- About the Lecture
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About the Lecture
Even if the typical MIT hacker doesn’t qualify as a secret agent, he or she is to be admired for pulling off the collegiate world’s most surreptitious, elegant pranks, believes Jay Keyser. While Harvard students get a chuckle out of “putting panties over statues,” MIT students have placed a telephone booth and a police cruiser on top of the massive MIT dome, and landed and then safely exploded a weather balloon on the field of a Harvard-Yale game. Keyser is a fan of these generally anonymous and extremely clever technical pranks. And he’s burrowed into the psychology behind them. The students “are thumbing their nose at the Institute. ‘You want us to be engineers. You’re so damn hard on us. We’ll show you what we think of you.’ So they take us down a peg or two.” In fact, “hack culture is an important component of the mental health of the MIT student body,” Keyser claims. The difference between MIT and every other university, he says, is that MIT students “have bought into the value system of the university.” They’re under the constant burden of judgment and struggle every day with the knowledge that they’re among the best and the brightest. So hacks are “a coping mechanism, a way of putting on sunglasses on a very bright summer day.”Related Videos
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- About the Speaker
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About the Speaker
Samuel Jay Keyser
Peter de Florez Emeritus Professor of Linguistics Special Assistant to the Chancellor
Samuel Jay Keyser is professor emeritus of linguistics and holder of the Peter de Florez chair emeritus at MIT. He was associate provost for institute life from 1986 through 1994 and came by his experience with hacking through his many roles at MIT, including his tenure as housemaster of Senior House. Keyser's most recent book is The Pond God, published by Front Street Books
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About the Host
MIT Activities Committee (MITAC)
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The information on this page was accurate as of the day the video was added to MIT World. This video was added to MIT World on December 11, 2005.
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Where the Sun Shines, There Hack They
- Samuel Jay Keyser
- October 12, 2005
- Running Time: 1:00:51
