This is pretty much true at all colleges and universities today, not only private institutions like MIT, though the campus and administration buildings seem to be fully open during business hours. Years ago things were more open, up until the late 1990's even dorms were open at all hours, but then 9/11 happened and everyone got scared and paranoid, and there have been a lot of mass shootings at schools, then COVID, so it isn't all that shocking. If you had or have children at university, do you really want an open door policy with non-students allowed to go where they want on campus at any time without appointments or permission and unescorted? It's really a different world, and I think the most prudent position to have is not to expect and you won't be disappointed.
I graduated in the 2010s after attending two universities and this is not my experience at all. Every campus I've been on has been wide open. Technically you're supposed to get permission before auditing a lecture, but no one actually checks and every building is officially open to the public. This is still true in 2022 in the three closest universities to me.
You know, I'm not supposed to be snarky, but in all seriousness, there is a saying about encountering jerks everywhere you go.
My college experience was also quite open, as a state school it was in some sense a public institution and you pretty much could just open a door to a classroom and attend lectures as you wished. A closed campus wouldn't really be practical as students might want to work at any given time of the day - and I sometimes did as an architecture major who spent long hours meticulously finishing projects.
I didn't live on campus, but obviously the dorms were a bit more like apartments with their own ability to manage access and I don't know about admin offices and things - most professors were pretty accessible but I'm sure the doors could lock if they wanted to. But overall academia tries to foster a sense of openness both literally and metaphorically.
> You know, I'm not supposed to be snarky, but in all seriousness, there is a saying about encountering jerks everywhere you go.
The saying you refer to and your comment are both obtuse ad hominems, and I'm not sure who would mistake it for wisdom. I'm far more like hemorrhoids: I endlessly irritate assholes.
This viewpoint is very US-centric, but that said, the rest of the world is moving in the same direction, although much less.
As a current US resident, I can see how cities and their residents can be scary at daytime in ways that eg Europeans can't comprehend (eg Tenderloin in SF), but it's almost exclusively due to the lack of social programs for the homeless, drug addicts and mentally ill, and to a smaller a extent, about the prevelance of firearms.
The American solution, to keep the poor poor, is eating it from the inside. Hiding in your cars, locking down campuses, hiring private security for things like schools and living in gated communities is a terrible living experience, it reduces the reachable living space to the bare minimum. But almost every collective problem has an individual solution here, and few people even believe it's possible to change it.
As a US citizen and resident who has only experienced college campuses in the US, I am forced to agree, but at the same time I would like to divorce myself from any government policies, and especially from whatever is happening in N. California. I also must inform you that I have no ability, personally, to implement social programs.
But I agree with you if you are saying that economic inequality is a huge problem in the US, though your examples of security aren't in a vacuum and at least somewhat are a reaction to and justified by crime, which is probably related to economic inequality. And yet crime is not justified by economic inequality. In a lot of ways, the problem here is appetite: everyone has an endless appetite for wealth, are gluttons for it, jealously, and can never get enough. Personally, I don't think it would be a bad thing if there were no rich and there were no poor, and everyone was gradients of middle class. I don't know how we get there from here.
> If you had or have children at university, do you really want an open door policy with non-students allowed to go where they want on campus at any time without appointments or permission and unescorted?
Dear god, yes. University without an open culture sounds terrible and pointless. Might as well send your kid to some sterile LAC and put them out to pasture.
Then would you want an open door policy on your home with non-residents allowed to go on your property at any time without appointments or permission and unescorted? Does your home sound pointless and terrible without an open culture? How about your place of work? Because while they are students living on campus, it is their home, and while instructors are instructing and administrators administrating on campus it is their place of work.
While I would love to live in a world absent of gun crime and rape and other violent crime, without theft, vandalism, and white collar crime, where no one need lock their doors and no one need protect themselves or their property, unfortunately, a lot of people suck. Universities are organizations and businesses, and it would be great if what is theirs was mine, it is not this way and I have no right to trespass there. As much as it would bother you or me that someone just decided to hang out in our yards on a nice day, or come inside to see what was on the television in the interests of learning, it very well may disturb students and instructors who are all there for a reason, and whatever the heck the non-student is doing there, their reasons for doing so could not be as important.
You are acting like having universities be open to the public is some sort of insane thing. Prior to COVID it was EXTREMELY common. I worked at 3 universities, my partner worked at 3 other universities, and ALL of them had all academic buildings and libraries open to the public during normal business hours with very few exceptions.
Blocking carte blanc access to regular academic buildings was abnormal and even a major academic cultural faux pas prior to 2020. I can't think of a single building access door that was locked. Portions of buildings, lab spaces, classrooms while lectures were in a session -- sure. But not buildings. Everything was always very open to the public and someone had to be really causing issues to be kicked out.
MIT was an outlier in this respect because even things like seminars were always presumed to be open to the public unless stated otherwise.
> Then would you want an open door policy on your home with non-residents allowed to go on your property at any time without appointments or permission and unescorted?
My home is not an academic building at a university, and dorm buildings are not the same as academic buildings.
I don't want random people playing football or taking a piss in my home, but I have no problem with parks or public bathrooms.
> and while instructors are instructing and administrators administrating on campus it is their place of work.
As someone who worked at a university for many, many years: stop lecturing me; I'm supposed to be the one that does the lecturing! ;-)
Also, I can tell you don't work at a university or are yourself a deanlet because no academic says things like "what about the poor administrators?!" ;)
> ...at any time without appointments or permission and unescorted? Does your home sound pointless and terrible without an open culture? How about your place of work?
I have lived and/or worked on university campuses for going on three decades now, and yes, this is entirely normal and I wouldn't have it any other way.
