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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

When I attended Caltech in the 70s, I asked about riots and demonstrations on campus during the Vietnam war era. They said that outside agitators had come on campus, and attempted to recruit students to form a protest.

The usual response was: "I can't join a protest, because I'd miss Physics class!" and the organizers failed.

It made perfect sense to me, because missing even a single physics lecture was a very, very bad idea. I was hanging on by my fingernails.

RIP Prof Goodstein, my physics prof, who recently passed away. You were an awesome professor. He was also the prime mover behind "The Mechanical Universe"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtMmeAjQTXc&list=PL8_xPU5epJ...

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I remember reading that up to that time there had only been two protests by Caltech students.

1. When NBC cancelled Star Trek in the late '60s a group of Caltech students went and protested with signs and chanting outside the NBC offices in Burbank.

2. In 1973 people from Dabney House hung a big "Impeach Nixon" sign on Millikan library. There's a picture of that here [1], along with a copy of the letter that the President of National Oil Company then sent to the students of Dabney informing them that he was cancelling a $1 million dollar donation because of that sign. (That would be about $7 million today).

There was an on-campus sit-in about Gaza a couple of days ago [2].

[1] https://campuspubs.library.caltech.edu/3325/1/TheCaliforniaT...

[2] https://tech.caltech.edu/2024/04/26/palestine-sit-in/

There was also the time they hacked the Rose Bowl halftime:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-dec-26-la-sp-cr...

That's not really a protest though. It's a prank. Caltech students have done lots of pranks.

That one was their second Rose Bowl prank. Here's the first [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Rose_Bowl_Hoax

I wasn't really using at as evidence in a debate, but they do have time on their hands to do more than study. I thought Caltech students' love for their subjects is what makes them different, not that they were compelled to study all the time.

How much they study varies a lot from student to student. The typical workload was 3-0-6 per course - 3 hours of lecture, 0 hours of lab, 6 hours of homework. Some were more, like Ama95. It worked out to 50 hours a week.

Some students, like Hal Finney, did maybe 3 or 4 hours a semester and aced everything. Me, I did around 50 hours a week. Doing less did not work out well. The PreMeds did a lot more studying.

And then there were the poor souls who couldn't hack it no matter how much they worked, and they wound up quietly disappearing 1 by 1. The ones who needed someone to yell at them in order to work disappeared as well, and so on for the ones who could not manage their time (like me, I almost flunked out before getting my act together).

Yes, we wanted to be there, we wanted to learn the stuff. There was no compulsion. It all came from within. I would have been angry if other students tried to disrupt it for their selfish political purposes. I'm pretty sure the others felt the same way.

This was a long time ago. I don't know what Caltech is like today. I hope it hasn't drifted too far away.

P.S. I liked the way Caltech operated so much that I run the D Language Foundation the same way.

Thanks for the insights. It seems like almost a dreamlike place for young, passionate STEM students.

It was different than any other university I know about. I'm puzzled nobody else tried to create such an environment. Caltech had many unusual endearing qualities, such as professors were not allowed to take attendance. Perhaps Caltech's best quality was simply having faith in the students, and the students responded by living up to that faith.

It brings to mind the Lockheed Skunkworks, a one-of-a-kind immensely successful engineering operation. Many tried to copy it, but always "fixing" it in the process, and failing.

I get the impression that some small liberal arts colleges have similar cultures; that's a major part of their appeal (though I say that without experience of Caltech or 99% of small liberal arts colleges). Now that I think of it, I wonder how much Caltech is inspired by a similar concept.

My theory-in-development about such environments is that they require three things: First, a mission or goal that is 'good' (in the perspective of the people there), that brings out the best in people. 'Make lots of money' or 'monopolize the book trade or 'squeeze $$$ out of nursing home patients' demand values that affect how personnel treat each other. Second, they need a sufficient proportion of personnel who have passion for the 'dream' or 'mission', and who also have a certain level of humanism - not as much philosophically as their norms for behavior, especially trust and compassion for each other. Third, they need a small enough group that it doesn't need to be administered by bureaucractic rules, which become necessary as groups grow too large to run on interpersonal relationships. Also, it is of course hard to change cultures in existing organizations.

Could all of Lockheed be run like the Skunkworks? The full company can't be as selective about personnel and it's very large. There are many people, of course, who couldn't care less about such culture and will destroy it offhand. When I've been lucky to be in such magical cultures, the proportion of a-holes was small enough that they complied with the norms of the group; on one team of about only 14, when two leading proponents of the culture left then the a-holes tore apart everything - they resented the culture.

Some good observations. I certainly think that being small is a big part of it.

Lasted almost two hours before they got up and quietly went back to work.

The people who go to protests are probably liberal arts students. They can miss a bunch of classes and still bullshit their way out of it. And a majority of students at most schools are studying bullshit majors like that.

Caltech, Princeton, and UChicago remained pretty level headed (both faculty and most students) through all of this. Notice that the first two schools are notorious for not having grade inflation.

And the third. I'm a UChicago alum and my premed friends were always complaining about having to compete against beneficiaries of Ivy League grade inflation.

My mistake. I am only deeply familiar with the first two.

Yes, the grading was brutal. But, when I did manage to earn a good grade, it felt really really good.

Unlike high school where an A meant nothing at all. My dad (Air Force) called such things "PX ribbons", meaning you could buy them at the base exchange. The only one he ever valued was his DFC.

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