rsfern »

sulam wrote: post #59
rsfern wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with you. It's your choice to engage financially with the university, and you should do so knowing that if you want to know how it's going, you need to talk to the student, not the university -- we have laws like FERPA for a reason.

He told the university to disclose grades to me. No laws are being broken. This is his choice, just like it's my choice to send them a crapton of money.

Ok, that's a bit different than how I read your earlier post, I thought you were saying that parents/relatives should be entitled to that info solely on the basis of footing the bill.
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