[907] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Restructuring the Administration
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Thu Oct 4 18:25:35 2001
Message-ID: <200110042218.SAA06628@hikari-no-ken.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 18:18:09 -0400
Reply-To: "Documentation at http://web.mit.edu/beland/talk/talk.html"
<MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU>, "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
To enable you to get the main point of this e-mail without
understanding my reasoning, I repeat a key paragraph up front:
If you want to stop stupid decisions before they happen, educate the
administration by talking to them, duh. Yes, this requires their
cooperation and an ongoing dialog. That's why the Strategic Advisory
Committee to the Chancellor recommended the creation of a new Student
Life Council (not unlike what Cambridge University in England has).
(http://web.mit.edu/advise/www/unifiedproposal/proposal-FINAL.html)
If you ask me, a productive place to start on long-term change would
be asking, "hey, what's up with that?" Because for your information,
the Chancellor at the time (Bacow) actually *supported* this idea,
and actually gave the job of implementing it to a faculty committee
which has since dropped the ball.
(See below for more.)
But anyway...
"Anil K. Varghese" <akvar@MIT.EDU> writes:
> As far as I can tell, the last time it cost the administration
> anything when it did stuff students didn't like was back during the
> Vietnam War. We need to make it expensive for them to screw us
> over. The only idea that's making sense right now (maybe it's my
> lack of sleep that's talking) is by making them pay emotionally. If
> you've got other ideas, I'm all ears.
> Whatever happens, we're involved in a continual negotiation with the
> administration about the future of undergraduate life at MIT. As it
> stands, I still can't put my finger on why the admins actually want
> to do stuff for us, except for the ones who were hired specifically
> to look after us. Maybe they feel sorry for us. But not sorry
> enough that they're trying to wreck the way of life we've had and
> loved for decades.
Maybe they do it because it's their jobs? Because they want to see us
succeed? The administration is not at averse to student feedback; in
fact, they are constantly complaining to each other that they don't
get enough of it.
In fact, we seem to be giving administrators a lot of feedback - but
of entirely the wrong kind. How is someone going to react emotionally
when they get 1,000 "I hate you! Why are you making this place suck?"
e-mails? Entrench their position, of course.
Others write...
>|> I also think that MIT Administrators are very smart and dedicated
>|> people. I think they, like us, are working for a better MIT: I
>|> just think that their vision of what a better MIT is differs
>|> drastically from ours, and that this schism will always frustrate
>|> understanding between the two groups.
In my experience, a large part of the "schism" has been a lack of
information, mainly not a difference in goals. Administrators have a
vast lack of understanding about how various policies affect student
life. Students have a vast lack of understanding about what's needed
to prevent this city-sized institution from collapsing under its own
weight. Want to fix this? Try educating yourselves by asking
administrators questions about the reasons why they are making the
decisions they are. Don't just assume they are out to get the student
body for no apparent reason, because that's leaping to a (false!)
conclusion.
From Matt Cain's recent e-mail, it seems the administration is totally
hearing the sensible, reasoned feedback students have been giving.
This is exactly how the Dot and on-campus dorm selection were saved.
> Exactly. Administrators will continue to screw over the student as
>long as the worst thing that will happen to them as a result is that
>we'll tell them that we disagree. They'll keep coming up with
>proposals that will screw us over. Maybe we'll manage to stop a few
>of these proposals, but new ones will always keep coming.
>
> If we want this to stop, we have to stop being polite, and civil,
>and having orderly protests. We need to do more than give them well
>thought out reasons that their proposals are horrible, and circulate
>petitions. We need to make them very uncomfortable, we need to make
>their lives difficult, we need to hit them where it hurts. This means
>that people need to accept that they may get in trouble, and that they
>may miss some classes. Until students are willing to go this far,
>we're just going to keep getting shafted.
That, to me, sounds like exactly the wrong way to fix things. Sure,
the Vietnam War protests spurred MIT to, for instance, divest itself
of laboratories primarily engaged in defense-related research. But I
can't say the administrators wouldn't have done so if they had been
approached in a calm way which merely generated a lot of negative
publicity. Administrators were literally afraid of the student body.
