Outreach

MIT misused survey data to take action against Senior House by Elizabeth Glaser

A parent shares the results of her investigation into MIT’s participation in the Healthy Minds Study

To the editor:

In Spring of 2015, my son and about 1300 of his fellow undergraduates at MIT participated in a survey conducted by the Healthy Minds Study (HMS). When the final results of that survey were released one year later, the MIT administration took actions specifically focused on the residents of one dorm, Senior House, justifying it by mentioning survey data concerning mental health and substance use issues in the residence.

My son was dismayed to hear of the actions taken, since like other students he had believed the housing data gathered was based on the broad categories asked in the survey such as on or off campus housing, not by specific living group. Although, not living at Senior House, he was not directly impacted by the administrations actions, he stated that if he had known how the data would be used against fellow students he would never have participated.

Read More: https://thetech.com/2017/07/26/healthy-minds-survey-misuse

Who lost Senior House? by Jim Pekar (SB ’81)

Thousands of hours of student time were lost preparing for, attending, and following up on meetings that were part of the official Turnaround, Probation, and Readmission processes for Senior House, all of which failed. These failures can be attributed to poor leadership. The Turnaround process lacked clear goals, objectives, and evaluation criteria. The Probation process lacked clear goals, objectives, and evaluation criteria. The Readmission process had the vague goal of creating “a new community” but no clear evaluation criteria.

Read More: https://thetech.com/2017/07/26/james-pekar-letter

Senior House Mural Update

we need you — to help with the murals!

help 1: 

we need help identifying who painted what and when.  you can go wild on this.  (you can now edit). If you’re not sure, please put a ? after the entry.

help 2: Choose the top 10 murals
The MIT museum plans to hire a photographer to take archive quality photos of up to 10 of the most significant murals.  Instead of pointing a camera at a mural and taking one photo, the photographer would take many, many photos, stitch them all together, and come up with one very large data file.  it’s not so much # of murals as it is “hey we have x number of hours to accomplish this task.” so it will be a ranked top 10 with the expectation that not all would get this extra special treatment.

we’re looking for people to fill in what their preferences are, and then a group of us (shmural) will rank the top choices.  you can vote for your top 10 murals.  The instructions are in the upper left hand corner.  don’t screw it up  (Yeah yeah, i know its not the best method for ranking, but you know what they say — life sucks and then you die).  After everyone votes, Katy Gero, Gabe Cira, and I will look at the results and talk about it, and then let you all know what we think the top 10 should be ranked at.

Criteria:
  1. Original works of art.  many of the murals in the house which we love dearly aren’t original to the house.  because of copyright stuff, we want to capture works by the house, not copies.  interpretations of other people’s art is fine.  some of the ones in the voting list are not originals.  deal with it.
  2. Cultural significance to the house.  interpret as you will.
  3. Likely to be painted over.  This is a bit tricky cause we don’t know which hallway murals will be painted, but basically anything behind or on a door is going to be painted as far as we know at this point.  so — all suites, all rooms, all doors, and towers (is towers a suite???).  my best guess that anything that isn’t “wholesome” or has sport death will also be painted.
  4. well executed.  we’re taking super high res photos.  if the mural itself is not of the best execution, then the photos we have now might suffice to document the photo.

Here are all the photos in case you want to nominate some others I haven’t listed yet.

Here are murals we haven’t photo’d yet, but you might want to remember.