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Mens et Mania Recording Series: Week Eight

Today's recording concludes the eight-week series of readings from Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows by Samuel Jay Keyser. To top off the series, we are excited to offer a 15 percent discount on Mens et Mania to our blog readers (when purchased through The MIT Press website). Follow this link, which will automatically apply the discount, to access the complete set of recordings and to get your copy of the book just in time for the holidays. *In the (unlikely) event that the discount doesn't appear when you click the link, have no fear--simply manually enter the discount code "keyserblog11" in the shopping cart to get the discount.*.

Last week, Samuel Jay Keyser discussed MIT's hacking culture. In this final recording, Jay reads a bit more from Chapter 8: Hacking and answers questions about the power of judgment at MIT.

 

 

CH. 8.Hacking2

 

 

Did you ever see ways that this faculty judgment existed within the faculty as well, putting similar pressure on faculty members to constantly be the best of the best?

I think that excellence is the driving force at MIT. Its faculty feels guilty if it is not moving intellectual mountains. Look at me. I am 76 years old. I’ve been officially retired since 1998 and I have an article coming out in a professional journal this fall. Why do I bother with that? Why don’t I just say, “Enough is enough?” I think the reason is that I feel compelled to continue to command the respect of my colleagues as long as I possibly can.

 

Do you think it makes the faculty’s job more difficult or easier, knowing that they have this vital power of judgment?

I don’t think it is a question of difficult or easy. It is what you are supposed to do as a faculty member.  You have to teach and then assess each student on how well that student has managed to learn. Not to do that is not doing your job.

 

Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)

We're saddened to pass along news of the death of evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis. She passed away yesterday at her Amherst home at the age of 73.

According to a statement issued by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where Margulis taught from 1988 until her death, she was best known for her contributions to the theory of symbiogenesis:

She argued that inherited variation, significant in evolution, does not come mainly from random mutations. Rather, new tissues, organs, and even new species evolve primarily through the long-lasting intimacy of strangers. The fusion of genomes in symbioses followed by natural selection, she suggests, leads to increasingly complex levels of individuality.

But Margulis also made crucial contributions to James Lovelock's Gaia theory, which holds that the surface elements of the earth form a self-sustaining system. It may have been her ability to link supposedly disparate scientific fields that constituted her distinctive mark as a scientist. As Robert Holub of UMass Amherst put it, "Of course she was a different kind of scientist, one who does not come along very often. Her great gift was making connections, connections that others just couldn’t make. She provided a stimulation to the campus community and the scientific community that was uniquely her own."

Margulis was the author or editor of three of our books, the most recent being Chimeras and Consciousness: Evolution of the Sensory Self, published this past spring.

She will be missed.

Mens et Mania Recording Series: Week Seven

Last week, Samuel Jay Keyser detailed his experiences as Housemaster of MIT's Senior House and read from Chapter 6 of his book, Mens et Mania. This week, Jay reads from Chapter 8: Hacking and answers a few questions below about MIT's hacking culture.

 

 

 

 

CH. 8.Hacking1

 

 

Can you give us another hacking example that you would have mentioned during your talk when you took a “walk down hack-memory lane”?

Two of the students who planted the explosives under the football field of the Harvard/Yale game that would have carved the initials MIT into the surface had they gone off successfully came to visit me once. They were amused that the Cambridge Police made such a to-do about it. Local newspapers claimed the explosives would have cratered the field. In fact, the primer cord used would have left little more than a turf burn. As it happened, one of the perpetrators was a demolition expert who had learned his trade in the Army. Yielding to pressure, MIT suspended the perps for a year. I asked them if they were unhappy about that. They said, “Hell, no. We went to Alaska, got good jobs planting explosives and came back the next year with money in our pockets.”

From your excerpt about the masked woman, it seems that receiving acknowledgement for the efforts put into hacking was almost more satisfying to the students than the hack itself. Is this the notion you got from your experiences with hacking, and if not, what did you find were the students’ motivations for hacking?

