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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

#161

Post by sulam »

Icedcool wrote: post #77
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.

You should ask your nephew how it is going. As an adult.

I ask him about birth control and whether or not he's using it as an adult. When I have to pay the school thousands of dollars a month (averaged out), I asked for the ability to find out directly from the school how it's going, and thankfully there was a way to make that happen. Seems like my request was not considered out of the ordinary...

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

#162

Post by Bartweiss »

forgottenpass wrote: post #45

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.

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?"

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

#163

Post by mikeash »

sulam wrote: post #156
mikeash wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The school doesn't care that you're paying, nor should they. If you made this a condition of paying, then that's fine, but that's between you and your nephew. The school's involvement is limited to accepting his written permission to give you his information.

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

#164

Post by mhalle »

Bartweiss wrote: post #147
ScottBurson wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

One bit of useful context is that MIT has way more culture and persistent identity tied to its dorms than most schools. 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. The…

Thanks for bringing this point up. Without that context, this issue could seem fairly trivial. I would go as far as to say that living group culture (e.g, which side of campus, living group, floor, and even finer grain) is the strongest social bond that most MIT undergrads establish.

While students participate is a wide variety of activities and intramural sports, living groups are where you come home to. If you didn't fit in the rest of your life, your living group is usually your best bet to make bonds in a pretty brutal academic environment.

To be fair, that's also probably why MIT is cranked up about places like Senior House and Bexley (whole other story) if it gets the (simplistic) idea that bad forces might lead the innocent astray.

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

#165

Post by tptacek »

JamesBarney wrote: post #160
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…

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…

I agree, of course, but would root-cause that down to the simpler, less lurid observation that the "survey" was itself infantilizing. MIT should have set objective metrics for the performance of students in the dorm, communicated them clearly, and made decisions quickly and dispassionately based on the results.

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

#166

Post by Animats »

forgottenpass wrote: post #122
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? A…

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.

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

#167

Post by dsfyu404ed »

kakarot wrote: post #146
HarryHirsch wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh yeah, that one too. I grew up dirt poor and never really was able to take advantage of that aspect. My biggest takeaway from high school was to get as tight as possible with the authoritative figures who have direct control over you in order to have the highest degree of freedom. To appeal to their intellectual side. I went to several different high schools and this strategy kept me out of a lot of trouble and pro…

Make a few friends at the very top or a lot of friends at the very bottom.

Administrators can get you permission to use the cool new AV equipment to record the demo for some project thing you're doing.

Janitors work just as well in a pinch though.

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

#168

Post by taysic »

JustAnotherPat wrote: post #82
tptacek wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Why?

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.

No not really. Have you gone to Senior House? There are plenty of communist ideals all over the walls. I'm sure plenty of Hilary supporters though I haven't been there this recent election

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

#169

Post by sulam »

dcole2929 wrote: post #107
sulam wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 colleg…

As I said above, I don't endorse MIT's behavior. However, there is a spectrum here. It sounds like you think it's ok for him and I to make an agreement that the school will disclose his grades to me in return for getting a free (to him) education.

If I'd taken this further, and asked him to disclose his personal conduct, and he agreed, would you have a problem?

Keep in mind I actually don't care about his personal conduct. I care whether or not he's taking school seriously, and I am using grades as a proxy for that. I take the money seriously, and if he's not going to take the benefits the money is purchasing seriously, then I have the option to stop paying for it.

The problem I see is that this is a slippery slope. Suppose your kid gets into two schools -- say a cheap(er) in-state school and MIT. Either way you're paying for it, and you know the kid will get a perfectly good CS education at either school. However, having MIT on their resume will be worth something, as will the relationships they make. Perhaps it's even worth the huge additional expense, assuming they take full advantage of it. At what point does the additional value beyond the curriculum, which the school is happy to charge for, give me some interest (both intellectual and legal) in how all of that is going?

I ask not to argue that MIT is correct here, but to try and illustrate some of the complexity. I am not an ethicist but it seems like an interesting question to me.

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

#170

Post by patmcguire »

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.
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