Talk:Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Archive 1

message: I have deleted the unjust "parking garage" simile.  The old building that not-quite-surrounds Killian Court has great charm, and from my Neutral Point of View, I hereby sentence the author of the "parking garage" simile to Cruel and Unusual Punishment. Michael Hardy 21:44 Feb 10, 2003 (UTC)
:Agreed. I'd don't know how you'd prove it, but I'd think from a NPOV MIT's campus and buildings are neither particularly lovely nor particularly ugly. Actually I think MIT students are sort of uncomfortable with and embarrassed by the monumental old buildings. Building 20 had a special funky charm, of course, but now it's just a memory.
:What I don't understand is why nobody at MIT ever asserted that the library was sinking into the (marshy, Back Bay) ground due to the architect not have allowing for the weight of the books.  I guess MIT's libraries are so embarrassingly small that it wouldn't have been credible.  Dpbsmith 13:34, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)
replies: text:  Huh? "sort of uncomfortable with and embarrassed by the monumental old buildings"? I thought they were lovely (especially the Great Court, Lobby 7, etc), and so did many others. Now, the new buildings, boy, some of them are nightmares! Noel 20:29, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree.  I don't see any reason why anyone would be uncomfortable with them or embarrassed by them.  I like them, and I think I'm far from the only one. Michael Hardy 23:07, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: OK. Point taken. Will self-examine own feelings accordingly. The context was that I was saying MIT's campus and buildings (taken as I whole, I meant but failed to say) are neither particularly lovely nor particularly ugly, and trying to interpret somebody else's "parking garage" simile. Killian Court can be fairly described as a landmark (in a region that, of course, has many).  Beats anything BU and Northeastern have to show, I think. I don't know what the current consensus on Kresge or the Stratton Student Center (an example of the "brutalist" building style?) would be. Of the gentlemen Killian, Stratton, and Weisner, Killian certainly got the best deal. Dpbsmith (talk) 15:39, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: "parking garage" simile

message: The new paragraph is much better, and the notes about the attempted merger are relevant, but I still have a lot of problems with this. First of all, can't we get rid of the gushy self-congratulatory stuff like "The fact that these great centers of learning exist within a few miles along Massachusetts Avenue makes Cambridge one of the most interesting places to live in the United States?" I doubt that there's any NPOV to state this. And, without exaggerating the town/gown stuff, I still have to wonder whether the non-students living in the Central Square neighborhood find the presence of these "great centers of learning" all that "interesting." But I digress from my main point, which is...
...does this rivalry really exist? Of course it does at some level. I'm sure that the schools are aware of competing for faculty and eagerly await the delivery each year of the annual U. S. News and World Report rankings. But when I was at MIT, there was casual joking, and I felt a sense of social unease when in the Harvard Square area--this was at a time when most Harvard students wore suits and only perhaps 30% of MIT students did. But the rivalry was never much of a real presence. It wasn't like University of Colorado alums having parties and getting drunk watching the Buffalos play the Cornhuskers. I always felt that the institutions existed in separate worlds, almost unaware of the other's existence. And I never had the impression that any of my high-school classmates who went to Harvard spent much time thinking about MIT. 
I've always suspect that the song that was printed in the East Campus Songbook was actually lifted from some military context, but not knowing anyone in the Army Corps of Engineers I've never been able to check... the one with the odd claim that "MIT was MIT when Harvard was a pup/And MIT will be MIT when Harvard's busted up," and continues with the charming verse:
"If we should see a Harvard man within our sacred walls
We'll take him to the physics lab and amputate his balls;
And if he hollers 'Uncle,' than this is what we'll do--
We'll fill his ass with broken glass and seal it up with glue!
Oh, we are, we are, we are, we are, we are the Engineers
We can, we can, we can, we can demolish forty beers, etc."
Funny, though, I don't think I can remember anyone actually singing this verse. Dpbsmith 12:57, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Rivalry" with Harvard 

