What Matters: April 2003
Nightwork: Hackito Ergo Sum
Contributors: Institute Historian T. F. Peterson NON '57, Charles M. Vest HM, Samuel Jay Keyser HM, Brian Leibowitz '82, SM '84, and Anon E. Mouse HM
Police car on dome. Photo: Donna Coveney.
This edition of What Matters looks at that time-honored MIT sport of hacking and celebrates the publication of Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT with a few excerpts from the book.
Institute Historian T. F. Peterson NON '57 gives some historical background, noting that the "spirit and traditions" of the practice were established long before the terminology "hacking" came into use; Brian Leibowitz '82, SM '84 writes about the origins of the term which was MIT slang long before the advent of computers. Charles M. Vest HM recalls his favorite hack—the disappearance of his office on his first day as President of MIT. And Samuel Jay Keyser HM, former provost for Institute life and holder of the Peter de Florez Chair for Humor, explains the context for this rebellious—but carefully cultivated—tradition. All the contributions demonstrate the spirit, ingenuity, care, and invention of the anonymous nightworkers who lose sleep just to bring a few smiles (and a little bewilderment) onto the faces of those who labor at the world's leading technology university. As publication of this book makes clear, these hacks have gained an appreciative and growing audience worldwide. Also included are enlightening and humorous recollections from alumni gathered over a two-month period.
Photo: Terri Iuzzolino Matsakis '93, '98, MNG '98.
Where no cow has gone before: accessing the inaccessible
By Institute Historian T. F. Peterson HM
Armchair aficionados of the sport often assume that hacking was a twentieth-century phenomenon. But even before the Institute crossed the bridge from Boston to Cambridge in 1916, MIT students were hacking. John Ripley Freeman, renowned civil engineer and member of the class of 1875, noted in his memoirs that pranksters habitually sprinkled iodide of nitrogen, a mild contact explosive, on the drill room floor, adding considerable snap to routine assembly.
Of course, pranksters weren't called hackers back then; only within the last thirty years has the term hack been synonymous with campus hijinks (see Hack, hacker, hacking below). But it was in those formative years of hacking at MIT—well before the term was coined—that the spirit and traditions of the sport were established.
Institute hacks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were primitive by today's standards—jokes played on professors or pranks sparked by inter-class rivalries. Freshmen would steal the sophomore class flag before the annual football game. Sophomores would rearrange the furniture in freshmen dorm rooms while students were at class meetings. But in the 1920s, the Dorm Goblin, the first documented hacking group, raised the bar, setting the standard for subsequent generations of MIT hackers to follow or surpass.
In January 1928, the Dorm Goblin threaded a 35-foot telegraph pole through Senior House Dormitory and a few months later coaxed a live cow to the roof of the '93 dorm. (She went up fairly happily but was none too pleased to make the trip down.) This early cow prank set a trend that inspired the title of Neil Steinberg's book about college pranks, If At All Possible, Involve a Cow (St. Martin's, 1992). The addition of social responsibility to the hackers' creed in the late twentieth century made them revert to fiberglass bovinus.
The Dorm Goblin moved on to more technical pranks, like turning dormitory phones into radio speakers, which allowed students to fill their rooms with the latest tunes by taking the receiver off the hook. The Goblin was also more than likely responsible for launching the door hacking tradition that persisted for decades.
Since the earliest days of the Dorm Goblin, one underlying motivation behind MIT pranks has been to conquer the inaccessible and make possible the improbable. Often hackers have employed this vision in the creation of surrealist still lifes or absurd dioramas—a telephone booth on top of one of the Institute's signature domes, for example, or a dormitory room set up on the frozen Charles River. Full-size sailboats have found their way into moats and swimming pools. But making possible the improbable requires skill, attention to detail, and careful research. In 1976, for example, hackers consulted an arachnologist and examined spider webs with an electron microscope before constructing the multi-storied Burton spider web with 1,250 feet of nylon rope and steel wire.
Hacking ethics
The irreverent HowToGAMIT Guide (How to Get Around MIT) is the ultimate MIT handbook. This excerpt from HowToGAMIT sets forth the hackers' code as it stands in the early twenty-first century.
- Be safe. Your safety, the safety of your fellow hackers, and the safety of anyone you hack should never be compromised.
- Be subtle. Leave no evidence that you were ever there.
- Leave things as you found them (or better).
