Good luck maintaining an open academic culture if no one can just hang out in office hours.
US is doomed, frfr no cap
Also, MIT is one of the few private institutions in which the vast majority (85%) of undergraduates graduate debt free, which is particularly surprising given its pedigree.
https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...
Their graduate school costs are another thing entirely though.
It's not about office hours. It's more about the connection between MIT and the massive surrounding tech community.
I was briefly an MIT employee, and I gave a departmental talk on some work I'd done as an undergrad. And if someone from one of the surrounding tech companies had wanted to drop in, nobody would have even noticed or cared.
MIT is surrounded by tons of amazing tech companies, many of them founded by MIT alumns. And there are many other major universities in the area, including Harvard. It was pretty normal for people interested in a topic to be able to casually interact at MIT.
But I guess MIT has apparently decided to add a lot of friction to these kinds of casual intellectual interactions with the larger community? Instead of just sending out an email saying, "Hey, talk on the 9th floor on multiple dispatch implementation," I guess you now need to get people to apply for visitor passes, and make it an officially scheduled event, and get everything signed off on?
I dunno, it seems like the end of an era.
As someone at the first MIT BTC meetup as a Maryland visiting student who just showed up and had a pass to get into the campus, which 100% makes sense, this action just makes me sad. Maybe if they make it easy to officially give passes to guests to go around campus, this would be ok, but still - definitely feels like the end of an era, especially if they are strict about it.