message: In this decade (and form some time before that) it would be very strange if an institution that, like MIT, is the world's leading institution in its specialties, were not coed.  If it were all-male, that would be considered iniquitous, and if it were all female, that would be one of the most frequently mentioned facts about it.  That being the case, doesn't "coed" in the first sentence border on being a waste of space?  Maybe some demographic data on numbers of male and female undergraduates and similarly among graduate students and faculty, should be included and that word dropped.  Michael Hardy 20:07, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: For example, the Globe neglected to take into account the elevated suicide risk in the general population for males and for students in technical disciplines, who comprise a larger portion of students in the Institute than in the general college population.
Are males really a higher proportion among MIT students than in the general college population?  I seem to recall that, among undergraduates at least (OK, maybe whoever wrote that sentence had in mind that the number of graduate students is larger than the number of undergraduates, dunno ....) the women now slightly outnumber the men (affirmative action, maybe?).  Michael Hardy 20:11, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

text: Nope. For whatever reason, women now comprise the majority of all university admissions, but it's not due to policy. Couldn't tell you why, but I'd suspect nobody could for sure. Meelar (talk) 20:15, 2004 Jul 27 (UTC)
I hadn't thought about it, but MIT is, I believe, slightly unusual in that it has been nominally coeducational, presumably since it admitted Ellen Swallow Richards c. 1870; certainly it described itself as coeducational in the early sixties. Nevertheless, this "coeducational" institution had only a minuscule number of women students until (roughly) the building of McCormick Hall in 1963. I'm not sure at what point it became functionally coeducational, in the sense of having enough women that "tech coeds" were no longer considered to be curiosities; probably not until the seventies. I expect that the term "tech coed" is no longer in use. Shortly after McCormick Hall was built, someone put up an improvised sign in front of it reading "Co-Techs," which was thought to be the height of sophisticated humor at the time. 
It is hard to believe the atmosphere of a few decades ago. I attended Harvard summer school in the early sixties. During the year, the Lamont library was off-limits to women, but during the summer they were allowed. I once listened to a Harvard student go on a fifteen-minute tirade on the topic. He thought it was totally outrageous because a library was a place for serious work and it was, of course, utterly impossible to concentrate if there were women in the building. I am not kidding, and he was perfectly serious. 
In the late 1960s I was in the company of my major professor and a distinguished professor from Yale; at the time, Yale was seriously a coeducation plan, and the distinguished professor was having a sustained and major hissy-fit about the very consideration of such a thing, ostensibly because he did not approve of lowering the academic caliber of the undergraduate class. My professor, who graduated from Yale, kept trying to suggest mildly that the plan was not to lower the academic caliber of the class, but to obtain a class of the same academic caliber as before—but containing women. The distinguished professor appeared to be unable to consider this, even as a hypothetical possibility. Yale did adopt the coeducation plan in 1969 and my understanding is that it is still considered to be a fairly good school. 
Anyway, with respect to coeducation, the articles on Princeton University, Yale University, and Harvard University do not think that being coeducational is something that needs to be mentioned in the opening paragraph. Dpbsmith 21:24, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: "coed"?