- If you find something broken call F-IXIT (the local number for reporting problems with the buildings and grounds). Hackers often go places that Institute workers do not frequent regularly and may see problems before anyone else.
- Leave no damage.
- Do not steal anything.
- Brute force is the last resort of the incompetent. ("One who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of reason."—Keshlam the Seer, Knight of the Random Order)
- Do not hack while under the influence of alcohol/drugs/etc.
- Do not drop things (off a building) without a ground crew.
- Do not hack alone (just like swimming).
- Above all, exercise common sense.
Hack, hacker, hacking
By Brian Leibowitz '82
The fifties saw the beginnings of the MIT term hack. The origin of the term in the MIT slang is elusive—different meanings have come in and out of use, and it was rarely used in print before the 1970s. Furthermore, the use of hack varied among different groups of students at MIT. "Hacking" was used by many MIT students to describe any activity undertaken to avoid studying—this could include goofing off, playing bridge, talking to friends, or going out. Performing pranks was also called hacking, but only as part of the broader definition. In the middle to late fifties, additional meanings for the word hack were developed by members of the Tech Model Railroad Club, including an article or project without constructive end or an unusual and original solution to a problem, such as inventing a new circuit for a switching system. In the late fifties, students on campus began to use the word as a noun to describe a prank.
Also in the late fifties, telephone hacking, the study of the internal codes and features of telephone switching systems, emerged. Here, the word hack was used to imply doing something outside the norm; telephone systems were made to do things that the system designers never anticipated.
In the late sixties and the seventies, the meaning of the word hack broadened to include activities that tested limits of skill, imagination, and wits. Hacking was investigating a subject for its own sake and not for academic advancement, exploring the inaccessible places on campus, doing something clandestine or out of the ordinary, and performing pranks.
The word hack found its way into common usage outside MIT with the advent of computer hacking in the early sixties. In the eighties, experts in the computer field made a distinction between hacking and cracking. Hacking denotes nondestructive mischief while cracking describes activities such as unleashing a computer virus, breaking into a computer, or destroying data.
By the mid eighties, hacking had come to be used at MIT primarily to describe pranks and exploring the Institute. Many of the earlier definitions have disappeared from use on campus.
Intriguing hacks To fascinate people
By Institute Historian T. F. Peterson HM
The origins of the acronym IHTFP are strictly anecdotal. Many have claimed the amorphous motto as their own. Its use has been unofficially documented in both the United States Air Force and at MIT as far back as the 1950s. Whatever its ancestry, generations of MIT students have delighted in the acronym's infinite versatility. IHTFP has appeared on sign posts and in Greenspeak; it's even been printed on shoelaces. The point is to use it creatively: I Hate to Face Physics, It's Hard to Fondle Penguins, I Have Truly Found Paradise. And of course there's the age-old tuition gripe, I Have to Forever Pay. But these flights of fancy are merely riffs on IHTFP's widely accepted primary meaning: "I Hate This F*&^ing Place."
The Case of the Disappearing President's Office
By MIT President Charles M. Vest HM
It simply isn't even close when it comes to naming my favorite and most unforgettable hack. That's because I was the hackee.
It all goes back to my very first day on the job nearly twelve years ago, on Monday, October 15, 1990. The late vice president Constantine Simonides was escorting me to my office—his was across the hall—on the second floor of Building 3. When we arrived, however, there was no office to be seen, only a large bulletin board, flush against the wall and covered with newspaper clippings, including several about the search that led to my selection as president, and also clips from The Tech headlines, "Vest Takes Over on Monday."
So good was the ruse that Constantine became momentarily disoriented and thought we had, perhaps, while engrossed in conversation, climbed the stairs to the wrong floor. Then we broke out in hearty laughter when we realized what had happened: the bulletin board, ingeniously constructed and snugly fitted within the opening, was moved aside and, lo, there were the outer doors to the president's and provost's offices.
We gave the bulletin board a place of honor and humor for a time, and I still have it. As I explained later that day to a group I was addressing, "My first major policy is that we're going to keep that. The first time issues get hot on campus, we'll put it back in place. "Well, there have been some fairly hot issues, but none so bad that I've had to hide behind the bulletin board.
If there was a message in all this, I suppose, it was that MIT presidents come and go, as do students, but the rich culture and traditions of the Institute will endure. The student hackers, who remained anonymous, left behind a bottle of champagne as a gesture of welcome and goodwill. Later, when we opened it, we toasted the hackers and MIT students generally, whose ever-inventive minds help to make MIT such a special place.
