[1660] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: [Mit-talk] merit, diversity, hahvahd, mit, etc.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jessica H Lowell)
Mon Oct 24 18:50:31 2005
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 18:50:12 -0400
From: Jessica H Lowell <jessiehl@mit.edu>
To: Wally <wally@sub-zero.MIT.EDU>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0510241653300.2003-100000@sub-zero.mit.edu>
cc: mit-talk@mit.edu
Errors-To: mit-talk-bounces@mit.edu
There's a lot of insight in what you said. But the source of much of my
frustration and offense is that so frequently, crufty folk take out their
(understandable) bitterness over decisions made by MIT in the last several
years on undergrads. "You're students under this new system, therefore you
must be sheep/weak/boring." Of course students have changed.
Different fields
are emphasized by society. The outside culture is different, and freshmen are
coming in with different influences, many of which are stated by
Marilee in her
article. That doesn't mean the students are less interesting. The
biologist of
today can enjoy and participate in Rush (or what's left of it) as
enthusiastically as the computer scientist of eight years ago did, and the
freshman who's been forced into a million resume-padding activities
since birth
and never had a chance to do something just for the fun of it might
delight in,
or even be desperate for, the chance to do just that.
I'm not convinced that the gap between East and West Campus is closing. I'm a
junior, and I feel that it's widened perceptibly since I've been here. Maybe
it goes in cycles, I don't know.
I just wish that people would not confuse "Some MIT administrators are pushing
the campus to be a certain way" with "These new students are a certain way",
which is what I got from Jimmy's email.
- Jessie
Quoting Wally <wally@sub-zero.mit.edu>:
>> "The branding of MIT" is a perfectly valid discussion topic, however, I
>> feel that your interpretation of the current state of affairs is
>> somewhat off from reality. And I'm sick of hearing that my generation
>> are millenials who aren't h4rdk0r3 g33ks like your generation was B4ck
>> 1n 7h3 D4y.
>
> Executive summary of the following: toughen the hell up. MIT is changing.
> In ways for the better and in ways for the worse. As are the students. And
> before the words 'people don't understand my generation at all' escape
> your lips or keyboard, consider how many people have said exactly the same
> thing over time. MIT does a remarkable job admitting more or less the
> right students, but the pool of applicants is changing, as are students'
> reasons for applying, and the culture of MIT has changed nonnegligibly in
> the last few years. In the opinion of a bunch of people: not for the
> better, overall. Lot of dying traditions, but new ones to replace them,
> and that never goes over well with old fogeys like Jimmy. And Gladwell's
> article is one of the best things he's written (my opinion of him isn't
> terribly high), so if you haven't had a look at it, go do so now!!
>
> OK.
>
> I only skimmed Jimmy's post. Sorry if I'm misunderstanding the point of
> this exchange. This isn't really about Sloan at all, because I don't give
> a damn about Sloan, and think that people who study only business are
> wasting their time in college. [Side note: listen to Jeff. He is wise.]
>
> I came to MIT in 1997 and it's obviously changed since then, though
> probably not as much as I've changed - which makes it hard for me to gauge
> whether the students coming in to MIT are more or less this or that than
> my class (which was Scott Krueger's class, for reference).
>
> I lived at tep, and the teps of today are just as interesting as the
> outgoing seniors my year. That's refreshing and reassuring. But that's
> also very much a self-selecting and odd culture even within the odd wider
> culture of MIT. I take a dimmer view of the fate of MIT undergraduate
> culture in general - but perhaps I'm ascribing a wrong degree of
> specificity to those shifts, and changes at MIT just reflect wider shifts.
> (Along with what I take to be very bad decisions by MIT admins of course,
> for instance moving freshmen on campus, indulging the whims of celebrity
> architects, and paying off Mr and Mrs Kruger.)
>
> For a couple of years as a grad student I TAed undergrad classes at MIT
> and Tufts. There was a massive difference between the students at the two
> schools, as you'd imagine. (Full disclosure: in many ways I preferred
> teaching Tufts students; though the MIT students were more *impressive*,
> they were also working considerably less hard.) There was also, it seemed,
> a difference between the MIT undergrads I taught and those I came in with.
> For one thing: much, much, much less likely to be utterly socially
> maladroit, it seemed. Most likely explanation, to my mind: a shift in
> wider culture by which geekdom has moved closer to the inoffensive center,
> socially. Those who would've been programming alone in a basement are more
> likely to be able to find others with whom to share their
> interests/pathologies. That's good in a lot of ways, but it also serves to
> counteract the devil-may-care anti-fashion that has historically
> characterized MIT's 'look and feel'.
