Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 222 posts

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

#201

Post by pishpash »

pm90 wrote: post #185
meddlepal wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Undergrad students are a nuisance for a school like MIT nowadays. These are giant research corporations masquerading as academic institutions.

This is unfortunately too close to the truth. While there are still many who enjoy teaching and guiding undergraduates, a Professors life is consumed by first, the pursuit of tenure and then the pursuit of more and more research funding for projects (not to mention doing the actual research). In that context, issues with undergraduate administration seem like an unsavory part of their jobs: often, offering very littl…

Professors aren't the ones dealing with undergraduates, it's the administration. The administration is answering to the MIT Corporation and the Board of Directors, whose interest has long become to grow the "investment vehicle" (endowment, professorial industry nexus, bureaucracy, etc.) through commercial and real-estate ventures, patents, and the cultivation of the brand. Students, graduate or undergraduate, and their lives are all nuisance, and you can tell from how they are treated in financial transactions relative to the aforementioned beneficiaries on whose behalf the Institute truly works.

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

#202

Post by Stranger43 »

tosser350 wrote: post #173
op00to wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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…

The stronger, more confident civilization and culture wins, not the most progressive or sophisticated. Rome was wiped out by barbarians and the dark ages followed. Western civilization is weak and divided, some don't even think it's worth defending. This is mainly due to outside influences intentionally creating division to weaken the United States from within. Western civilization is far from perfect but I think it'…

The historians cannot even agree on a date for the fall of Rome, let alone a cause. Especially once we remember that Italy were one of the poorer regions of the empire by the time we start seeing any major change to it's structure.

Maybe we should be a bit cautions about what lessons we draw from a an even we cannot even data correctly. As there is a lot more to the story that most introduction textbooks have time to cover, or that the empire as such collapsed as the capital of Constantinople was not sacked until the 4th crusade in the 12th century, and not by barbarians but Christian knights.

When it comes to history we have a tendency to invent the lesson we want to learn and then go look for a way to spin history to fit an existing narrative rather then work the other way around, and let history teach us a lesson.

It was not so much that the barbarians beat the Roman army as it was that the Roman army had been outsourced to a bunch of former barbarian tribes while everyone rich fled east that led to Rome being looted and taxed by the barbarians(but not exactly sacked) And that was centuries after Rome gave up all pretence of being an republic with many deities. The fact that the barbarians weren’t exactly pagan but Christians of a slightly different denomination is also left of of most textbooks.

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

#203

Post by wrs »

AlphaSite wrote: post #67
jdietrich wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>RMS? really? The dude wrote EMACS, GNU, GCC and the GPL license. He more or less single-handedly invented the concept of Free software. If RMS isn't a genius, then I don't know who is.

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

He started the free software "movement" to _preserve_ the existing ethos of software sharing at MIT and elsewhere, which he saw as being destroyed by corporate influence.

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

#204

Post by totony »

indigochill wrote: post #126
wolco wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I tried hackthebox.eu... https://i.imgur.com/Axq0GPu.jpg

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

#205

Post by vfclists »

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?

Why the downvotes, I meant 18 not 21?

And technically a person is in their 21st year of life in the year leading up to their 21st birthday.

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

#206

Post by trophycase »

JustAnotherPat wrote: post #102
throwawayjava wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because Senior House was full of Trump voters /s

Even Hillary Clinton admits she thinks she lost because of Bernie Sanders and his sexist bros.

If she believes that she's doomed to repeat her failure.

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

#207

Post by throwawayjava »

bjl wrote: post #145
throwawayjava wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because Senior House was full of Trump voters /s

The most cogent criticisms of liberalism come from the left, not the right.

Still, somehow I doubt SH is being shut down because "Clinton's corporate cronies" "consolidate power" by "cracking down" on cocaine-fueled "counter-cultural" threat to the "current liberal elite status quo".

I think on this issue we can take administration at their word. They prefer clean high-performing students to drug-using mediocre students.

