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

My guess is that, like so many universities in this country, the administration is not answerable to students or even alumni.

Remembering some Latin texts from in high school, I get the distinct impression the same could be said of Grammar schools in ancient Rome. Having (quite a bit of) wine with colleagues and even with the teachers on occasion was pretty normal. Living together was a necessity in many places, even for the rich.

Biggest difference with High School being that having good grades was pretty much rewarded, even socially. Not everywhere, but more than a bit.

Even now, I'm hesitant to discuss this here (or most places) because, despite the best intentions in arguing a position (even out of pure rhetoric), I face the high probability of being punished for going against "the collective's" thoughts. Because disagreement means punishment is in order. You're wrong, I know it, fuck you, downvote, whatever. And, if the collective severely disagrees with you, it is, apparently, acceptable to let it be known to your employer, spouse, parents, local pizza shop, etc.

WHile college freshmen get babied like this, others the same goddamn age are going into combat. Large numbers of them.

There are fighter pilots younger than 25 who are entrusted to fly SOLO in a $180m F-22 Raptor with live missiles.

How do these so called High school administrators justify protecting "children" from every theoretically possible harm? While forgetting that in less than 2 years these same students might be going into combat as a member of the armed forces.

Back then, there seemed to be an implicit understanding that MIT, maybe unlike other places, gave you a lot of rope, and it was your job as a student to use it wisely. No parent got a letter saying their kid was caught on a roof (unless they were jumping, an idiot, or hurt somebody).

On the other hand, one autumn a few years after I graduated when I was still advising, I was at a brunch for the parents of new students. The Dean of Students at the time addressed the gathering by saying, "Trust in us. We will take care of your children".

I found it jarring then, and I find it jarring now. One dean, one speech, one fall, but wrong at so many levels.

There is a list of some notable Senior House alumni on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Massachusetts_Instit...

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 with some degree of safety that you're with like-minded individuals. Even if people cheat the system, that at least means they cared enough to cheat and it also means they probably won't get very far with the additional tests once they get in (or they do, which requires they learn something, so everyone benefits).

Okay, but all that's online. What about actual physical places? Hackerspaces/makerspaces are probably the place to start. Places where what you're passionate about making is more important than who you are.

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.

I actually have much higher hopes for technology allowing those greatest minds to be pushed forward than before.

To get in now you need to be a robot who can ace standardized tests, who spends their whole childhood doing math problems and has no real contact with the real world aside from two pieces of flair suggested by a guidance counseller in order to get into an ivy.

Survivorship bias is real. Things sneak up on you when you aren't looking. Linux had only just made it into the 1.2 kernel series.

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.

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 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.

PS. Former EC guy here.

PPS. Sorry for the inside baseball.

What is the MIT administration attempting to measure by using graduation rate as a metric?

Why has the administration chosen to optimize for graduation rate?

And the more general elephant in the room:

What does/should a research university in general, and MIT in particular, seek to accomplish? And How does/should the administration classify emergent behaviors of the large group of people into helping/harming those ends?

"Put them on notice": who is "them"? Senior House, like any dorm, is a bunch of people living together. Some were even assigned there without choosing it (I was one). Each resident has no responsibility for the behavior of others. Why should someone following the rules (and they are the huge majority) have any obligation to MIT to "DO something"?

It is easy and understandable to think of groups as monolithic. But that doesn't make it fair.

MIT administration, on the other hand, acts as a single official entity. And it is the one doling out collective punishment.

To be clear, I'm not saying do nothing when problems come up. But there are plenty of established mechanisms to deal with the individuals creating those problems (Committee on Discipline, Committee on Academic Performance, Campus/Cambridge Police, ...). While not perfect, they are mature, they have known rules, they apply to everyone the same.

Unlike what happened at Senior House, apparently, at least you're allowed to have a faculty representative with you when you appear before COD or CAP.

It's at least a yellow flag for me when it becomes necessary to create new procedures and enlist new powers to special case a problem.