message: The heavy science and technology focus of the university can be seen by the fact that liberal arts and humanties are subsumed into one department with one major (Course XXI).
Hmmm.  The last time I heard anyone rigorously classify the "liberal arts" was Martianus Capella, just before Rome went to pieces, but I don't think this statement rings true.  Philosophy is a separate classification, Course 24.  Poli. Sci. classes are pigeonholed in Course 17.  Architecture types major in Course 4, and at least a few of their classes are weighted to the artistic, rather than the structural, aspects of that profession.  (4.301 students often inflict odd public constructions, possibly works of art, on our campus.)  All in all, the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences offers 12 majors:  Anthropology, Comparative Media Studies, Economics, Foreign Languages and Literatures, History, Linguistics, Philosophy, Literature, Music, Political Science, "Science, Technology and Society" (barroom chat made academically respectable), and finally Writing and Humanistic Studies.  Economics and anthropology may seem too "scientific" to count, although the general weighting is pretty clear (and I'd personally say that economics is too "soft", and its math too easy, to be anything but a "liberal art"--ha ha, only serious).  These categories have considerable over- and interlap; my favourite literature classes were offered jointly with the CMS faculty.
On a very ethereal level, one could argue that MIT approaches the "humanities" in a way few other universities attempt.  For example, our Prof. Donaldson spearheads the Shakespeare Electronic Archive, which lets users compare Quarto and Folio editions side-by-side, while simultaneously viewing still-photography or video works based on the scene in question.  This sort of post-linear scholarship does occasionally feed back into more traditional areas, such as identifying the various hands at work in each copy of the Bard's work that we possess.  SHEA lets us distangle the different editors, compositors and actors who all influenced the Shakespearean canon, and it provides a handle on the complexity which can make finding a single, authoritative text impossible.  I could discuss this at much greater length—it's the example most familiar to me—but let me just say that such projects make the "technocentricity" issue a subtle one.  (Are we focusing on extremes instead of means? Do a few clever minds redeem the Institute?  etc.)
Over on the east side, John Maeda's design work at the Media Lab is floofy enough to count as art, by anybody's textbook.  To belabor a very obvious point, art don't happen without tools; if the minds that deal with technology are not aiming for a scientific goal—if they are not using the "scientific method" to pose questions of the Universe—then the result may well be called artistic.  Didn't Bill Watterson make a point about the quality of depth and perception being more important than the medium?  (Someone look in the last pages of the Tenth Anniversary Book—I know it's there.)
Please don't confuse this with an apology for MIT's supposed technocentric nature.  In my highly arrogant POV, the school would be far better off if the powers-that-be trashed the entire humanities requirement.  While some of our professors are stunningly brilliant, and many of their classes are fascinating, the rules which govern the categories students must sample are, in a word, absurd.  I've yet to hear a student speak out in favor of the HASS status quo, which everyone sees as a farrago of counterproductive regulations.  More than one professor has scoffed at the babble of HASS-D, HASS-CI, CI-H and CI-M that complicates our lives, and the gibberish surrounding these courses is a favourite target of our campus humourists.
There are far more cogent objections to MIT's Weltanschauung than the "Criticisms" section lists.  I'd recommend starting with Ben Snyder's The Hidden Curriculum (I'll find the ISBN when I have a moment to look).  It is a little disquieting that the book's main criticisms, formulated in the late sixties, have gone largely unanswered; worse yet, several developments which Snyder highlights as progress have recently been reversed.  (Pass-fail grading has been cut to half of freshman year, for example, and many other recent initiatives seem to bring back the paternalism that Snyder was glad to see decay.)
Upshot of all this:  I'm removing the sentence I quotated above.  There should be better indicators of MIT's sciento-techno-electrological orientation than a statement about the course catalog—one which happens to be wrong anyway.
Anville 17:45, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: MIT v. the Humanities

message: brainyquote attributes this to Jerome Weisner. Does that seem at all likely? It was a popular metaphor in the 1960s but was not then attributed to anyone in particular. Is this a case of credit where credit is due, or something that Weisner said because he had heard it said, or just an illustration of the observation that an unattributed quote will attach itself to anyone plausible? Dpbsmith (talk) 15:42, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Getting an education from MIT is like taking a drink from a firehose.

message: Having just looked at an article on Amity High School that asserts that the school a) was built 50 years ago and b) is sinking 1.25 inches/year—which by my arithmetic would put its original ground floor underground by now—I am sorely tempted to add this to the MIT article:
:Thanks to MIT's well-known excellence in architecture and engineering, MIT is the only university that is built on marshy land whose library is not said by students to be sinking into the ground due to the architect's failure to allow for the weight of the books. 
So far, I'm resisting... Dpbsmith (talk) 13:37, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Aw, you're no fun! Adding that would be a great hack! :-) Noel (talk) 06:17, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tempted, but resisting... 

message: *"Big Ball in Boston" (Kingston Trio version)
*"No Beans in Boston" (Peggy Lee)
*"John Henry, the Thinking Man" (Brothers Four version).
Any others? Dpbsmith (talk) 01:05, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Check out the CDs of some of the a cappella groups among the students.  Here's one: The Engineer's Drinking Song.  Google it and you'll find lyrics comparing MIT to Hell.  Michael Hardy 02:15, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh, well... I wasn't really thinking of that sort of thing or I would have added the MIT alma mater to the list. Is "The Engineer's Drinking Song" the one about "his right hand worked the problems while his left hand traced the curves?" And the line about seeing Venus De Milo and saying "the whole damn thing is just concrete and should've been reinforced?" Or is it the one with the refrain "We are, we are, we are, we are, we are the Engineers/We can, we can, we can, we can demolish forty beers?" Dpbsmith (talk) 02:54, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: The latter, if those are two different songs, but I'm not sure they are. Michael Hardy 22:01, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Songs that mention MIT