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Unleash the geeks!
By adamg on Fri, 11/04/2011 - 11:19am
Any HTML/XML geek will grok, of course, that the giant banner at MIT means the end of NovemberRule. But as Melanie McCue, who took the photo, explains, it takes an eager beaver to know the full meaning of the banner unfurled on Tuesday at 77 Massachusetts Ave.:
"The "November Rule" discourages frosh from entering any "romantic entanglements" at college before November 1.
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Comments
I wonder when that was started...
I was at MIT for 5 years (albeit 20 years ago) and never heard of a "November Rule." Nowadays, I kind of laugh at how hard we thought life was then, but it's all about your perspective.
I don't remember this either
and I went to MIT about a decade before Dave did.
Eager beaver?
Eager beaver?
MIT beaver
MIT students are so proud of their beaver they even have a replica on their class rings.
What, you thought I meant something else? Why, I never!
The Brass rat
The mascot stems from two observations: The beaver is the engineer of the animal world -- and MIT students are the animals of the engineering world.
Thanksgiving Rule
We had the unofficial rule that upperclassmen weren't supposed to date frosh before Thanksgiving, because it was a little like preying on baby deer. It wasn't a rule in any sense of enforcement, but just that we'd mock the crap out of you for being hard up enough to pick up a clueless freshman.
May Rule(s)!
May can't come fast enough, when many of them depart from our fair city...
I can't wait!
Maybe someday they'll leave for good and all the local businesses that couldn't survive without the college crowd will have to close down!
Apparently another example of MITadmin's social engineering
Yes, they glommed it out of the old 'Thanksgiving rule' you'd hear in some (not most) of the co-ed dorms and living groups. They've been trying to make it canon for a few years and here have cynically used the signifiers of the tute's hacking sub-culture to give it "street cred". They've similarly tried to co-opt and water down traditions like drop-date etc.
In the last decade or so, the administration (heavily populated by carpetbaggers now) has done incredible damage to MIT's century-old culture. The freshmen-creche dorm, universal and mandatory meal plans, disassembly of the intramural activities system, and ridiculous appropriations like the above.
I wouldn't be suprised if this latest example was intended at least in part to distract the student population from the recent tragedy and scandal surrounding the death of Satto Tonegawa. I know that there are many students, alums and faculty who are livid about the failure of the institute's student support systems and the subsequent coverup. There's questions of whether this and other recent events indicate unintended consequences of the administration's paternalistic and overreaching social policies.
****
Why should non-MITers give a shit about all this? Because many of the students who are being infantilized and homogenized by these policies are the ones to whom we give the keys to our economy and even our existential safety. Do we want the brains that are capable of building neutron bombs or super-viruses, walking around with stunted interpersonal skills? College age (late teen-early 20s) isn't just when most of us do our high-skill learning - it's also when we grow our social network, develop empathy and self-reliance, and learn to think and take care of ourselves and make rational and informed life decisions.
MIT admin, in an effort to create as packagable and marketable a product as possible, is doing its best to take all that messy and hard-to-control personal growth stuff out of the hands of the students. It's a recipe for cultural disaster.
Remember to change out your
Remember to change out your tin foil occasionally - over time it loses it's ability to protect your cranium.
MIT students
Have had stunted interpersonal skills for years. That's nothing the new "evil" administration just started enabling. Please get over yourself.
Overgeneralize
Much?
I know what you mean
Kinda like people saying suburbanites are all fat, lazy, SUV-driving wusses.
You're joking, right?
I'm sorry, but the entire pretext of your comment is simply ridiculous. You think that the administration is pushing some agenda by introducing the "November Rule" as a way to distract underclassmen from more significant issues and destroy campus culture? I can personally assure you that no one besides underclassmen themselves had absolutely anything to do with this project, or even the concept of a "November Rule" in the first place. You even claim that the administration is destroying undergraduate culture in response to viewing a hack. Are you serious? I have an incredibly difficult time believing that you were ever an undergrad here. The administration may not support the best policies or be exceptionally competent, but they aren't malicious.
Not only is undergraduate culture ridiculously stronger here than most schools, but it supports activities such as hacking, and what amount to inside-jokes such as the November Rule. I assure you that it's strong enough to survive some disagreements with the administration. Go get involved and talk to people and learn what campus life is really about instead of just be pulling self-contradictory conspiracy theories out of your ass.
Post Shirley McFail people have it good
There was a Ninny State loser Dean of Students in the 1980s who was fundamentally incompentent administratively, but hellfire and brimstone intent on being "in loco parentis" for a campus filled with a large percentage of people who were adults - like, graduate students, professors, staff ...! Anyone on campus was a defacto child and she was constantly asserting that she had total control and could force her vision of a monastery on everyone.