Where the Sun Shines, There Hack They
By Professor Emeritus Samuel Jay Keyser HM
The title of Brian Leibowitz' historical compendium of MIT hacks, The Journal of the Institute for Hacks, TomFoolery & Pranks at MIT (MIT Museum, 1990—now out of print) is itself a hack. Embedded in it are the initials IHTFP (describe above). This is not the acronym's only "public" commemoration. The Class of 1995 changed the date embossed on the Dome image in the class ring from MCMXVI to IHTFP, something obvious only with a magnifying glass or a sharp eye. Earlier classes have done similar recodings of the MIT ring.
During my years as associate provost for Institute life, many of my colleagues approached me with this question: If students hate this place, then why don't they just plain leave it? It is a good question to which, I think, there is a good answer: they DON'T hate this place. But if they don't, the conversation continues, why say they do? An equally good question.
The answer lies, I believe, in unpacking the hacking. When we do, we find the practical-joke-cum-parody lurking beneath. The practical joke is physical in character. One does not tell practical jokes. One plays them. Similarly, one does not tell hacks. They, too, are played. Here is how Arthur Koesler describes the practical joke in his Encyclopedia Britannica article:
"The coarsest type of humour is the practical joke: pulling away the chair from under the dignitary's lowered bottom. The victim is perceived first as a person of consequence, then suddenly as an inert body subject to the laws of physics: authority is debunked by gravity, mind by matter; man is degraded to a mechanism."
The operative words here are authority debunked. The hack is a physical joke designed to do just this. But it is not any physical joke. Hacks have a strong element of parody in them. They are physical jokes that parody the honest work of an Institute grounded in science and engineering. That is why MIT hacks, unlike hacks at other institutions, always have a strong engineering component. They make fun of engineering by impersonating it and then pulling the seat out from under. MIT hackers typically don't throw pies or wrap underwear around statues of founding fathers. Rather, they make large objects appear in inaccessible places, rewire lecture hall blackboards to go haywire when the instructor tries to use them, replace chiseled wisdom on friezes with silly sayings in what appears to be identical script and then do so so cleverly that it takes a SWAT team of trained rappellers to dismantle them.
Why does MIT hacking have such a long half-life? The answer lies in something called disobedient dependency. In order to stay in a dependent relationship that is both desirable and yet threatening, one coping mechanism is disobedience. It distances the dependency, makes it bearable. Let me give an example drawn from my experience as a housemaster at Senior House. During the 1980s President Gray and his wife gave garden parties for the parents of incoming freshmen. The President's garden was filled with incoming sons and daughters and their parents. Several Senior House students took this as an opportunity to be ostentatiously disobedient. They would dress as grungily as possible. Then they would scale the wall separating the Senior House courtyard from the President's House garden and mingle with the well-dressed, well-scrubbed guests, scarfing crabmeat sandwiches as if they were auditioning for the part of John Belushi in a remake of Animal House. The more outrageous the behavior, the better. Some of the more inventive students would dress up as characters from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Most, however, did not, attempting to épater le bourgeois, as it were, without props. More often than not, someone would dump a bottle of detergent in the garden fountain in order to intensify the nuisance value of his or her presence.
The superficial motive behind such disobedience was to embarrass those in authority, the president, his spouse, the various deans, and housemasters who showed up for the occasion. The crashers were declaring their independence from the Institute and all its folderol. The deeper motive was to provide distance between themselves and the Institute so that its judgments of them, upon which they deeply depended, would be less painful when they were made.
Why do I say that students deeply depend on the Institute's judgments of them? The reason is that the values of the students and of the faculty are the same. For the most part, the faculty are the best at what they do. The students come here to be like them. When the faculty grades them, those judgments can be painful because the students believe they are true. At some level our students know that while they are all in the top 5 percent of their high school classes, they will soon be recalibrated downward. I say at some level because a poll taken not too long ago asked the incoming class how many of them thought they would end up in the top quarter. Something like 75 percent said they would! At least half of those responding were about to discover they were not as good as they thought, not an easy pill to swallow at any stage of one's life.
Unlike the extreme kinds of disobedience that one often finds in living groups, the hack is a socially acceptable form of disobedience. It is easily distinguished from its more extreme counterparts by three properties. Hacks are technologically sophisticated, anonymous, and benign. They are technologically sophisticated because they need to parody an MIT education. They are anonymous because were they otherwise, the Institute might be forced, if only for safety reasons, to do something about them. They are benign because their goal is not to inflict pain, but to cope with pain inflicted. They do this by making fun of the Institute, diminishing it, bringing it down to size so that its judgments are brought down to size as well.
