Letters to the Editor
Thanks, Administrators!
I would just like to thank the MIT administration for providing the MIT student body with so many great community-building opportunities like the protest in Lobby 7 on Tuesday.
By misunderstanding or outright ignoring many students’ views on dining, hacking, and other issues — thereby angering large portions of the student body in one way or another — many of us have really come together and built strong bonds as a community of outraged MIT students. More than any dining hall or communal kitchen cooking experience could ever accomplish, the MIT students concerned about the future quality of student life for ourselves and those unfortunate enough to follow have formed a strong sense of true community.
Why, just at Tuesday’s protest, I ate the nutritious and tasty lunch I had cooked for myself in my kitchen at Senior Haus the night before, chatted with many friends and acquaintances from both sides of Mass Ave and the Charles River, got a bunch of help in learning LaTeX for a problem set, solved several problems on a different problem set, and got a date to the track prom. Talk about community building!
And all of it was facilitated by our wonderful MIT administration, which continues to dismiss student concerns instead of listening to them with the respect normally rendered to adults with their own needs and desires. Thank you, MIT administrators!
Stop Wasteful Behavior on Campus
Paper requisitions are still a common way to place purchases across the Institute. The carbon-backed forms come in 100-page booklets and can be acquired from the Office of the VP for Finance at 600 Tech Square.
On February 17, having exhausted our lab’s supply, I took a detour during lunch to pick up more booklets.
Imagine my surprise when I was handed a single page instead of the usual maximum of two booklets. Then, imagine my annoyance when I discovered that the reason for this frugality was that someone had commandeered the storage room where 85 boxes of these books were stored and had thrown them all out to free up space. By my rough estimation, each box contained at least 60 books, meaning that at least 8100 books were carelessly discarded.
Until Office Depot can print more, the forms are being rationed at a single page per request.
What’s really disturbing is that the situation could have been so much worse. What if, instead of tens of thousands of blank forms, these boxes had held important records, confidential student information, or proprietary research data? Would they be lying in the street for anyone to find or lost forever in some landfill?
Hopefully, this is an isolated incident, but it suggests a certain level of bureaucratic incompetence or negligence. If the Institute is committed to increasing efficiency across campus, then such wasteful behavior must be addressed.