As someone who lived at MIT's Senior House in the late 80's and then returned as an alumni to stay there a couple summers for conferences[0], I'm particularly torn by these moves to shut down Senior House and turn it into a freshmen community called Pilot2021.

Senior House has always had a heavy contingent of counter culture types, much more so than other dorms at MIT, making it look highly non-traditional while still having room for some of the founders of the campus student republicans group, conservative ROTC members, and inclusion of all manner of folks (at least in my day it did). Also, oddly enough, even though it was called Senior House it was not just for Seniors.

As others have mentioned there was a report with some pretty questionably statistics and even more questionable methodologies that said Senior House residents were more at risk for poor outcomes, failure to graduate, etc, than residents of other dorms.

There has been lots of debate about the nature and quality of that research. I understand those concerns. My concerns are different.

About ten years ago, the building went through a major renovation. The state required elevators for handicap access, and the walls and floors are amazingly thick solid concrete which made the rennovations extremely difficult and expensive. The end result being huge compromises were made architecturally in order to meet the mandated accessibility requirements.

I moved into Senior House as an undergraduate in large part because of the architecture. The building I lived in remains the best laid out dorm I've ever seen for fostering community and friendship and a sense of belonging, through a hierarchical set of groupings and spatial organization that encouraged a sense of shared identity and belonging on a host of different scales and group sizes. In short, the building worked.

Going back to live in the same space after the remodels was one of the most disturbing experiences I've had in a built environment.

The remodel had punched through all those nested, multi-scale groupings and turned the space into something that reminded me more of a slaughter house than an actual house. Never have I felt so alone, so isolated, so cut off from any community, and that change in experience resulted solely from the change in layout away from multi-scale clusters of group areas to an ad-hoc meander or non-branching non-scale varying random walk layout that resulted from the cost-challenged state-mandated accessibility requirements. It really did meander and twist and redirect in exactly the way a slaughterhouse does, and the design of slaughterhouses is explicitly laid out to impact and manage the psychology of the animals being led through them.

If I'm right that there was a real qualitative change in the nature of the interactions driven by the change in the physical layout of the space, and if the administration is right that outcomes of those living in the space have fallen, then the root cause for that change in outcomes is unlikely to be fixed by kicking out the counter culture types that used to live there (and still love the place) and replacing them with a statistical sampling of more "normal" MIT students.

[0] pro tip: MIT alums can or at least could stay in the dorms during the summer dirt cheap.