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And now I get to comment that "Random" has got to be one of the most, er, random names for a dorm I have ever heard. The first time I saw it in print I thought it was a joke.
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<p>Actually, it IS a joke. Or, at least there's a funny story about the name. When MIT decided to buy an old apartment building near Central Square and turn it into a dorm in the late 60s, the students thought it would be amusing to call it "Random House." The original house president and an MIT dean even invited Bennett Cerf, then president of Random House publishing company, to come to the official dedication.</p>
<p>The company was, apparently, NOT amused and the company's lawyers wrote some stuffy "cease and desist" letter threatening a lawsuit over trademark infringement.</p>
<p>So....officially, the name had to be changed to "Random Hall," though I understand that residents used the designation Random House unofficially for some time afterwards. </p>
<p>When you think about the amounts of money that donors pay to get their names on college buildings, not to mention the amount of money that company's pay for the free publicity that comes from things like "product placements" in movies and TV programs, it's pretty funny that Random House publishers insisted that the dorm's name had to be changed! (I believe there was some discussion of trying "Maxwell House" next!)</p>
<p><a href="http://web.mit.edu/random-hall/www/History/founding_and_naming.html%5B/url%5D">http://web.mit.edu/random-hall/www/History/founding_and_naming.html</a></p>
<p>On a MUCH sadder note, there have been two young women who have committed suicide in dramatic highly publicized cases at Random in the past 5 years. There are two wrongful death suits pending.</p>
<p>In April 2000, Elizabeth Shin, a bio major, burned herself to death in Random. As mentioned elsewhere on this forum, her parents are suing because MIT mental health professionals did not keep them informed as to how Elizabeth's mental state had worsened right before her death and administrators at colleges all over the country are watching that case very closely.</p>
<p>Just one year later, in April 2001, Julie Carpenter, another young woman in Random, a chemical engineering major, committed suicide by taking cyanide. Her parents are also suing MIT for wrongful death, saying that MIT authorities failed to protect their daughter adequately from a stalker who had been a fellow Random resident--allegedly he had used a master key (which he had possesion of because he worked the front desk at Random) to break into her room, taken videos of her with her boyfriend which he later showed to others, captured keystrokes from her computer keyboard in order to discern her IM conversations, camped out on a couch outside her room, etc. Although he admitted he had behaved inappropriately had been originally required to move out of Random, an MIT disciplinary panel later ruled that he could reapply to live in Random again the following fall.</p>
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The panel made its decision on Friday, April 20, 2001, the suit says. The following Wednesday, Carpenter picked up a copy of the panels decision left in an unattended room and signed for it, the suit says. No one from MIT spoke with Julie concerning the contents of the decision or monitored her reaction to it.
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<p>A few days after she read the panel's decision, she used her laptop to order cyanide, which she took a few days later. The copy of the ruling was found in her room after her suicide.</p>
<p><a href="http://www-tech.mit.edu/V123/N27/27carpenter.27n.html%5B/url%5D">http://www-tech.mit.edu/V123/N27/27carpenter.27n.html</a></p>
<p>Especially given the small size and close-knit community of Random, these two suicides must have taken a terrible toll on everyone around them.</p>
<p>Ironically, token, as the article above mentions, Julie attended a birthday party on the Random roof deck the night before her suicide at which only lemonade and chocolate chip cookies were served. The article gives no indication that alcohol was involved in her death--just a very troubled student dealing with a combination of a very demanding curriculum and an obsessed and immature young man who did not respect her right to any sort of privacy---and an institution which was not sensitive enough to realize that she might want some reassurance that she would be protected from further intrusions.</p>
<p><a href="http://www-tech.mit.edu/V123/N27/27carpenterside.27n.html%5B/url%5D">http://www-tech.mit.edu/V123/N27/27carpenterside.27n.html</a></p>
<p>According to the timeline in the above article, he did not dispute the charges against him at the February 19 judicial committee meeting. He was required to move out of the dorm, but it seem that it took quite a bit of time for him to actually move out...he finally moved out on March 7. On April 20, the administrative review panel decided he should have weekly counseling sessions and read 3 books about victim trauma and write an essay before he would be allowed to apply to move back in in the fall.</p>
<p>On the face of it, this somewhat boggles the mind. A young man admits that he abused the master key entrusted to him as part of his job monitoring the front desk to REPEATEDLY invade a young woman's privacy in this way. Back when marite and texas137 went to college, I would think such a person would have been kicked out of college for GOOD, not just asked to move out of his dorm for a few months (while apparently staying enrolled as a student.) </p>
<p>Julie's boyfriend and friends had become deeply concerned as she became suicidal over this issue by late February. A firiend's mother who happened to be an M.D. learned how troubled Julie was and--with Julie's permission--Dr. Josephson communicated her concerns to MIT officials in considerable detail in late February. Dr. Josephson's letter ended poignantly: "I chose to write to you to be certain that this problem would not be kept from your attention. Weve lost too many MIT kids to suicide. Please help."</p>
<p>Yet nobody at MIT was sensitive enough to monitor her reaction to the discovery that the administrative panel had agreed to allow her stalker to reapply to move back in to Random.</p>
<p>It sounds as though the information from Dr. Josephson (the friend's mother) got lost in the shuffle/administrative maze and didn't wind up in the hands of the people who really needed to know---the counselors working with Julie and the people on the administrative panel dealing with the issue. </p>
<p>There are a lot of troubling issues here...we're only seeing one side of the story in these articles, unfortunately, but on the face of the facts in the Carpenters' lawsuit, it's hard to understand why the MIT administrators and mental health people were not more sensitive in this situation---especially in the wake of a tragic suicide a year before in the same, small, close-knit dorm where one would imagine that everyone knows one another.</p>