I think the students took pride in creating an elegant hack, one that was hard to execute, intellectually clever, and did not damage. But the underlying motivation, as I tried to argue, was to bring the Institute down a peg or two so that its judgments of their abilities didn’t hurt as much.

 

Mens et Mania Recording Series: Week Six

Last week, Samuel Jay Keyser talked about student conflict and read from Chapter 13 of his book, Mens et Mania. This week, Jay reads from Chapter 6: Housemaster, in which he details his experiences as the housemaster of MIT's Senior House. An excerpt from this chapter follows the recording.

 

 

CH. 6. Housemaster

 

I became housemaster of Senior House in 1981. Constantine Simonides was the one who offered me the job. Constantine later became a very close friend and advisor. You might not have predicted that if you had been a fly on the wall when he offered me the job. To put it bluntly, when I became housemaster at Senior House, the dormitory was functioning as a storm drain for the other MIT living groups. All of the difficult students were funneled there. These were students incapable of living harmoniously in the more normal dorms. These were the students who snatched fire extinguishers off the walls and ran down the corridors spraying their housemates' doors...

The position is a live-in arrangement, with the housemaster having an apartment located in the dormitory itself. My then wife, Margaret, and I had been residents for less than a week when we were visited by the house president. I remember what he looked like. He had the puffy look of an MIT anti-nerd, someone who worked very hard at his studies, didn't get enough sleep, ate too much pizza, and drank too much beer on the weekends. He had adopted the practiced mien of a hard-bitten leader of the working classes, namely, his fellow antinerds in Senior House. He had thick, black hair and a swarthy complexion. When he came into my apartment, I felt as if I were being boarded by a pirate.

After a few pleasantries--basically an exchange of names--he came straight to the point.

"Your job as housemaster," he said, "is to stay in this apartment and mind your own business. We'll let you know when we need your help."

"We?" I asked.

"The grease," he said. "The house grease."

This was the name for the Senior House government, all elected grease.

"What kind of help?" I asked.

"We may need you to run interference for us with them," and he jerked his head in a direction that I took to mean the rest of MIT. (This incident helped me begin to understand the role of hacking at MIT, but I'll save that for later as well.)

"I'll do my best to be fair," I said.

He gave me an odd look as if to say, "What the hell has that got to do with it?"

 

Win a Subscription to ARTMargins

The launch date for our newest journal, ARTMargins, is fast approaching. ARTMargins will be published three times per year, with the first issue due in Winter 2012. The journal will foster awareness and conversation about contemporary art in Eastern Europe within a global perspective. The journal's focus is art and curatorial practice from Eastern Europe in the context of an expanded global margin that includes Eurasia, North Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central Asia. Content will be organized into articles and critical essays, artist presentations, and reviews. The print journal will serve as a companion to the much acclaimed ARTMargins Online.

You can visit the ARTMargins order page to preorder your subscription to ARTMargins now. Or, you can take advantage of a unique opportunity: in preparation for the first issue's release, we are excited to offer our first ever subscription contest. Answer the three questions below for a chance to win a free subscription to ARTMargins. The questions are related to forthcoming content slated for the first issue of the journal. Submit your answers as a comment on this post, and you will be entered into a drawing to win the free one year subscription. The deadline to enter the contest is December 31, and we will notify the winners mid-January.

QUESTION #1: Vardan Azatyan’sarticle “Disintegrating Progress” describes Armenian artist Hakob Kojoyan’s celebrated work about the life of David of Sassoun, a protagonist of the Armenian epic poem Sasna Tsrer. When was Sasna Tsrer first published?  

QUESTION #2: Octavain Esanu’s article “What Was Contemporary Art” discusses the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art, a group formed to support the growth of contemporary art in Eastern and Central Europe. Which two currently functioning organizations grew from the SCCA?

QUESTION #3: ARTMargins Online has a devoted following and will continue to publish articles, interviews, podcasts, and reviews separately from the printed journal. ARTMargins Online was founded in 1999. Who was the subject of the site’s first interview?  

 

It’s Electric!