>
> Another observation/guess: MIT undergrads are also more likely, today, to
> dress and accessorize just like everyone else. This might be tied,
> Jessica, to today's 'non sequitur == statement' aesthetic among young
> people who were in elementary school when (for instance) the
> Clinton/Lewinsky politics-as-game-show debacle was happening - as the
> poltiical/fashion standard deviation grows, the deviants become
> standardized, no? And that's what today's MIT kids know. Or: when no one
> dresses quite the same as anyone else, there's the curious effect that
> everyone starts to look alike - cf. above re: mainstreaming geeks (and
> everyone else). Fashion is immensely stupid, Dick Hebdidge and the 'dress
> to be yourself!' self-help pabulum notwithstanding, and it's hard not to
> see the shrinking of the distance between the East and West Campus
> cultures as a loss of signature style.
>
> Then again: most of the people jacking off about the subject are East
> Campus/SH/etc. types, so maybe you're also seeing resentment over the fact
> that their old dorms aren't WICKED COOL anymore.
>
> But consider this: except for old leftovers, no current MIT undergrad was
> around for the hands-off drinking policy pre-Krueger, or (I think) a
> campus without the monstrosity that is Simmons, or freshman Rush and its
> lunatic fraternalism and vivacity, or - this is the big symbolic one -
> Building 20. The steady erosion of student autonomy since I arrived seemed
> like a Big Goddamn Deal to the Class of 2001 (I remember midnight Bexley
> basement meetings for a group called MITChoice, dedicated to fighting the
> Freshmen On Campus decision), and maybe it doesn't seem like a big deal
> now that we've graduated, but what IS sad is that current students have
> internalized the *effects* of these changes without experiencing either
> causes or processes. It's easy for people like me and Jimmy to bitch about
> the relative boringness of today's undergrads because they Just! Won't!
> Stand! Up! but perhaps it's hard for us to remember that there's no reason
> for you guys to get involved in arguments that were settled when you were
> in middle school.
>
> Marilee Jones's 'Millennials' article was spat on by students when it came
> out - blah blah evidence that they see us as sheep, blah blah MIT's moving
> in the wrong direction, &c. But since then I've read it a couple more
> times. It's not a horrible article at all; indeed as I recall it reads now
> as a gentle but serious criticism of grade school, parents, and a college
> admissions industry that privileges test scores and resume line items over
> committed intellectual engagement and the giving of the self to
> idiosyncratic passion (which is my ideal vision of MIT, in buzzwords).
>
> [The article in all its plain-text glory is right here, by the way:
> http://www.lsmsaaa.org/for_students/generation.admission.2001.txt]
>
> I think she's grossly oversimplified a number of things for the sake of
> argument, but Dean Jones is a smart woman, and her lede - that MIT needs
> to work AGAINST so many of these social trends to keep its identity strong
> - seems to have been buried in her article and subsequently overlooked by
> knee-jerk on-campus critics. She also displays some buried Boomer
> resentments and enthusiasms, but that's to be expected. And in a single
> sentence she demonstrates a depressing misunderstanding of what makes
> people like MIT:
>
>> I believe that if we remind our students on a regular basis that we fix
>> this world, we do what others think is impossible, we "apply science for
>> the benefit of humankind" as MIT was founded to do, and they are part of
>> that effort, IHTFP will dissolve within five years.
>
> Well, no. As I recall that acronym has several meanings, all inextricably
> linked. Her point stands, though: the individuality of MIT students has
> always been bound up, to a degre, in their incompatibility with the wider
> culture. They have to do what they do - because what else is there? Right?
> But as MIT-type traits come to be valued more widely, more college and
> career options become available, and the choice to go to MIT becomes, for
> some students, less about NEED. Metaphor time: betcha five bucks that
> students these days are less likely to have maintained computers at their
> high school for the fuck-it-all thrill of it, and more likely, MUCH
> moreso, to have done sysadmin work for money, than at any time heretofore.
> Sounds good, in a sense, but do you see the sadness there too? Like
> writing for your local homeowners' association instead of writing your
> novel. Not all the differences involve money.
>
> I say all this shit by way of explanation: when people complain about
> Those Darn Students These Days, they're citing very real shifts in
> culture, and showing their ignorance of the fine details of that culture,
> and providing historical perspective, and ignoring just as much
> perspective. Just like everyone else, I guess, all the time, everywhere.
>
> None of which changes that Sloanies just aren't doing the Old MIT Thing,
> which involves a certain happy divorce from business realities. If you
> don't care about money, it's easier to see why business school is such a
> noxious thing for people to place at the center of their lives. Then
> again, few people can escape caring about money.
>
> You couldn't help being a 'Millennial' - but you're doing something else
> now. So don't take offense at name-calling.
>
> Hey when you graduate and settle for a boring office job, you can write
> long emails like this one (in length if not style, of course: your
> choice). So you have that look forward to in this world of knaves.
>
> Cheers,
> Wally
>
>
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