Of course an undergrad by the name of Dershowitz ...
This commenter was clearly at MIT after that and really doesn't have any room to complain given Shirly McBay's reign of error and attempt to prohibit any sort of anything adult - sex, pubs, concerts, etc. - from taking place on her
church campcampus. That was the golden era of infantalizing stupidity - not now.Yes, I was an MIT ugrad
...and a MIT industry liaison, part of one of the Media Lab consortia, and am currently a member of the AILG and two development groups on campus (I can even tell you what "five ones in November" signifies). I have been directly part of, or closely observing MIT's campus culture for more than 25 years.
And I just spent a couple days counselling some friends of mine who happen to be undergrads and knew Satto Tonegawa (I did not) - and then listening to administration excuses for why it took so long to find him - and why RAs and others responsible for student safety/wellbeing had to find out via the mass media. So, yeah, my emotions wrt MITCorp are a bit raw right now.
I agree with SwirlyGirl that McBay was an absolutely heinous DoS, and the roots of many of the current patronizing policies lead back to her. But I disagree that things are particularly better, or even trending better. Most of the Big-brotherish developments I mentioned in my first post (FoC, the Freshman dorm-cum-creche, mandatory meal plans, dissolution of Rush, crack down on traditions surrounding drop date, steer, beast roasts, etc) - all these happened after McBay's watch.
Sources I trust told me who was involved in the V hack, and that they didn't originate the concurrent NR hack. Maybe they're protecting fellow hackers, but the physical tells, tone and timing of that banner seemed out of sync to me. So too the abnormally wide media distribution of what is - I am sure you will agree - a pretty lukewarm hack, coming at the same time as MITadmin is closing up ranks and refusing to publically discuss the circumstances surrounding Satto's death.
But 'mit undergrad', if you say you know who did it and it was legit, then I'm willing to consider my initial response to the banner was colored by too little sleep and too much grief-by-proxy
However, even setting that aside - you're kidding yourself if you think the institute is unaware of the "November Rule" meme. About a decade ago I attended a Future-of-MIT symposium where an AsstDean bragged to roomful of us (ie corporate liaisons) about how they were exploiting cultural tropes like this in order to "channel and control the exhuberances of the undergrad population". Only a few of us present were MIT alums, and the ones I talked with afterwards were gobsmacked at MIT's brazenness.
I just now did a super quick 30 second google and found several references on mit.edu or by members of the admin/corporate staff wrt the November Rule.
Geek is an offensive and misleading term
I consider a "geek" to be someone with an interest or lifestyle having to do with niche activities, especially fandom and technology, but you can "geek out" about anything. The word you're looking for to describe bookworm MIT students is most likely "nerd".
It's like Milhouse said on The Simpsons: "I'm not a nerd, Bart. Nerds are smart."
Agree 100%
I'm so sick of these so-called "geeks" taking a perfectly good word and ruining it for the rest of us. How are perfectly respectable chicken-head-biters supposed to feel when people are running around destroying the reputation of the word "geek"?
Agree as well - but
I agree with this distinction between the two terms. And I believe there is a very simple observation regarding why mainstream culture has misappropriated "geek" to be a synonym for "nerd".
Here's the gist. Say there is a smart kid who does well, really well, at math; maybe even competes in a h.s. or college math competition, maybe even places. You could call her a math nerd. Now let's say this kid furthermore geeks out over the subject - she enjoys not merely the academic pursuit, but has a niche love for all things mathy, talking about it excitedly, making math puns out of everything, wearing a hard-to-understand math joke t-shirt, always making metaphors of real life to math concepts. That person could now, in fact, be rightly called a math geek. The nerdiness and this geek personality trait feedback each other. She is a math geek the way someone else might be a music geek and another might be a theater geek, etc. No doubt this has gotten bigger in the mainstream over the last decade.
Point is, I think there are a fair number of people who are an "X nerd" who are also an "X geek" in this fashion, and they are more noticeable in their fervor for X than the "X nerd, non-X geek" types, overshadowing the existence of the latter. As a result, mainstream culture has come to imagine smartypants intellectuals as all being the first type, and therefore call all the smartypants geeks.
... That was a lot to contribute on such a narrow topic.
Geeks no longer bite the heads of chickens; deal with it
Great Geek Debates: "Geek" vs. "Nerd".
nothing wrong with "geek"
I would define a geek as someone who is obsessively enthusiastic. I think I heard that definition on a Doctor Who episode.
I would NEVER associate "bookworm" with MIT students. I knew few MIT students who spent much time in the libraries. You must be thinking of those losers up the street. ;)
"Now that the November Rule
"Now that the November Rule is no longer in effect,
perhaps this would be an opportune moment to raise the
possibility of coitus."
YES !!!!
+10