It’s hard, if not impossible, to explain the levels of quirkiness of living groups at MIT, but Wired does a surprisingly good job of it.
This was Senior House, the oldest dormitory on campus, built in 1916 by the architect William Welles Bosworth. For 101 years it welcomed freshman and returning students. Since the ’60s it was a proudly anarchic community of creative misfits and self-described outcasts—the special kind of brilliant oddballs who couldn’t or didn’t want to fit in with the mainstream eggheads at MIT. Some did drugs and dropped out. Some did drugs and graduated. Others were proudly “straight edge,” eschewing drugs and regarding their bodies and minds as pristine temples. Many went on to create startups, join huge tech firms, and change the technological world as we know it.
Senior House was the gravitational center of alternative culture at MIT, characterized by extremes. For example, since 1963 its courtyard was the site for an annual Dionysian festival that began with a whole steer being hauled atop a pit and roasted on an open flame. The bacchanal ended three days later when there was no more mud left to wrestle in or drinks to gulp. By the time the third dawn came, friendships had been forged, tire swings had been swung, meat had been devoured, some drugs had probably been snorted or smoked, jobs had been offered, and lives had been changed.
And now it’s been “disappeared.” The putative reason is that there were too many drugs, too few graduates, and a weirdness that would prevent the administration’s dream of students wearing khakis, polo shirts and acceptance as Ivy-league-types from peer institutions.
Its motto was “Sport death, only life can kill you,” which sounds … scary. (The house symbol is a human skull.) Campus lore has it that Senior House residents used to burn kittens in the house furnace.
It takes a peculiar sense of humor to appreciate this, and most of us don’t share it. But then, most of us wouldn’t be worthy of admission to MIT. Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart didn’t get the joke.
Over the summer, former Senior House residents were put in a housing lottery to find new accommodations. The administration painted over murals and covered others up with whiteboards. Feldmeier watched from his office as the story of Senior House written onto its walls was whitewashed. One way to kill a culture, he says: “With lots of white paint.”
Were the problems of Senior House over the top? Perhaps. But the administration burned its residents hard and fast to leave no room for its salvation. It wasn’t for everybody, and nobody had to live there if it wasn’t their taste. But for those eclectic souls for whom Senior House finally offered the community they found nowhere else, it was home.
Some will see the effort to homogenize weirdness as a good thing. After all, a house full of peculiarly brilliant kids could end up feeding on itself, coming up with outrageous ideas (like Random Hall’s longitudinal milk experiment) that might have changed the world. Or just snorted some coke and chilled. It’s not like college kids ever do drugs, you know. Timothy Leary was just a figment of your imagination.
The administration could have provided some support to improve the graduation rate of Senior House residents. It could have tried. Instead, it screwed them and slammed shut any possibility of the community surviving.
Now, it’s gone. Senior House is no more. The forces of mediocrity and homogenization prevailed. Let no weirdness darken the Infinite Corridor again. Let no hack obscure the dome. This proves, conclusively, that time travel is impossible, for if it was, someone from the future would have come back and prevented this from happening. Long live the grocery clerks.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
It’s a sad day when even the paint is privileged.
MIT attempts on an individual basis to help every student graduate (or at least to leave in a way that won’t damage their graduation rates). There’s not necessarily an obligation for them to conduct some sort of collective dorm intervention. The traditional alternative culture at MIT will now have to live at fraternities or sub-units of other dormitories instead of being officially subsidized by the university.
>The putative reason is that there were too many drugs, too few graduates, and a weirdness that would prevent the administration’s dream of students wearing khakis, polo shirts and acceptance as Ivy-league-types from peer institutions.
I submit that there are plenty of MIT students / alums at or from dormitories other than Senior House who pride themselves on being weird, and would easily accept the first two reasons at face value rather than imagining that MIT’s true motive was to apply a culturally homogeneous steamroller.
This has been an ongoing war at MIT over this for years, which is why this ended up at WIRED instead of just the Tech, where the battle has raged about things you submit aren’t an issue. I’m sure the students and alumni of MIT who’ve been involved with this for years will feel much better knowing you “submit” that they should substitute their reality for yours.
And it might help, since you’ve chosen to go anon for this comment, if you want to be remotely credible, use your name and state the basis for your opinion. Spewing horseshit from under a rock may be safe, but it’s a bit too cowardly to blindly accept your word.
>And it might help, since you’ve chosen to go anon for this comment, if you want to be remotely credible, use your name and state the basis for your opinion.
You have my full email address, which contains my full name. I don’t know if you pay enough attention to the people who comment here to recognize that I usually post under part of my name, but in this case combined with the context here it is enough to uniquely identify me and for personal reasons I would rather not have all the comments I have left on your blog to be traceable to me in real life. For context, I used to attend MIT and count a large number of alumni among my friends, most of whom were from East Campus or Random. I did not graduate from the university. That is the context I am commenting from.
Of course I know who you are, but when you choose to comment publicly, others don’t know what I know. And I, too, know a bit about MIT (you didn’t even mention the Random House milk experiment, which I thought was very funny, but tells me you never lived in Random or you would have picked up on it). And I’ve been on top of this for years, with other MIT students and alums (the ones who did graduate), and I remain involved, as do they, as this has been developing over the past few years.
