[887] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: Discuss Mandatory Dining at the UA Town Hall Meeting Tonight
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeremy H. Brown)
Thu Oct 4 14:48:35 2001
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Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 14:44:45 -0400
Reply-To: "Documentation at http://web.mit.edu/beland/talk/talk.html"
<MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU>, "Jeremy H. Brown" <jhbrown@ai.mit.edu>
From: "Jeremy H. Brown" <jhbrown@ai.mit.edu>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.30L.0110040314190.18696-100000@buzzword-bingo.mit.edu>
Thesis: there are two reasons administrators keep releasing proposals
that screw the students.
1. Honest failure of communication on one or both sides leads to a
proposal which doesn't have student input.
2. Lack of respect for students by certain administrators leads to the
creation of proposals without any student input, and/or the
gathering of student input only as a placatory move.
Observation: Every time we have one of these "incidents", item one
gets talked about ad infinitum, everyone promises to do better, and
nothing ever changes.
Claim: Communications and consensus are generally higher-overhead than
not-communicating and top-down decisionmaking. Thus, there has to be
a real and present motivation for administrators to make the effort to
involve students.
Observation: There is nothing in the policies and procedures of the
Institute (or those of probably almost any other American university,
for that matter) providing that motivation in a systematic fashion.
Thus, the only motivation in the system comes from individual
administrators who are actually imbued with respect for students.
Assertion: Fear is a form of respect. If the administration does not
respect MIT students as bright adults who want to be involved in their
community's governance and finances, it could certainly come to
fear/respect them as a destructive force capable of generating bad
press, rioting, vandalism, occupying offices, shutting down
facilities, etc. etc.
HOWEVER...
Tentative theory: The number of high-level administrators with a
measurable amount of genuine respect for students as adult community
members has increased in recent years, and this has given the students
more voice in these debates than in previous years.
Unfortunate corrolary: There is nothing embedded in the MIT system
that guarantees that this forward progress is permanent.
Additional corrolary: Destructive acts on the part of students may
roll back this progress by turning currently-respectful
administrators against the students.
Claim: You must carefully weigh the merits of an increased amount of
fear-based-respect verses the decline in intrinsic-respect before
engaging in destructive acts.
Closing Assertion: If you want to solve the problem in a long-term,
systemic fashion that is more or less independent of individual
administrative personalities, you need to come up with a plausible
plan for fundamentally restructuring the governing of MIT to
permanently embed student representatives in the decisionmaking
proceses at the highest levels.
Claim: This is way hard. But it will be an easier thing to attempt
if you have a body of administrators who respect you as adults than
if you have a body of administrators who fear you as wild animals.
Jeremy
Post script suggestion: If they screw you in November by implementing
Plan B in place of a reasonable Plan A suggested by the
student-inclusive dining board, then recompute the merits of an
increased amount of fear-based-respect under the new assumption that
the perceieved genuine-respect from higher-level admins is actually
false.
