[ericd]

I can tell you that the student body at MIT generally had a pretty dim view of the admins when I was there, always trying to kill the things that make MIT an amazing place, while building stupidly overpriced vanity buildings. Not to mention the incredibly shameful way they handled the Aaron Swartz case.

[sokoloff]

I think there were a mix of cases when I was there, with admins sometimes supporting the wonderful weird and other times not. Often when they did, it was because the weird was only a background level of annoying/risky and when they didn’t, it was often that the level of cacophony had exceeded that admin’s tolerance for it.

[Throwawayaerlei]

It got worse: while the admissions office and museum were using MIT hacking culture to attract applicants and advance its brand, the school changed both the type of officers hired for the campus police which is necessary due to its inner city location and started arresting students for attempting to pull off harmless hacks. I also heard some reports they got generally more aggressive towards the student population.

When I was there they hired older, very experienced police officers who were looking for a good, not normally intense final job for their career. So they were generally understanding and fit into the culture.

Aaron Swartz was an entirely different thing. Instead of hammering JSTOR from his own institution of Harvard to the point it blocked the whole campus, he disguised himself demonstrating mens rea, a guilty mind, let himself into a machine room and left behind the laptop to do his act of civil disobedience or whatever. And then proved chronically depressed people have no business committing such crimes. From beginning to end he demonstrated ill intent towards MIT.