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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

#151

Post by throwawaySH555 »

(Throw-away for obvious reasons).

MIT alum (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.

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

#153

Post by tptacek »

aidenn0 wrote: post #121
tptacek wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

To the extent that that's a story, the more important part of that story is happening long before dorm selection, in Sophomore and Junior year of high school. I think that is a big issue, in particular with securing access to opportunity for people in lower-income communities. But I don't think availability of counterculture dorms is a super important part of the story.

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

#154

Post by op00to »

sulam wrote: post #47
mejin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Speaking as someone paying what is effectively a second mortgage so my nephew can go to school, I expect the school to let me know how it's going. I'm not saying MIT is in the right here, but if you want parents or others completely disengaged, then you need to not engage them financially.

> Speaking as someone paying what is effectively a second mortgage so my nephew can go to school, I expect the school to let me know how it's going.

Why? If you're paying your spouses' medical bills, do you expect to be included on personal, private conversations between the spouse and his or her doctor? (Spoiler: you need the spouse's consent for that!)

No one is forcing parents (or you) to pay for someone else's college, but as adults, the university should manage the students' autonomy by not sending "nastygrams" home.

Why do you think you're entitled to invading your nephew's privacy simply because you gave him some money?

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

#155

Post by op00to »

JackFr wrote: post #78
mejin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very generous of you. When my parents got married, my grandparents paid for their honeymoon. Had the resort where they were staying reported to their parents what they did there, they would have been outraged. Would something like this also be accepted in America?

Of course not, but it's hardly the same. For the sake of argument, take the university at their word: that they believed there was an unsafe environment fostered in this dorm, and that the students were markedly underperforming their peers. As such the University is selling a defective good to the parents, and they are trying to remediate it. That sounds quite reasonable to me. However, are they infantilizing the stu…

> As such the University is selling a defective good to the parents

The university is selling a possibly "defective" good to the student. The parents are gifting money to the student to pay for that service.

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

#156

Post by sulam »

mikeash wrote: post #134
sulam wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone paying what is effectively a second mortgage so my nephew can go to school, I expect the school to let me know how it's going. I'm not saying MIT is in the right here, but if you want parents or others completely disengaged, then you need to not engage them financially.

That's not how it works, assuming your nephew is an adult. You, as an adult, are making a decision to give another adult a lot of money. That gift creates zero obligations on any third party, and should not even create any obligations by your nephew unless you explicitly arranged for this in advance. From what I hear, a lot of parents have your attitude. They call up the school asking about grades and performance wit…

I'm giving the money to the school, not to him to give to the school. The mechanics of this are perhaps irrelevant, except that the school offers this option for me to get his grades sent to me by them, similar to how I give the money to them.

My "attitude" is that I told him I would pay for his school if I got to see his grades. Pretty simple. I'd be happy not to pay and not see his grades -- I'm not his parent, and for my own kids (while this is further into the future), if they can pay for school without my help then I don't think I should know anything they don't want to tell me.

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

#157

Post by op00to »

ginko wrote: post #129
mejin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I went to univ. in the USA. My father paid most of my term bills, and not once asked me to talk about how school was going. I screwed up my first semester, realized I was wasting a bunch of money, and straightened myself out. My state university never contacted them even though I was clearly on the path of failing. HUGE life lesson, maybe one I'd avoid if I had a parent that was more involved with my schooling, but I certainly learned a lot about why it's important to apply yourself.

So, at least in the 2000s, it wasn't established at my particular State University to contact parents.

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

#158

Post by sulam »

op00to wrote: post #155
JackFr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not, but it's hardly the same. For the sake of argument, take the university at their word: that they believed there was an unsafe environment fostered in this dorm, and that the students were markedly underperforming their peers. As such the University is selling a defective good to the parents, and they are trying to remediate it. That sounds quite reasonable to me. However, are they infantilizing the stu…

> As such the University is selling a defective good to the parents The university is selling a possibly "defective" good to the student . The parents are gifting money to the student to pay for that service.

Actually it's not a gift. If it was a gift, it would exceed the amount of money I can give him and would trigger taxes for him, and I'd need to give him _more_ money to pay those taxes.

I don't know how this works legally, but I do know (because I asked) that this isn't considered a gift according to the IRS.

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

#159

Post by taysic »

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…

I graduated from MIT 10 years ago and went to one of the last "cool" Steer Roasts my freshman year where the halls were inundated with drunk and drugged strangers invited randomly from the street even. Of course then later you find out some one or people got hurt but it's an afterthought to many who complain the school is infringing on their rights.

This "issue" around the culture at Senior house is a lot more pervasive than you imagine and to say the school has given them time is the understatement of the year. The issue really is the culture that freshman are inundated by every year. It's one thing to have this be practiced in your room or among your friends but the culture in the dorms at MIT tends to be much more in your face. One professor described such environments to actually be more conformist and that aligns with my experience.

I personally feel confident that the students can hold onto the good aspects of the culture through this transition. I don't think the school is obligated to perpetuate or support it either on their own property. I can't really speak for how they went about it thought because I wasn't following closely.

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

#160

Post by JamesBarney »

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…

I think the only malfeasance is how MIT used the study results. Taking a study that you're told is anonymized but isn't in ways that you will perceive to be directly harmful to you is messed up.

A large amount of research is collected on undergrads, and for this research to be accurate there needs to be a certain amount of trust between students and the university. I could easily see this story skewing the results of any studies (especially any that involve drug use or other undesirable behavior) in the future because of this violation.

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