The January/February 2021 MIT News reports on 140,000 living (and recently dead) MIT alumni, 11,000+ current students, and thousands of faculty and staff members.
Alex Meredith reports on her final semester on campus:
The Class of 2021 was given just 12 weeks in the dorms, stretching from the end of August to mid-November. … I spent all spring and all summer 3,000 miles from MIT, attending virtual classes from my parents’ basement in Seattle. … I would finally close Zoom and immediately open FaceTime to talk to a pixelated version of my girlfriend… This fall, after spending one week in quarantine at the start of the semester, MIT allowed me to see a small group of five friends, called my “pod,” without physical distancing. As long as our dorm isn’t on a “pod pause for public health,” we can hang out in each other’s rooms without masks, and we can ride in each other’s cars. … Beyond my pod, I can p-set with my friends outdoors on a terrace, and it’s a major upgrade over our usual p-set Zooms. I can see my girlfriend, who recently graduated from MIT and lives in Somerville, for picnics in a local park; we have to sit on separate picnic blankets, but six feet is nothing compared to 3,000 miles.
I hope that Ms. Meredith is never sentenced to prison here in the Land of Freedom (TM), but if she does become part of the world’s largest imprisoned population, it sounds as though she has the right attitude for life in the Big House.
What’s happening with the alums? George Kossuth of the Class of 1965 (age 77?) is a hero of optimism. He reports getting married and having heart valve replacement surgery. Frank Helle, Class of 1971, is a straight up hero. He reported losing 20 lbs. during the pandemic.
Roughly half the news regarding these earlier classes relates to the deaths of alumni. People were killed by cancer (e.g., “four-year, well-fought battle with pancreatic cancer”), heart disease, “a long illness”, Parkinson’s disease, “peacefully at home”, etc. Alumni write about losing wives to cancer (nobody describes being in an LGBTQIA+ relationship or having lost a same-sex spouse). What’s missing? Out of 140,000 alumni, I learned of two killed by or with COVID-19. One was 62-year-old Peregrine White Jr., SM ’84, who “was 62” and “died from complications of cancer that had impacted his brain, slowly causing a significant cognitive deficit over the last year. He also had covid-19.” The other was of Myron Kayton, PhD ’60 (87 years old?) who was an inertial guidance expert and “deputy director for guidance and control for the lunar module that landed man on the moon.”
A journal account by someone worried by the pervasive danger:
“Certainly, I don’t want to die and I absolutely do not want my children to die, but I am taking no particular precautions beyond those which have become habit over the past fortnight; limitations of going outside, expeditions to buy ‘in bulk’, an end to the visits of friends.”
The danger was not from Covid-19, however. Those words were written by Mouloud Feraoun in the city of Algiers in March 1962 during the last months of the Algerian war. (The quote is from A Savage War of Peace by Alistair Horne.)
Terror attacks by the OAS and the FLN were killing 30 to 40 people daily in Algiers, by bombs and gunfire. Feraoun was murdered by the OAS in one of those attacks. In 1962 it took war zone conditions to drive people into “social distancing”.