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Comment by whymauri | Hacker News Reader

as an alum, this is terrible and sad. i'm friends with a class of 62' who wanted to walk around campus on a now-rare visit to Cambridge.

he emailed me about how sad he was he couldn't enter any buildings. that's just a bummer man.

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I googled 'MIT Tim Ticket' and got this on the first page. "New for MIT alumni: MIT alumni can now sign up for a digital MIT ID for ongoing access to MIT’s non-residential buildings and facilities on campus."

I have mine, and it’s activated, but it doesn’t open doors; you still have to have an administrator vouch for you and send your mobile a QR code.

Just got demotivated to get one. Is there a reason why they do all that? Is that because of Covid or something else? I've been kinda under the rock on this..

COVID was the original reason but it's not clear why they're keeping it this way. At least what I've read has been pretty vague/weak justification.

I guess there was some legitimacy to the concerns that heavy-handed COVID restrictions might actually never be lifted.

COVID still exists. We are still in a pandemic.

Yes, and we are all going to die.

It’s endemic now, meaning that due to a number of factors (including that it is dormant in wild animals), it will exist forever at some baseline.

This is analogous to how HIV is endemic and kills ~1M per year worldwide.

I think once vaccine rollout was widespread it was time to lift many of the restrictions. But regardless of your opinions on this, MIT is not claiming the restrictions are still there because of COVID. They are outright saying they are keeping the closed campus as other restrictions are lifted, for security reasons.

The biggest danger with regards to Covid is not the formal restrictions or mandates, it's its convenience as a scapegoat for various shortcomings or reductions of service level.

Even 2 years down the line I'm still seeing businesses blaming Covid for various issues instead of blaming themselves and their inability to run/manage a business properly.

I tried this on Monday and it didn't work. Even if it did, this goes beyond access for alumni. I believe the campus should be open to everyone, as it's been for decades. It's one of MIT's values, as Reif himself said:

> Because openness is a central MIT value, our campus is open too. The vast majority of our buildings are open to the public and the campus has no visible perimeter; we are an aggressively ungated community that works around the clock and welcomes the world in.

He can still enter buildings. Do you really think the MIT Alumni Association can't arrange visitor passes?

FWIW, I was able to enter all the buildings I tried recently. Did not notice any restriction.

The restrictions are clearly there, you can't miss the eyesore in lobby 7.

But you're right that they're easy enough to get around if you're just looking to access main group buildings. The restrictions are inconsistent across entry points and it's super easy to tailgate students during the day anyway.

Places like Hayden library are currently much harder to get into without a student ID though.

I don't want anyone to arrange any passes. It creates a barrier to entry, however small, that means fewer and fewer people will gain access to MIT and be inspired by it.

"Arrange a visitor pass" is 100% different than open buildings, which is what it used to be.

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