[gumby]

I replied "this is an excellent analogy" and it was voted down. On the assumption that I was too brief, I'll try again.

From the early 40s through the early 90s MIT was essentially entirely (> 80%) funded by various organs of the US government (I used to read the budget when I was a student, and nowadays the development office sends me the budget). With the end of the Cold War that era came to an end. Interestingly Nicholas Negroponte was one of the few who really recognized this and he set up the media lab on a different structure.*

MIT really struggled to make a transition, which it has only partially made progress on. And what I like about this analogy is that it is trading on someone else's judgement and reputation. The landing page and pitch deck that uses other peoples' logos (typically without permission which I think, in the pitch deck case at least, is just fine, as long as the usage is true). "Trust us! Our B2B solution is trusted by Coca-Cola, Airbus and Lyft!"

A lot of schools name buildings and courses after people. One thing I liked about the old MIT is that they didn't really: Building 2 actually has a name but who really knows it? There were a few exceptions, but they were few. One element of the "new" MIT is that they essentially sell their own credibility ("Steven Schwartzman school of computing is merely the most notorious" and also try to trade it in reverse "Steven Schwarzmann may be a scumbag but he thought we were worth giving money to". Harvard (from its very name) Stanford, etc have all been in on this game for decades and centuries; MIT is just trying to catch up.

* I have mixed feelings about his by that's an unrelated matter

[generationP]

> Building 2 actually has a name but who really knows it?

It helps that rooms are numbered with the building number up front (e.g., 2-351 is building 2 floor 3 room 51), so the number is much more informative than the name.

Also, it's only been the Simons building for 4-5 years or so; before that it was just building 2.

[ghaff]

Although the building number (mostly) doesn’t tell you much about the location except approximately.

[rsfinn]

Not too approximately: Even numbered buildings are to the east of the central grassy plaza (Killian Court), and odd numbered buildings to the west; the numbers tend to increase moving away from the river.

Additionally, buildings outside the main cluster have a cardinal direction prefix (W/NW/N/NE/E) that helps locate them.

<http://whereis.mit.edu>

(I know you know all that; I'm adding context for the readers.)

[ghaff]

I have to admit I never noticed the even/odd rule. Maybe I'd have found Building 2 without having to look it up the other day :-)