How could Steer Roast be cancelled? Based on my understanding of the article, Steer Roast is a 3 day party. Can't the students (18+ adults) just rent a campground nearby and have it there?
MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
61–70 of 222 posts
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The story is the administration was looking for a reason to shut it down.
Right. Why?
From the article:
The demise of Senior House is emblematic of a larger shift on campuses across the US. Last year my own alma mater, Wesleyan University, closed down its countercultural house Eclectic, which had existed for a century. A few years ago Cal-Tech shuttered its countercultural dorm Ricketts. “If it were just Senior House I would be upset and sad,” says alumna Christine Corbett Moran, an astrophysicist and engineer who, after graduation, helped write the code for the encrypted chat app Signal. “But I really see it as a harbinger of MIT and other colleges homogenizing and corporatizing.”
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> I think you're looking at it wrong... You're completely missing GPs point, which is specifically about politics. Talking about an "interesting SaSS" is a red herring.
I didn't think it was meant to be a political post. The entire thread is about a purported cultural shift that's starving out the environment that people like Steve and Woz thrived in.
In fact, I would be disappointed if it was meant to be about politics because it'd come across as an attempt to shoehorn politics into a discussion about much broader social trends
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#64I wonder if there'll ever be another Steve Jobs or RMS. I wonder if we've destroyed all the places where brilliant weirdos can thrive and closed off all the paths to success other than a handful of narrowly prescribed routes. I wonder how many of the greatest minds of our generation are flipping burgers or making coffee.
If you think it's likely that we have great minds flipping burgers now, it stands to reason there were minds greater than Jobs, Gates, etc (RMS? really?) flipping burgers then, too. I've seen this sentiment expressed before and it always struck me as the intellectual equivalent of "kids these days!" without much merit. Some people will waste their talent. Some people won't.
> RMS? really?
Yes, Jobs and Gates can't even compare to him.
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#65I wonder if there'll ever be another Steve Jobs or RMS. I wonder if we've destroyed all the places where brilliant weirdos can thrive and closed off all the paths to success other than a handful of narrowly prescribed routes. I wonder how many of the greatest minds of our generation are flipping burgers or making coffee.
I was chatting with a guy on the plane the other day who was bemoaning the disappearance of old-school BBSes and rise of homogeneous social media sites. I think my answer to his concern and yours are the same: There are still places for clever weirdos. Particularly online. I know of at least two hacking communities, for instance, which only let in people who can hack the invite process. At that point, you can assume…
Black Rock City also comes to mind.
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#66the plot of Animal House with an unhappy ending?
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think it's likely that we have great minds flipping burgers now, it stands to reason there were minds greater than Jobs, Gates, etc (RMS? really?) flipping burgers then, too. I've seen this sentiment expressed before and it always struck me as the intellectual equivalent of "kids these days!" without much merit. Some people will waste their talent. Some people won't.
>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.
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#68What's the actual story here? "Four students tried to buy cocaine" isn't the story. That happens all the time, at every college, in every other MIT dorm, and in most city high schools.
> 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 administration's job to "solve" it with finality.
There's a story to write about how a relentless focus on academic performance starves out countercultural values, and probably another to write about how dispersing a 15% increase in failure-to-graduate-rate just hides the problem numerically.
But not as much of a story to write about intrigue and malfeasance at MIT.
If all that is true, my major critique would be that MIT themselves seemed unable to be adults about the whole thing. They should have just set a deadline and a specific performance metric, with a clear up-front warning that missing that metric would mean closing the dorm. No interviews, no notes to parents, no "cancelling the steer roast".
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Institutions everywhere increasingly seem to want to just make everything bland and safe. Can you really blame them when the alternative is college campuses burning because they invited a speaker who was committing wrongthing and wrongspeak? This is something that has been demanded by a growing percentage of the student body over the last two decades. The schools are giving the students what they want. I wouldn't b…
Yes, this is clearly a reaction to political correctness, which is why they got rid of housing for the ~ privileged ~ straight white men and--oh, what? This was traditional housing for exactly the sort of queer people, minorities, and lower-income students who get blamed for hating "speakers who commit wrongthink"? While protests that don't do much are referred to as "burning campus," the people actually hurt by real…
You have no idea what you're talking about. I have good friends who are senior house alums. Ive been following the timeline of this action for years. This was managerial capitalism squeezing out non-conformity in order to maximize statistics and minimize liability for problem students. How dare you blame this on any student? No where did this article mention identity politics but you decided to bring it up anyway. People like you are insufferable. You are completely off base.
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#70I think the trend at MIT is not just about dorms. It's about groups that are too independent, too strong-willed, or just too different getting hammered down or spit out, in favor of corporate-friendly programs and people that are more willing to toe the administration's line and/or promote its designated priorities. The quirky but long-lived program I took part in recently had its leader of 10+ years dismissed, with…
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