You’re seriously out of touch with what’s going on, and the other commenters (who I know use mit.edu email addresses) have told you so. And I don’t blame you for going anon on this one. The kids from MIT would flame the hell out of your for spewing garbage.
I know about the milk, but I didn’t feel that it would add anything to comment on its existence (“yeah, I know about that!”), nor will it add anything for me to try and prove it at this point in time. For color’s sake I will add that the experiment had a considerable unexpected advance one summer due to a power outage.
That I’m considerably out of touch with all things MIT is a fair charge. The move against Senior House I had heard of only in the context of what amounts to fairly boring individuals remarking on it the way you’d mention a favorite restaurant closing down rather than the frontlines of the culture wars.
Did you suspect the issue wound up in a long form post at WIRED because it was a big nothingburger? Did you suspect that you were the only person familiar with MIT around, and so it was left to you to convey what little you heard to others here? There is a difference between your commenting that the people you knew and heard from at MIT didn’t consider it a big deal rather than as the spokesman for MIT ordained to educate the ignorant masses and put out this non-existent fire?
It would be fair to say that not everybody at MIT was losing their mind over this, although that contributes little of value since there are always people who don’t share the concerns of others. That neither disproves the concerns exist or are significant. You know that guy who comments that he’s never seen anyone stopped for “driving while black”? Does that mean driving while black isn’t real, or just that one narcissistic asshole thinks it important that everyone knows what he’s seen? Or is he just oblivious? To the guy arrested for it, killed for it, it’s a big deal. Is it less of a big deal because some asshole says he knows nothing about it?
You created your own problems. You didn’t have to, but you did. If you feel compelled to comment, this is something you should consider. The world isn’t limited to stuff you know and stuff that matters to you (or your friends).
You either know nothing about MIT or you’re a fucking moron. Either way, go fuck yourself.
This is insane. Reif and Barnhart have been open about wanting to change the culture to conform with Ivy peers. For you to even raise a question suggests you’re a shill, since no one else would bother trying to make up such a ridiculous argument.
I don’t know if you were around, but remember the whitewashing of Burton Third?
I never attended MIT and know nothing about it. That said, is anon saying that between Wired and what you’ve written here, and the comments here from various MIT students and alum, everybody is full of it and he knows better?
I demur.
While Senior House doesn’t sound like a place I would find comfortable, it certainly appears that the school wants to eradicate its existence (the emails made it obvious this was their plan, to crush it, all along). White bread is so much easier to digest than a steer roast.
The argument is that it’s still MIT, just a sanitized, safe, wholesome version.
First they came for the hacks,
but I wasn’t a hacker so I said nothing.
A little weird with just enough bubblewrap.
Heh. I know where a magnetic switch was hidden back in the 1960s, hacked into an elevator car control to permit roof access, but I’m not telling. You can see the building somewhere in this:
As you know, my son was a hacker. They don’t allow hacks anymore. Not real hacks. Someone might get hurt.
Back when seventeen hundred was too damn much, they didn’t “allow hacks” either. Although Dean of Students Fred Fassett was more prone to laugh than to take disciplinary action when hackers got caught. That seems to be a major difference these days.
I recall a couple good hacks from the time.
One night the Heinz “57” neon sign that shone over the athletic field from atop a non-MIT building, became “69”, or as reasonable a facsimile as could be made from its neon tubes.
Could somebody have been hurt? Well, yeah, somebody could have been electrocuted. But you don’t major in course VI to know how to avoid it.
Another, with no possibility of injuring anything except national security, was the phone call heard around the world.
Somebody figured out how to get a tie-line to a certain national lab by dialing a sequence of digits on a dorm hall phone. From there, with layers of social engineering and phone operator lingo, an LD operator at a certain USAF base put the call through to another base far across the ocean blue. It worked its way around the rest of the world to ring another dorm hall phone.
A few years after graduation I came to know, and on occasion work with, one of the more gifted phone hackers from those days. He became a successful computing consultant. He died a while back.
One hack from just before my day still survives in style: the smoot marks measuring the Harvard Bridge (it’s 364.4 smoots long). These days the marks are an institution, and a plaque on the bridge commemorates the measurement. You can even choose the smoot as units in Google Earth.
Oliver Smoot became chairman of ANSI, and President of ISO.
For that matter, Spacewar for the PDP-1 was more or less a highly collaborative hack, although it wasn’t frowned on and was actually encouraged by faculty. It fathered several generations of video games and arcade games when microprocessors came along.
So many classics. /IHTFP
One day, I’ll tell the story of the culmination of my son’s final hack.
That’s like saying they don’t allow real spies. If they know.
Of course, if “Senior House” was more than simply a physical location with some murals, it is possible they have just spread it, rather than stamping it out as they intended.
Possibly, but it’s mostly a community.
Come on esteemed one post a pic of you assimilating the flesh, or at least helping carver it, at the steer roast, or at the very, very least a few paragraphs about why you chose to attend in kakis instead of a holey tie-dye.
You will get extra credit if you have the fortitude to post up that pic of you at the concert bare chested with a recently dreadlocked grad student atop your shoulders.
That wasn’t a grad student. That was me.
?????????? & a
honorary degree.
I knew you had the goods!
RIP Senior House, for now anyway….