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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

#121

Post by aidenn0 »

tptacek wrote: post #68
jpmattia wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 perc…

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 administ…

> this is just a numbers story

I actually think that this points to the larger issue. We are seeing homogenization by numbers. It seems intuitive to me that counterculture groups absolutely will have worse aggregate numbers than conformist groups, particularly when graded pass/fail (in this case graduate/no graduate).

If you disallow people sorting themselves into groups where some have much higher drop-out rates than others, it becomes a de-facto ban on counterculture groups. To me that's almost more scary than the administration consciously setting themselves opposed to counterculture groups because it sets a goal that is much harder to fight.

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

#122

Post by forgottenpass »

anon853941 wrote: post #92

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.

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?

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

#123

Post by toomuchtodo »

neurotech1 wrote: post #111
otakucode wrote: post #13

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.

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 f…

> 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

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

#124

Post by joshuamorton »

tptacek wrote: post #40
cuckcuckspruce wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parents are paying the bills.

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.

This. My parents paid for much of my education, but got information about my academics through me. I allowed them to access my grades because it was often easier than any alternatives, but actually stopped doing that after they got worried about some things without context. I, and I think they, would have been surprised and appalled if my school had emailed them about the conduct of other students.

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

#125

Post by mhalle »

anon853941 wrote: post #92

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.

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.

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

#126

Post by indigochill »

wolco wrote: post #29
indigochill wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

https://www.hackthebox.eu/en is one

There's also http://3564020356.org/ (Actually I misremembered this one - you gain access by reading an intro to crypto and then answering a question about it. As I recall you get additional access by solving other, more challenging tests)

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

#127

Post by booleandilemma »

vfclists wrote: post #91
djsumdog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

18 for military, 21 for alcohol. It's ridiculous, yes.

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/7/26/1398179/-18-year-ol...

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

#128

Post by seriff »

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…

What online communities are you talking about?

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

#129

Post by ginko »

mejin wrote: post #43
djsumdog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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).

I don't think that my University in Austria even had my parent's contact data. Why would they?

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

#130

Post by Zigurd »

tptacek wrote: post #68
jpmattia wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 perc…

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 administ…

That sounds about right. Based on a few visits to campus and my old dorm, I can see positive and negative trends: There are a lot more women, which is very good. There is a greater emphasis on support and success rather than sink or swim. That's good. There are also signs of more conformity and solid evidence of less tolerance of "hacks" in the traditional MIT way: Roofs, tunnels, and other prohibited areas are seriously secured and alarmed, and campus police are armed even though Cambridge is thoroughly gentrified, even gilded in places like Kendall Sq. Rafael Reif's hiding the identities and protecting the people who tragically escalated the Aaron Swartz matter from a no-harm-no-foul trespassing case to a federal prosecution outright stinks.

Senior House had a decades-long record of problems and was in many ways a liability. Everybody knew this. There was no need to do anything in secret. It was a needlessly lousy approach and stinks of second-rate leadership.

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