The hack is a pact that the Institute and its students enter into. Keep it anonymous, harmless, and fun and MIT will look the other way. It will even be mildly encouraging because it recognizes, as do the students, that students need to turn the Institute into an adversary. This, by the way, is why the adversarial undercurrent between students and the Institute won't go away, no matter how supportive student services are or how solicitous our staff might be or how accessible the faculty makes itself.
The hack isn't the only buffering mechanism. Another is the special relationship that students have to their living groups. Why does where a student lives take on such monumental proportions at MIT? Part of the answer is that living groups function much like disobedience; namely, as a kind of protection against the slings and arrows of institutional judgment. Living groups are safe houses, ports in a storm, raingear to keep them dry once the firehose is turned on. This them/us division is so profound, in fact, that long after they have graduated, students talk in terms not of having been at MIT but rather of having been at Senior House, or Sigma Chi, or MacGregor. MIT tacitly acknowledges this as well, which is why changing the very peculiar system of residence selection called R/O is like pulling teeth. The buffering function of the resident system is as much a part of an MIT education as are the General Institute Requirements. The same is true of hacks.
Hacks and living groups, then, are to the Institute what sunglasses are to the sun: a form of protection that makes it possible to live with the light. Not every student hacks. Not every student feels the same degree of disobedient dependency. But every time hackers help to place a police car on the dome, they are providing shade in a very sunny clime.
Alumni Remember Hacks
Alumni and others members of the MIT community were asked: What's your favorite hack? Do you have any hacking memories to share? What do you think of the tradition?
Read their responses.
Michael J. Bauer '92:
I'm glad to see that people are still getting good use out of my IHTFP page.
I think the tradition is wonderful. It is engineering creativity that is accessible to the world, unlike most of the work of engineers. It also (generally) provides a great deal of positive publicity for MIT.
Of the hacks I've seen and heard of, my all-time favorite is the Acme Roadrunner Trap, one of the many hairball hacks. It was quick to deploy, immediately funny, non-destructive, and accessible to nearly everyone—and made clear commentary on the proposed sculpture.
Lloyd Marks '71:
It was a cold winter day, class year 1968-69 (the truly wild years!)
In Baker House a group of students shovel snow into the shower room, open the windows and call the Boston Globe to inform them that MIT student have figured out a way to make artificial snow in a common shower. The Globe reporter falls for the prank hook, line, and sinker and prints the story the following day. The story is so interesting that it gets picked up by the wire services and distributed nationally. The reporter is then informed that he was the victim of a hack and retractions had to be published.
I can't remember who the mastermind of the hack was but he provided us with a good few days of belly laughs!
Another alum sheds light on this story anonymously:
FYI, I was one of the MIT students involved in the Great Snow Job in the late 1960s. The fact that my roommate at the time was from (warm and sunny) Puerto Rico gave us the idea to claim it was so cold in the Baker House dorms during the winter that it actually snowed in the bathroom while he was trying to take a shower. The photo of this hoax appeared on the front page of one of Boston's major daily newspapers after we invited a reporter to witness this event. A few years ago I donated my copy of this newspaper to the MIT Museum, where (I hope) it is still available to see.
Krisztian Orban MBA '01:
In 2001, I was present at the graduation ceremony of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the preeminent foreign service school of the country. The school is located in the Boston area at Tufts University. The graduation speaker was Kofi Annan, an MIT grad. As he was delivering his speech, he received a lot of applause. This was partly because what he said, but partly because soon-to-be diplomats tend to be very polite.
A good 10 minutes into his speech he mentioned that he is quite familiar with the Boston atmosphere, because he had attended MIT. That was the moment when I started clapping. First nobody knew what is happening, but I was going on. After a couple of seconds of clapping, the polite folks followed suit. Finally, he got a full applause for mentioning MIT.
Mr. Annan was clearly puzzled. He could not resist saying that "you are really very polite, you are even cheering for other schools."
Wesley Moore '70, SM '73:
In the late '60s, I was on the staff of Voo Doo (I hope some people remember Voo Doo...) when I had the brilliant idea of having a hack contest as part of our ongoing and mostly ineffective publicity campaign.