Do I think that's a damn shameful way to frame the situation? Sure. But straight-shooting administrators who just simply don't care about counter-cultural values -- one way or the other -- seems like a infinitely more likely explanation than sinister political plot to undermine free-thinking individuals.

Don't ascribe to political conspiracy what can be explained by bean-counting and political indifference.

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

#208

Post by mrguyorama »

sulam wrote: post #161
Icedcool wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

If you can't trust your nephew to give you honest answers to your questions and discussions, how can you trust him to utilize your gift to its fullest extent? Or at least come out of it in a good way?

I was dirt poor, and similarly had a family member help with my college when, even after a full tuition scholarship and some government grants there was still a lot of bills left to pay. It wasn't a large sum that he paid, but he never grilled me about my status. His position on it was "You are a smart kid and you've earned this opportunity"

Meanwhile, years earlier my sister squandered large amounts of money partying at a supremely expensive private school. We couldn't exactly afford it in the first place, and attempting to exert influence over long distances caused huge amounts of stress on our family.

Do be careful. To some people, the worry of disappointing or angering the one funding the opportunity can be overwhelming. Having positive and supportive, yet frank discussions with your nephew would really help him, especially if/when he fails. But being overbearing could in fact make his college experience less positive and beneficial.

Hope I wasn't too condescending with my overly long rant

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

#209

Post by jpmattia »

pishpash wrote: post #201
pm90 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unfortunately too close to the truth. While there are still many who enjoy teaching and guiding undergraduates, a Professors life is consumed by first, the pursuit of tenure and then the pursuit of more and more research funding for projects (not to mention doing the actual research). In that context, issues with undergraduate administration seem like an unsavory part of their jobs: often, offering very littl…

Professors aren't the ones dealing with undergraduates, it's the administration. The administration is answering to the MIT Corporation and the Board of Directors, whose interest has long become to grow the "investment vehicle" (endowment, professorial industry nexus, bureaucracy, etc.) through commercial and real-estate ventures, patents, and the cultivation of the brand. Students, graduate or undergraduate, and the…

You must have had a different interaction with the MIT Corp: I've found that they have nothing other than the best interests of MIT at heart. Most of the members are alums, and several of them have made very significant donations (with not a whole lot of recognition imo.)

I'm not saying the MIT Corp hasn't made mistakes, but I've never questioned their motives for doing the right thing.

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

#210

Post by Stranger43 »

mrgordon wrote: post #197
Stranger43 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the greater narrative pushed by wired have pretty much everything to with the great battle for the future of America’s history. It's not about Trump vs Clinton it's about yesterdays failed rebels failing to let at new generation emerge as it's own thing and that's universal for both parties, and not even confined to just America. Whatever senior house was 10 years ago it cannot be 10 years from now because the wo…

Thats not what happened here. Current and former students are overwhelmingly united on the same side. The administration misused some voluntary response data as a pretext for shutting down a community that they didn't like. There are no loud senior citizens subduing youths unless you mean the administration. Au contraire, the students and alums were fighting together to prevent Senior House from being replaced with a…

the reality of the situation is that a dorm was closed by the people whom it's financial viability depended on because it never grew into something fully independent, nor into something that the people running MIT's budget found especially useful.

Already there we have a narrative break, sure a lot of people who's identity have gotten mixed with a particular community feels they lost something but that don’t mean society did. And the fact that one of the people responsible for tanking the US economy lived there don’t actually change anything.

This debate is classic and symptomatic for any kind of bohemian community, who always have a super important pedigree until it have to be quantified at which point the super important narrative kind of falls apart, and this is not a isolated case every city on every continent have it's Senior House.

The problem is that your asking people to fight for something utterly insignificant(more of a local petting zoo then a civil rights landmark) as if it had an impact on the battles worth fighting which it frankly don’t.

Yes there is a trend on the way towards the institutions to stop financing and sanctioning counter culture but again what good is a counter culture that only exists when it's sanctioned and financed by the establishment?

Post reply on HN