Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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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".

Thought 1: Correlation/causation. It's not clear if the house causes the higher likelihood of failure or if the folks who are more likely to fail are drawn to the house. I can see arguments for both.

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.

Right, but the same correlation/causation problem recurs for the "homogenizing" narrative if all that's really happening here is that administrations won't tolerate dorms freighted with double digit increases in dropout rates.

I graduated from MIT 10 years ago and went to one of the last "cool" Steer Roasts my freshman year where the halls were inundated with drunk and drugged strangers invited randomly from the street even. Of course then later you find out some one or people got hurt but it's an afterthought to many who complain the school is infringing on their rights.

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.

> the halls were inundated with drunk and drugged strangers invited randomly from the street

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.)

> this is just a numbers 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.

To the extent that that's a story, the more important part of that story is happening long before dorm selection, in Sophomore and Junior year of high school. I think that is a big issue, in particular with securing access to opportunity for people in lower-income communities. But I don't think availability of counterculture dorms is a super important part of the story.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this story. There does appear to be a misuse of survey information possibly gathered under false pretenses, The "corporatizion" angle is also bothersome. I'd note that the other "counterculture" dorm was closed down a number of years back when the building needed renovation and MIT determined the renovation didn't make sense. There's also been a broad crackdown on fraternities over the years.

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.

> So if that's it, this is just a numbers story.

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.

That sounds about right. Based on a few visits to campus and my old dorm, I can see positive and negative trends: There are a lot more women, which is very good. There is a greater emphasis on support and success rather than sink or swim. That's good. There are also signs of more conformity and solid evidence of less tolerance of "hacks" in the traditional MIT way: Roofs, tunnels, and other prohibited areas are seriously secured and alarmed, and campus police are armed even though Cambridge is thoroughly gentrified, even gilded in places like Kendall Sq. Rafael Reif's hiding the identities and protecting the people who tragically escalated the Aaron Swartz matter from a no-harm-no-foul trespassing case to a federal prosecution outright stinks.

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.

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 any studies (especially any that involve drug use or other undesirable behavior) in the future because of this violation.

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.

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