I never lived in Senior House, but I hung out with friends there quite a bit. From what I've read, I've tentatively, and sadly, come to the same conclusion: there were persistent problems with the culture of the dorm, and the administration probably had no choice.

Yes, the rate of drop-outs was 3x the average (20% vs 7%). But it appears as if this dormitory draws its population from a subset of freshman that already starts out different than the average population.

College admission should make a few bets on misfits with potential here and there. And if the mark of MIT's drug-infested den is that only 80% of them graduate MIT, it seems like they're still doing ok in absolute terms.

The only real problem is that Wall Street has apparently infected MIT, and they're taking the love-yourself (and keel over with heart failure) drug.

Tech interviewer: Do you, was there any sort of control for, sort of, selection bias. Maybe that people less likely to graduate are more likely to select Senior House? For example, maybe like, students who ranked Senior House first but didn’t get in, how they did?

Chancellor Barnhart: Yeah, oh, that’s actually a really good way to think about that. So, that’s something we’ll look at.

This was after the initial decision to bar freshmen came through.

In the analogy, I think it's a mistake to compare to spinning a server up and down - that's a low-consequence, low-cost decision. Maybe compare to decommissioning a physical server and buying a new one. I think before throwing away the high-latency server, it'd be worthwhile to make very sure that the problem wasn't about some process running on the server that would simply carry over to the new machine.

I'm worried that MIT has decided to solve a problem by shuffling 'hardware' without any clear evidence on whether that's the layer with the problem. Every university has populations with higher and lower graduation rates, and we know that Senior House attracted a lot of groups who might have been at high risk (e.g. people with financial difficulties or substance abuse issues). If those people just end up in other dorms with no more support, this might become a costly change (financially and culturally) with no real benefits.

I speak strongly and pessimistically about this because of some very fresh in my mind experiences from my university, where I watched drug abuse (and some far more heinous acts) be covered up and untreated as long as they could be by staff, and then pushed under the rug after kicking out the students who likely could have been helped earlier with tactful interventions (of which dissolving the house/support structure in OP certainly is not). The incentives at many universities are heavily misaligned to what I believe we'd like them to be.

[Edit] As a postscript; I'd add in a ramble, as there's another thought weighing on me: (as there seem to be two stories here, "are we properly helping students" and "what's happening to the heterogeneity of universities")

My own undergrad would have been remarkably less positive if I didn't have my own groups of "outsiders" to associate with, whom I'll openly admit likely correlated with increased drug use, dropout rates, and lower GPAs, as a side effect of being composed of students who might have different priority systems, not as some corrupting effect. Without these groups I likely wouldn't have landed a majority of my professional-life jobs, I wouldn't have shared in a vast amount of their knowledge and experience, and I would have lost both many good friends, and likely my wife. In the decade since then, I've seen a "real world" in which I've been told to my face, "we avoid hiring nonconformists". And while I can understand the "business justification" for that, and the university changes, I have some fear for what will be lost resulting from a push to dissolve these pockets.

In the bigger picture, even those MIT student who don't graduate MIT enhance the school's prestige. And it enhances the student's prestige. Only now the school will be less likely to appeal to this set of students in the first place.

You're exactly right about bureaucracy - as long as your standards are sufficiently overbroad, all the actual decision-making happens via selective enforcement.

I suppose the best question to ask of a story like this isn't "why?" but "why now?"

Apocryphal story: In 1987, MIT made Playboy's list of Party Schools. [1] Sounds crazy, right? The backstory: The writer/reviewer was in Boston, and somebody convinced him to check out Steer Roast. Around day #2 of party, the writer asked somebody was it like this all the time? To which the resident said yes, interpreting "this" to mean Steer Roast as opposed to the more general party atmosphere of MIT.

[1] http://www.fiestafrog.com/playboys-1987-top-40-party-college...

Edit: I should mention that the actual picnic (Sat afternoon) is an event that alums/families/profs used to show up. Eg. Doc Edgerton was a regular, and really seemed to enjoy himself the years I saw him.