
MIT – Introducing Pilot 2021 - joebergeron
https://pilot2021.com
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aeromackerel
FYI, this is a commentary on MIT's recent decision to close and depopulate
Senior Haus. Senior Haus is (was?) one of MIT's more creative dorms, and many
feel it was especially supportive of some students that didn't fit in
elsewhere.

MIT decided to depopulate Senior Haus because they statistically were less
likely to graduate on time (numbers were questionable at best). Students felt
like trading off a supportive community for graduation rates represented
commoditization of students, hence the website.

In particular, Pilot 2021 is supposed to focus on wellbeing, health and career
development, hence all the references to meal kits.

~~~
_chris_
> meal kits

Food at MIT is a very interesting topic. The administration has been pushing
"dining halls" and "mandatory meal plans" for 15 years now, thinking that
college should be a Disneyland resort experience you can sell parents on as
part of $60k+/year tuition (instead of a place where adults live, clean, cook,
and eat like adults).

In reality, cooking and community kitchens has been a big part of MIT's
culture. It's fun, it builds community, and it's stress-relieving. Also, meal
plans are _really_ expensive and many students do not want not-very-good-food
for $20 a meal.

Fun story: I remember one dining hall banning to-go boxes because MIT students
were inclined to take their meals to-go so they could eat their food quickly
in isolation and get back to work. The administration thought if they forced
people to eat in the dining halls they could somehow build a community that
way.

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throwaway22949
[https://qz.com/1005761/mit-is-overhauling-senior-house-
haus-...](https://qz.com/1005761/mit-is-overhauling-senior-house-haus-a-dorm-
beloved-by-poor-minority-and-lgbt-students-citing-drugs-and-late-graduation-
rates/)

~~~
throwaway22949
and some more stuff, like
[https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/6gv0d9/pilot_2021/](https://www.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/6gv0d9/pilot_2021/)

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mjfl
This is a joke, but I don't get it.

Is this, like, resentment at being desireable to employers?

~~~
_chris_
The real Pilot 2021 website:
[https://studentlife.mit.edu/housing/undergraduate-
housing/re...](https://studentlife.mit.edu/housing/undergraduate-
housing/residence-halls/pilot-2021-senior-house)

The administration of MIT have decided to nuke a dorm whose culture they
didn't like and forced everyone to leave (they claim too much drugs and poor
graduation rates). In their place, is "Pilot 2021" in which only freshmen will
be moved in (and a few select upperclassmen).

Students feel the administration has been less than honest in their handling
of the ordeal (and the dorm's year-long probation period) and had no real
interest in helping the dorm improve or listening to the students' needs.

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jayajay
I find it slightly weird and offensive that the products contain sexual
orientation information. Are the products being bought to be paired with other
products, sexually? Or are they being bought to perform labor? Does the labor
in any way depend on the sexual orientation of the product? Isn't prostitution
illegal in the country where this company operates?

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asdfghj123
[http://saveseniorhouse.mit.edu/](http://saveseniorhouse.mit.edu/)

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yodon
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.

~~~
hindenburg
"Senior House has always had a heavy contingent of counter culture types, much
more so than other dorms at MIT," \-- ha ha. They nuked Bexley first for a
reason. Ghetto -- suburb!

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0xelectron
lol! Anyone care to explain?

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QML
What.