Every morning we wake up and automatically reach for the light switch without having a second thought. But imagine if that light switch wasn’t there. Where would we be without electricity? A huge step in the foundation of electricity occurred today in 1878 when The Edison Electric Light Company was opened in New York. It was here that Edison helped create the first effective incandescent bulb and a city electrical lighting system. Here’s a selection of books in recognition of this electric anniversary:

 

Power Struggles: Scientific Authority and the Creation of Practical Electricity before Edison
Michael Brian Schiffer

In 1882, Thomas Edison and his Edison Electric Light Company unveiled the first large-scale electrical system in the world to light a stretch of offices in a city. This was a monumental achievement, but it was not the beginning of the electrical age. After laying out a unified theoretical framework for understanding technological change, Schiffer presents a series of fascinating case studies of pre-Edison electrical technologies, including Volta's electrochemical battery, Thomas Davenport's electric motor, the first mechanical generators, Morse's telegraph, the Atlantic cable, and the lighting of the dome of the U.S. Capitol.

 

When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America
David E. Nye

Where were you when the lights went out? At home during a thunderstorm? Preparing for an air attack during World War II? During the Great Northeastern Blackout of 1965? In California when rolling blackouts hit in 2000? We often remember vividly our time in the dark. In When the Lights Went Out, David Nye views power outages in America from 1935 to the present not simply as technical failures but variously as military tactic, social disruption, crisis in the networked city, outcome of political and economic decisions, sudden encounter with sublimity, and memories enshrined in photographs.

 

The Languages of Edison's Light
Charles Bazerman

Charles Bazerman tells the story of the emergence of electric light as one of symbols and communication. He examines how Edison and his colleagues represented light and power to themselves and to others as the technology was transformed from an idea to a daily fact of life.

 

The End of Energy: The Unmaking of America's Environment, Security, and Independence
Michael Graetz

Americans take for granted that when we flip a switch the light will go on, when we turn up the thermostat the room will get warm, and when we pull up to the pump gas will be plentiful and relatively cheap. In The End of Energy, Michael Graetz shows us that we have been living an energy delusion for forty years.

 

A Century of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, 1882-1982
Karl Wildes and Nilo Lindgren

Electrical engineering is a protean profession. Today the field embraces many disciplines that seem far removed from its roots in the telegraph, telephone, electric lamps, motors, and generators. To a remarkable extent, this chronicle of change and growth at a single institution is a capsule history of the discipline and profession of electrical engineering as it developed worldwide.

 

Power Loss: The Origins of Deregulation and Restructuring in the American Electric Utility System
Richard F. Hirsh

 

In the late 1990s, the formerly staid and monopolistic electric utility industry entered an era of freewheeling competition and deregulation, allowing American consumers to buy electricity from any company offering it. In this book, Richard F. Hirsh explains how and why this radical restructuring has occurred.

 

Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future
Edited by Joseph J. Corn

The history of the future is the history of a society's imagination, and Imagining Tomorrow takes a lively and informative look at the future as envisioned in the American past. Some of the technologies discussed are x-rays, radio, plastics, the electric light, and nuclear power.

 

Mens et Mania Recording Series: Week Five

Last week, Samuel Jay Keyser discussed MIT's parenting responsibility. This week, he reads from Chapter 13 of Mens et Mania and comments on it below.

 

 

 

 

 

CH. 13.After the Aftermath

Even while apartheid “took a backseat,” was there a sense of unease that it would suddenly flare up again? What were your experiences and feelings during this time?

In a nutshell it was waiting for the shoe to drop. Many students needed conflict in order to mature. If there was no obvious conflict on the horizon, then one would have to be conjured up. Unfortunately, a university is an easy place to conjure up conflict. It is also a relatively unthreatening place to conjure up conflict, compared, say, to the world outside the so-called walls of ivy.

Fifteen Percent-Off Friday: November

Happy Friday! In honor of both the "Friday Reads" phenomenon and the first Friday of the month, we're excited to offer a 15 percent discount on When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans by Paula J. Caplan to our blog readers (when purchased through The MIT Press website). Follow this link, which will automatically apply the discount, to get your copy of the book just in time for Veterans Day. *In the (unlikely) event that the discount doesn't appear when you click the link, have no fear--simply manually enter the discount code "caplanpu11" in the shopping cart to get the discount.*

Here's an excerpt from When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home to kick off our first Fifteen Percent-Off Friday. Check back on the first Friday of December (12/2) for our next "Fifteen Percent-Off Friday" pick.