We put up a lot of flyers, and mentioned it in the mag, promising some inexpensive prize, and waited to see what happened...
There was only one response, but it was exquisite on many levels: another group with access to a mimeo machine put up flyers announcing that the "administration" had forced us to call it off.
I thought this was "classic" because:
- It eliminated any competition,
- It was a hack on us, and
- It sort of slapped down the idea of doing hacks for any reason other than the sheer helluvit.
David Plass '90:
One of the few hacks I saw in person was when the space-frame in Lobby 7 was transformed into an enormous 6-sided die. It was quite a complex hack (with documentation!) that remained up until the entire frame was taken down. Rumor was that physical plant couldn't figure out how to remove the cloth because it was too high in the air.
Wayne Seltzer '81, SM '82:
Sometime during 1980 (I think), fancy new terminals were installed in the Baker House dining hall to accommodate the new dining cards with magnetic stripes. This replaced a tried and true manual system (pencil and paper.) Tina, our favorite dining hall staff person, didn't much like this new technology, what with its beeps and boops and LED display.
One night, a bunch of us course 6 nerds, rewired the machine so that it talked to Tina every time she inserted a card. We connected the machine's speaker to a spare "dormphone" line and wired in a tape player utility closet somewhere in the bowels of Baker's basement.
We recorded all kinds of rude "sound bites" such as, "Hey, didn't that guy eat enough today?" or "Make sure this one finished his vegetables before he gets ice cream."
Tina was not amused, and actually seemed quite convinced that at MIT, one should expect machines to talk. It was quite entertaining to watch her talk back to the machine until she realized it was a hack.
Anonymous:
Lobby 7 was hacked back in 1991 ('93?)—it was turned into a temple to the goddess Athena, and rumor had it that a couple got married there at midnight. It was really amazing; the windows to Mass. Ave. were turned to "stained glass." Anyone who remembers more or has a picture, it would be great!
(Anon E. Mouse Notes: The date was 1992, and Lobby 7 was turned into a Cathedral of Our Lady of the All-Night Tool, a reference to an earlier performance prank. There was indeed a wedding in the "Cathedral." Read the enlightening description.)
Anonymous:
My favorite has to be the taking of the Route 128 sign, a masterpiece of planning and coordination. I still remember seeing the sign disappear from sight as it was taken down. It took two cars and a number of MIT students. Some were set up as lookouts and the rest took the supports down. We kept in communication with walkie talkies. Once the sign was down, it was floated downriver on large inner tubes to a small park where the final breakdown was done and the pieces loaded into the waiting cars.
Anonymous:
My first hack experience was during R/O week my freshman year, 1990. The freshman class was gathered for its class picture on the steps of Lobby 10 when a banner with the word SMILE was dropped down from above and hundreds of super balls were dropped on our heads. A super ball fight immediately began between the freshmen and the upperclassmen who were gathered behind the camera man. The poor camera man then asked "Please don't throw balls at the camera!" You can guess what happened next. I still have a super ball from that day. Rumor has it that one of the super balls said "You won!" on it.
Anonymous:
In October of 1972, a team of hackers from MacGregor House made their way to the top of the Mass. Ave. dome and covered the dome in black plastic. Painted on the plastic were two eyes which looked like they were peering over the edge of the roof. It was somewhat like the Army Kilroy was here drawings from WWII or earlier.
We worked all night to get it done and physical plant had it down in about 45 minutes after the sun was up. They nicely rolled up all the plastic and wound up all the rope and left it all in those rolling "laundry hampers" they use for trash, etc.
So, we simply carried it all back to the roof and re-installed it the next night. It was fun and was a great relief from tooling. I can't believe that I even remember the word tooling!
Anonymous:
About 1978 Burton One students assembled a large pink paper mache nipple measuring approximately 15 feet across, to be placed on the Great Dome. Unfortunately, campus police noticed the small crowd struggling to move the object down Amherst Alley, and asked if they could help. When their offer was declined, they confiscated the object, even though they weren't sure what it was for.
Anonymous:
Hey, we always thought the hacking, which peaked just before finals, was a sexual thing that relieved the enormous tension. There was hardly any widespread sex, so it was hacks, masturbation, or fistfights. Many of the hacks I saw were designed specifically to startle or discomfit women, and were successful insofar as they accomplished this.
