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Comment by orzig | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a horse in the race, but maybe before jumping to conclusions people should read the reactions of students themselves? They're very easy to find:

https://www.independent.com/2022/07/27/mixed-reviews-ucsb-mu...

It's no puff piece, and students aren't uniformly positive, but it's a reminder that there are many trade-offs in life, and some are pretty open to it

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Every student quote in that piece is either overt criticism, or qualified praise (“I personally would not want to live there,” he said. “I would feel trapped”).

It does have positive quotes from a number of people on the UCSB payroll who would never live there.

Yes, no one praises the lack of windows, because it'll be weird to be thankful for something normal that is missing. But the lack of windows aren't just a middle finger to the students, their absence allows for greater freedom in design of the building. So you have students praising the relatively large private rooms. Which would not be possible without the lack of windows.

No one said there was praise about the lack of windows. I said there are no positive comments from students quoted in that piece other than the guy who would feel trapped living there.

> Many students expressed enthusiasm over the privacy the single rooms would offer, Reyes said, as well as a promise from the university that Munger Hall housing costs would remain 20-30 percent below the market rate of nearby Isla Vista.

> . “On the one hand, it’s really nice,” said McCarthy, who lived in the “funky” Santa Rosa Residence Hall his freshman year. “It’s indisputable. There are all sorts of features — air conditioning, game rooms, balconies, flat-screen TVs in every suite — that would make it the nicest dorm on campus.” He also appreciated the project’s bike-friendly infrastructure

Yes...that is the first half of the quote from the guy who said he would feel trapped if he lived there.

Fair enough. Maybe the reporters are just lazy then, if 80% were neutral or positive.

The question isn't whether windowless dorms are good or bad, it's whether the students who live in dorms should decide or should it be dictated by the richest people in the world.

The common retort is that it's the rich people's money so that they should be able to impose whatever living conditions they want on the deprived.

I suppose students are welcome to use their own money to buy buildings. There is a university governance board that can design whatever they want.

In this case, Munger proposed an efficient donation (in his mind) to help the most students possible with his donation and the university accepted.

Since only billionaires are likely to donate buildings, I think it’s going to be common to have donors influence the design.

Yes by this logic if a poor person doesn't have food it's okay for a billionaire to make him dance a jig for them to in order to eat. If a school doesn't have funds for buildings a billionaire should be able to mandate that they teach Charlie-Munger thought for one hour a day in order to stay open.

I don’t think this building is the equivalent of either of those things. More like it’s the equivalent of a billionaire is a pescatarian and they only offer to provide sushi meals to people and refuse to buy hamburgers.

I'm not drawing an equivalence, I'm making a comparison: Why should those be forbidden and the others allowed?

Because dancing a jig is demeaning while living in a comfortable, safe apartment that doesn’t have a window seems fine to me.

I think that forcing unreasonable actions as a condition of charity is bad.

Does not having windows seem fine for the students? That's the question.

Being forced to live without windows because it makes a billionaire happy seems pretty demeaning (and unreasonable) to me.

Is Charlie a licensed architect? If not, the final decisions still come down to an architect.

UCSB is notoriously sparse on housing, so it sounds like a lot of students do prefer the privacy and quiet of Munger's dorm to the more fratty atmosphere of IV. But if options were better...

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