But also as a result, they took bureaucratic actions to split the
power of student governments and divide the student body against
itself. I'd have to say they largely succeeded at that, given the
petty turf wars I've seen over my tenure here. These methods are the
surest to a.) make students unhappy because their physical safety is
threatened and b.) drive decision-making underground, where it can't
be subjected to public scrutiny c.) destroy the only channel the
administration has for learning about students - talking to them.
If you want to stop stupid decisions before they happen, educate the
administration by talking to them, duh. Yes, this requires their
cooperation and an ongoing dialog. That's why the Strategic Advisory
Committee to the Chancellor recommended the creation of a new Student
Life Council (not unlike what Cambridge University in England has).
(http://web.mit.edu/advise/www/unifiedproposal/proposal-FINAL.html)
If you ask me, a productive place to start on long-term change would
be asking, "hey, what's up with that?" Because for your information,
the Chancellor at the time (Bacow) actually *supported* this idea, and
actually gave the job of implementing it to a faculty committee which
has since dropped the ball.+ If the student body had actually cared
about this, if *Tech* reporters were asking the committee for updates
every week and publishing stories about lack of followup, maybe this
would actually be together by now. Maybe this ad-hoc dining crisis
could have been averted. (Stupid people are stupid, grr.)
+ He writes:
> Accordingly, I have asked Professor Steven Lerman, the Chair of the
> Faculty, and Professor Candace Royer, Chair of the Committee on
> Student Affairs, to review the suggestions contained in the SAC
> report to explore redefining the mandate and membership of the
> Committee on Student Affairs so that it might perform a similar
> function to the suggested Student Life Council.
http://web.mit.edu/residence/systemdesign/bacow1.html
> We can invade the offices of whichever administrators most deserve
> our ire, and refuse to let them in for days on end. This worked
> fairly well for the Harvard living wage folks.
Did it? Didn't they give up after they discovered the administration
had entrenched its position, and took the sensible route of refusing
to negotiate with the people holding their offices hostage?
> We can take the list of admitted prefrosh, come April (or whenever
> they release it), and contact each and every prefrosh on there and
> try to convince them that MIT is a horrible school, and that they
> should go to Harvard or something.
That sounds like a wonderful way to improve intellectual and community
life here.
> I think the admins have quite definitively shown that trying to
> reason with them is almost certainly a waste of time. And, even if
> it does happen to work, they'll just wait another couple months, and
> try to screw us over again, through some different method.
How? By listening to student input about placement of temporary
faculty offices and reaching a sensible compromise between the obvious
(to them) need for renovation and the obvious (to us) need to preserve
green space? By listening to student input about the housing system
and reaching a sensible compromise between the need to cater to "I
just want a room" frosh and the need to preserve student dorm housing
choice? By setting aside the mandatory meal plan idea and starting
over with more student input?
> The second way is to demand that they treat us as adults, and demand
> that they make changes to the structure of MIT to insure that they
> continue to do so.
Perhaps some of us should start *acting* like sensible adults.
Brad Ito writes:
> Call me an optimist, but here's hoping that a new face can mean the
> start of new relations between students and administrators.
Hear, hear. I think the best thing for students that has happened in
the MIT Administration lately is that Neal Dorow and Rosalind Williams
have been replaced.
> At 01:15 PM 10/4/2001 -0400, Peter M Finin wrote:
>> Petitions, committees and well thought out arguments won't get the
>> admins to change the structure of MIT's administration in any
>> meaningful way.
Perhaps you weren't around when the administration asked for student
input on how to restructure the Dean's Office, and created the Dean
for Student Life position?
On strategies for bomb-throwing:
> (2) tell all the alums you know who are donating money
FYI, MIT pays a lot more attention to its major donors than the minor
ones, and more often than not, they wouldn't really agree with the
mainstream student sentiment as expressed on these lists here. Maybe
if someone phones up one of the recent major donors, though...
Beland
Who Hopes That People Will Get His Drift and Not Nit-Pick
and
Who Should Be Working on His Thesis
