I like the fact that our campus is in an urban environment yet I always feel safe.  I have visited friends at big urban schools like NYU and BU that have very stringent dorm policies that impinge on students' everyday lives.  Here, we come and go as we please.  We are encouraged to make our own lifestyle choices because the administrators generally believe that we are mature enough to do so.

These policies are a reflection of the overall maturity of the MIT community.  I am comfortable leaving my laptop in the reading room for 5 minutes while I grab a snack downstairs because I am confident no other student is going to steal it.  We look out for each other and stealing a laptop is stealing from a person.  We cannot imagine putting a friend, acquaintance, or colleague through that kind of emotional and financial stress.  Yet, somehow people are perfectly capable of stealing chairs from the reading room.  I suppose they can rationalize it because they think they are stealing from the institute or "the man".  What they don't realize is that they are stealing from all of us.  The institute's resources are all of our resources.  We suffer when we go to study and there are no available seats.  We suffer when the CAC has to spend $20k to replace and protect our own chairs and cannot pay for other initiatives that could vastly improve our quality of life.

To steal from another is wrong.  To steal from yourself is just plain dumb.

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2 Comments

  1. Anonymous

    well then is there a way, besides guilting students, to prevent the theft of luxuries in public spaces like the reading room?

  2. Dien V Le

    I don't remember where I read it, but I believe insurance will cover for the lost chairs, not CAC. In exchange for covering for the chairs, they more or less demanded that MIT up its security regarding the reading room, which I think is a good idea anyways. Even though it has a card reader in the front, the door is always open for some reason, as if the reader is broken or something.

    I still have no clue whether it was an outsider or other MIT students who stole the chairs but I would like to believe it wasn't MIT students because like you said, stealing "from yourself is just plain dumb". I remember taking a final at Harvard and when I asked to go to the bathroom, I had to sign out and be escorted to the bathroom, and I thought, "At MIT, there's none of this crap cuz they trust us not to be dishonest."But over the past two years, I've heard of TA recounting about how students change their answers and submit for regrade, I have come to think otherwise. I guess no place in the world is THAT ideal to not have dishonesty.