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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

#111

Post by neurotech1 »

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 forces.

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

#112

Post by jpmattia »

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.

When I first heard about it, I noticed that McCormick had the highest GPA and SH the lowest. So I helpfully suggested moving all the SH residents to McCormick and are there any other campus problems you would like me to solve this morning? Only a few were amused.

PS. Former EC guy here.

PPS. Sorry for the inside baseball.

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

#113

Post by rsfern »

aianus wrote: post #85
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.

It's not a choice. In Canada at least you are disqualified from financial aid (including loans) based on your parents' tax returns. The law expects you to pay for your kids' school if you earn a middle class income or more.

Ok, I can see it from that perspective -- we have similar financial aid limits in the U.S. I still think it's a choice, even if it's one that's structurally difficult for many people to make.

However, this is mostly orthogonal to the issue that most university students are adults, and the university has no business sharing their personal information on their behalf (without their explicit consent of course).

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

#114

Post by strathmeyer »

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…

This is a University that would rather someone die than they have to admit they did something wrong. Nobody is giving them the benefit of the doubt.

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

#115

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#116

Post by Gargoyle »

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…

The interesting thing about a school at the top of the pile is that even the dropouts will have their educational background described as "MIT dropout" for the rest of their lives, and it will mostly be used as an oddly positive descriptor.

In the bigger picture, even those MIT student who don't graduate MIT enhance the school's prestige. And it enhances the student's prestige. Only now the school will be less likely to appeal to this set of students in the first place.

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

#117

Post by HarryHirsch »

kakarot wrote: post #84
yusyusyus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sentiment has been that this high school-level authoritarianism seems to be in vogue on a larger cultural level than just educational settings. Largely, status quo maintenance is seen as a positive, so don't rock the boat, don't get out of line. In another era, I would have referred to this as "conservatism" but the silly political posturing makes this term less useful (since this authoritarianism has no political…

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

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

#118

Post by eropple »

dublinben wrote: post #86
AlphaSite wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m fairly certain OSS predates him by a reasonable margin.

You'd be wrong. The Free Software movement predates the "Open Source" movement by 15 years or so.

The BSD license predates the GPLv1.

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

#119

Post by aidenn0 »

aianus wrote: post #85
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.

It's not a choice. In Canada at least you are disqualified from financial aid (including loans) based on your parents' tax returns. The law expects you to pay for your kids' school if you earn a middle class income or more.

Same in the US; I had a friend who was estranged from her parents, and so they refused to sign a FAFSA form, which made her unable to qualify for pretty much all financial aid. The college president had to step in to have an exception made for her, since all need-based scholarships provided by that college (and most others) are based upon FAFSA.

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

#120

Post by soundwave106 »

BoorishBears wrote: post #19
jdietrich wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> How many opportunities are there today for someone with a 2.65 GPA? Just as many as there used to be, it's just never been easy. Actually I thought about it some more, and there are actually probably more opportunities today than before with the internet and the democratization of knowledge. > Woz and Jobs started out in business selling blue boxes to illegal bookmakers. > Imagine a world in which they had been sub…

Steve Jobs had an acquaintance in college named John Draper (aka "Captain Crunch" in the hacking world) who if I remember right taught Jobs said blue box skills. He possibly represents the endpoint which the OP fears.

I've met him at a couple of raves back in the 1990s back when he was basically wandering around the rave scene. My impression: brilliant guy, but incredibly eccentric.

I don't know much more about him beyond Wiki articles etc., but apparently he has had a bit of a tough time employment wise, due to a combination of his phone fraud convictions and his eccentric personality. This despite his heavy tie-in to early Apple history, and a fairly strong coding resume. Then again, from what I saw, his personality is not the type that would embrace Standard Corporate to begin with, I'm sure. But said personality means he never got rewarded much for what he did. If I remember right, he actually had to crowdfund for some medical issues recently. I think its fair to say at any rate that his talent potential ended up being underutilized.

You are right that it's possible that there are more opportunities for these sort of weirdos, but in order for that to exist, there has to be a space for the small corporation that is more willing to give eccentricity space. One of the dangers of corporate consolidation is exactly this: large corporations are probably more likely to exclude people with mild criminal records because checklists, and they are less likely to give space to people that don't fit into corporate cultures. Consolidation tends to kill innovation; perhaps this is one of the ways.

Likewise, from a university perspective, it won't matter as much if Big University kills off culture that "doesn't fit in" if there are small universities that welcome the eccentric weirdo. However, if only the Big University Degree matters in life, then it's also entirely possible for the eccentric but brilliant weirdos will end up being outside the system. Maybe they will form their own collective and create something new. The alternative is the Draper like scenario where one more just drifts.

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