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Having lived as long as I have in Boston, I’m not really that surprised. Walk from Kendall to Harvard Squares down Broadway (on a sunny late spring day it’s actually a very nice stroll. If you’re feeling more energetic you can sneak up to Union Square, Somerville, and walk over to Davis. Hillier, I grant you. But not the Himalayas). It’s rather like walking through some international bazaar. The store signs switch languages – Vietnamese, Korean, Creole, Portuguese – every block or so. Yes, we live in a “multicultural” community, but one which exists comfortably in enclaves.
So too at the Institute. I run into it all the time. I meet someone, tell them where I work, and they ask me “Do you know . . . ” Oddly, more often than not it’s “Do you know Noam Chomsky?” If not, it’s likely to be a computer scientist or particle physicist or cutting-edge gene-splicer. And usually I have to answer in the negative. We just don’t have much real contact with each other. Even less on the horizontal or hierarchical . . . Junior Faculty, Senior Faculty, Support Staff, Undergraduates, Dormitory residents, FSILG folk, East Campus, West Campus. The dividing lines seem to have no end.
Which is not my real point. When I first arrived here, I noticed right away how touchy MIT students were on the score of “geekiness.” And indeed you could go pretty far, nowadays, before you saw a pocket-protector on the Infinite Corridor. But we still take pride in our peculiarity. The least effective argument in favor of any motion or proposal (from mandatory dining plans to on-campus housing for freshmen to adjusting the GIRs) is that “the rest of the world does it this way.” “But we’re MIT, after all. We’re unique.” Even if that means “bizarre” or “self-punishing.”
We take such pride in our subsidiary uniquenesses, as well. I know I have a great deal of pleasure confounding friends from outside MIT with the notion that, of all things, I teach poetry to engineers. The wife of a college classmate of mine once introduced herself with a hearty handshake and the remark that “Rick says you’re the bravest man he knows.” As if working with the smartest late-adolescents on this side of the Worm Hole somehow merits the Purple Heart.
“Community” is a buzzword, at the moment – the issue du jour, you might say (drinking seemingly having slipped into the shadow, at least momentarily). President Vest, Chancellor Clay, the Task Force on Student Life and Learning, the UA, the GSC, faculty committees – everyone talks about the proliferation of communities on campus and the absence of any apparent overarching community. Well, it’s a rather large place, and it is hardly surprising that like seeks out like. Or that “likeness” is individually-defined.
But can we learn to be less proud of our unlikeness? I always am astonished, when (at one of those wonderful dinners Jay Keyser hosts, or on a faculty committee, or a graduate student coffee hour, or just having lunch at Lobdell) I actually encounter my fellow Institute denizens, how alike we are. Overworked (nothing so annoys me as when a student asks for some sort of course relief on the grounds that he/she is “busy”), stressed-out, feeling at the mercy of the administration or our supervisors, committed to what we do but worrying that we have taken a wrong step and should have gone to law school after all: we sing the same aria, in different keys. Which is not to droop into some variety of the text of Beethoven’s Ninth – “All Techies must be brothers/sisters.” But then again, it’s a moment when the words AND the music have always spoken richly to me. So let’s hum a few bars and see where it gets us.
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