Hacks were also attractive if they involved large forces, for example, explosives, or violent chemical reactions. Hacks were good if they made authority figures helpless: the famous welding the MBTA to the tracks comes to mind. Stretching the steel cable across Mem Drive in a snowstorm, another. Hacks did not have to be reversible or completely harmless; damage to property was allowable, damage to people not encouraged, but not regretted.
Projectiles were good, the phone system was a perpetual target, and vehicles of all kinds were fair game. A drum of urethane foam catalyzed in a dorm room is a prime example of an irreversible hack. Somebody else got their room stuffed with paper, that, in frustration, the resident reputedly lit. One end of East Campus almost vanished that time. An almost daily indoor hack involved one M-80 firecracker and a sopping wet roll of Springfield Oval. I remember that a little NI3 in a keyhole had the unforeseen effect of blowing a key back through a guy's hand. The line between hacks and vandalism was pretty blurry, and in the '60s, hacking started to look like social protest, which was odd on a politically conservative campus. I think the use of explosives declined as soon as the New Left appeared!
The memory of being one of a gaggle of giggling nerds running for cover before some Tech Infernal mechanism smoked, or gassed, or exploded, or leaked, or inflated, is there for me, and unfortunately, still appealing.
Anonymous:
About 1977, a Burton-Connor resident was traveling up the New England Turnpike when he saw a large man driving a new Cadillac. When the MIT student got to the toll booth, he paid his toll and the toll for the Cadillac, asking the toll booth operator to tell the driver behind him that there was no toll that day because it was "Cadillac Day." The MIT student did this at each of the toll booths except for the last one, at which he pulled over and instead watched the man in the Cadillac drive through the booth without stopping. A police cruiser went after the Cadillac and pulled him over for toll evasion, and he could be seen trying to explain to the trooper that he didn't think he had to pay a toll because it was "Cadillac Day."
Anonymous:
About 1977, a couple Burton-Connor residents went out and bought a barber shop pole. They proceeded to walk around Cambridge and as soon as they saw a police car, they would run away. A police chase then ensued, and when they were caught, they eventually showed the officers a paid receipt for the pole and they were let go. After doing this repeatedly, the Cambridge police issued an APB to all cars: "If you see a couple of kids running away with a barber shop pole, ignore them. They are just a couple of MIT students with a receipt, trying to make you chase them." The students heard this on their police scanner and then went out and stole about a dozen barber shop poles from all over Cambridge. These were deposited on the Cambridge Police Chief's yard at about 3:00 a.m., and then they called him on his unlisted phone to ask why there were so many barber shop poles in his yard.
Anonymous:
How is this for a hack? Instead of spending hours of brainstorming about how to put up a police cruiser on top of the dome, the best and the brightest spend some time in figuring out how to help out the families of Boston whose rents have skyrocketed due in part to those same students' tendency to forgo the dorms and move into apartments that they share.
Sources
"Hack, Hacker, Hacking" reprinted from the The Journal of the Institute of Hacks, TomFoolery & Pranks at MIT (MIT Museum, 1990).
"Hacking Ethics" reprinted from Is this the Way to Baker House? (MIT Museum, 1996).
"The Case of Missing President's Office" reprinted from Is this the Way to Baker House? (MIT Museum, 1996).
"Where the Sun Shines, There Hack They" reprinted from Is this the Way to Baker House? (MIT Museum, 1996).
Contributions by I.H.T.F. Peterson are from Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT (MIT Press, 2003).
All material is copyright © 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.
About the Authors
Samuel Jay Keyser HM 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 during those halcyon years and during his tenure as housemaster of Senior House. He returned to his faculty duties in 1994 and retired, exhausted, four years later, though he still serves as special assistant to the chancellor.
Brian Leibowitz '82, SM '84, MIT hack archivist 1984-89, edited two earlier books about hacking for The MIT Museum, The Journal of the Institute for Hacks, TomFoolery & Pranks at MIT (1990) and Is this the Way to Baker House? (1996), both are now out of print. He himself was hacked during one his talks about hacking.
Institute Historian T. F. Peterson NON '57 is a pseudonym. Guess what her initials stand for?
Charles M. Vest HM is president of the Massachuetts Institute of Technology, which was dubbed the University of Michigan at Cambridge by hackers on his inauguration day. Vest previously held the post of provost at U of M.
Anon E. Mouse HM is the most anonymous hacker of all.
What Matters is a guest opinion column written by a different MIT alumnus or alumna. The views expressed are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Alumni Association or MIT. Interested in writing a column? Email whatmatters@mit.edu.
