141–150 of 222 posts
the plot of Animal House with an unhappy ending?
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) hav…
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.
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.
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.
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.
People will always find a reason to be miserable, so now that almost every major issue has been taken care of we have increasingly small things being brought up like "microaggressions".
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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
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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…
You forgot: if you pay money you get away with bending the rules, as seen here (it's a fundraiser for a sister school washed away by Hurricane Harvey): Students may wear sweaters or hats for a donation
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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) hav…
> 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…
My undergrad shuttled students to a new building every year, and wouldn't let anyone stay in dorms over the summer. "Dorm culture" was basically nonexistent. At MIT, students have significant choice of dorm, can stay in one place for four years, and can stay on campus in their room over summers. There's a lot of culture embedded in choice of housing.
I'm not sure I would call this collective punishment, but it's got something in common with evicting everyone in an apartment building because some of them are noisy. Certainly it's much closer to that than it would be at most colleges.
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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...
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.
Bexley closed four years ago for repairs, and was demolished with no plans to open a new dorm as a continuation. This seems unpleasantly relevant.
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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.
The result is that even the non-academic stuff those students have done has an academic target.
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.
People really do need to get some perspective on real problems. The safe spaces and coloring books for students after Trump got elected was pathetic. 18 year olds stormed Normandy, now they are crying over the democratic process. I say this as a college student myself. People will always find a reason to be miserable, so now that almost every major issue has been taken care of we have increasingly small things being…
Isn't the sensitivity of the next generation a positive, and not a negative? I wish my father had emotional awareness instead of being part of a generation that customarily hid or pushed emotions away. The march of social progress is a good thing, not a bad thing - or, perhaps, do you believe that through progress in the modern world we are all not entitled to mental security as well as personal security?