What'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.
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 perceived as a place with higher-than-avg drug use. It has had that reputation for decades.
The current MIT chancellor looked at GPAs and other metrics and decided that Senior House was under performing and perhaps harmful to students. She put the dorm into "turnaround", and when that didn't pan out, she evicted all of the undergrad students. It is now a grad dorm.
[That last paragraph reads like a corporate action, a similarity that has been noted by others.]
Many alums have noted the administration has been trying to disperse Senior House for decades (I saw it in the 90s), it looks like Chancellor Barnhart was the executor.
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".
Thought 2: I don't think Wired is trying to write a story about intrigue as much as using the Senior House story to illustrate the larger trend of universities becoming more homogenous.
Writing a story that says "Universities are getting boring. 3 universities closed their counter-culture houses in the past year. Here's some quotes from people" is going to be, frankly, boring to read. On the other hand, a story that says "3 universities closed their counter-culture houses in the past year. Here's the story of one of them" is going to be much more compelling. It makes the story more personal, and therefore easier to understand and relate to.
That said, my sense from some continuing involvement with a couple different schools is that there's less self-regulation of activities in many living and other groups than there's been at various times in the past. (Binge drinking, etc.) It's hard for me to tell if Senior House just represents part of an ongoing crackdown or if it's a genuine response to worsening issues of academic performance and other activities. I suspect it's a bit of both.
There are certainly those who view it that way.
> But not as much of a story to write about intrigue and malfeasance at MIT.
MIT is a big place with a lot of opinions about "what makes it MIT". The admins have one point of view. Sometimes that aligns with the current students and alums.
There was an element of cerebral creativity in Senior House that one might argue does not fit well in the corporate mold or play well to the numbers game Barnhart chose. It nevertheless strikes me as a societal loss to see it go away. To steal an analogy from the article: Tor will not make its Senior House creators rich, or bring in gobs of cash to the MIT endowment. So the numbers story tells us it's a pretty terrible return, and we should shut it down, but the real error is that my chosen monetary numbers don't tell the 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 than others, it becomes a de-facto ban on counterculture groups. To me that's almost more scary than the administration consciously setting themselves opposed to counterculture groups because it sets a goal that is much harder to fight.
Senior House had a decades-long record of problems and was in many ways a liability. Everybody knew this. There was no need to do anything in secret. It was a needlessly lousy approach and stinks of second-rate leadership.
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.
That's a big cultural shift. There used to be a term in local dialect for non-MIT people in the dorms: urchins. (even defined in HowToGAMIT a bazillion years ago, iirc.)
I wonder if that change was brought about gentrification of the area? (The bio building on Ames used to be a factory, eg.)
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.
Imagine if you responded to an "anonymous" mental health survey stating that you abused some drug, and then the city kicked you out of your house because they used that survey to determine that there were too many drug users on your block.
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.”
The drug culture of this dorm goes much further than sporadic cocaine use. Frankly, without generalizing about individual residents, it's fair to say that drug use was an identifying component of the culture of the dorm. Yet that culture had existed for many, many years, so its existence alone didn't precipitate the closure of the dorm.