 

It is not surprising that the psychiatrized nature of our culture makes so many nontherapists feel they are out of their league when trying to help people who have been through as much horror as war veterans have. It is true that not every nontherapist, like not every therapist, can help every vet, and some nontherapists, like some therapists, will make mistakes. No approach is free from risk, because all involve interactions between two flawed (because human) beings. But if we consider the pros and cons of outreach from community compared to those of psychotherapy with someone who is regarded as an expert and with psychotrophic drug treatment, perhaps the risks of the first seem not quiet so serious…

There are several ways in which a nontherapist can convey messages that make a difference to vets in a way that therapists cannot. First, some therapists might try to erase the power differential that exists between themselves and their veteran patients because the former are therapists and thus assumed to know more about patients than they know about themselves, to have all the answers. But between a layperson and a vet, this particular power differential does not even rear its head. Laypeople are not being paid to listen to the vet, they do not come from a training program in which they learned certain interpretations of people’s experiences, and are not expected to have all the answers. This can create a more comfortable setting in which the listener and vet can interact. When a nontherapist listener clearly respects and tries to understand what a veteran says, the vet does not have to wonder what professional framework of interpretation might be getting in the way. (This is not to say that all therapists are dogmatic, of course.) Related to this, it is widely known that a major activity of therapists is to assign psychiatric labels to people and to treat as illness anything other than serenity and happiness. Although vets might be concerned that laypeople have absorbed these activities from the broader psychiatrized culture, they at least know that nontherapists do not have a professional stake in pathologizing them. So many vets have told me that the best thing anyone has ever done for them is to say something along the lines of, “If I had been through what you just described that you went through, I would be feeling the same way you are. I don’t think you’re crazy. In fact, if you hadn’t been this upset, I would have wondered why ’ ”36(177).

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36  S. Shane, “A Flood of Troubled Soldiers Is in the Offing, Experts Predict” (New York Times, December 16, 2004), writes that Dr. Thomas Burke, an Army psychiatrist, believes that if vets are told they are not crazy, they often get better rapidly. 

 

 

Mens et Mania Recording Series: Week Four

Last week, Samuel Jay Keyser shared his views on free speech at MIT. This week, Jay reads from Chapter 10 of Mens et Mania and answers a few questions about it below.

 

 

 

 

CH. 10.Don't Tell Me What To Do

 

What role, if any, do you feel you played in MIT’s parenting responsibility?

It is certainly true that MIT has a “parenting responsibility.” That responsibility is self-imposed, by the way. After all, MIT could have organized itself far differently with students living off campus and fending for their personal needs--lodging, food, medical, transportation, safety, etc.--on their own. But it didn’t.

I suppose, then, that in the eyes of the students I was a surrogate parent. I didn’t mean to be. Nor did I want to be. And, whenever possible, I tried not to be. But the nature of the place forces students, faculty and administration into certain roles. Those roles change as the culture changes, but in the 1980’s, it is very likely that I was seen as “surrogate parent” and the students that I had to contend with saw themselves as trying to free themselves from parental authority.

Was this notion of “Don’t tell me what to do” shocking to you or the general faculty in contrast to the students’ intellectual maturity in the classroom, or do you believe this aggressive attitude was displayed in the classroom as well?

“Don’t tell me what to do” had no place in an MIT classroom. It was, in my opinion, a reaction to what went on there. The students were highly constrained by the curriculum. The teachers were world-class researchers. They knew their subjects cold. The students didn’t. That’s what they were there, to match insofar as possible the expertise of their teachers. That is not an easy thing to do. “Don’t tell me what to do,” then, was the driving principle behind everything that was non-academic, the dorm, the dining room, the extracurricular activities like pornography and steer roast. It was a reaction to the pressure of the classroom. Hacking is a more creative and benign form of “Don’t Tell Me What to Do.”