The Hidden Curriculum (book) - Commentary

Commentary

Some of Snyder's descriptions of college life sound dated in the early 21st century. For example, the issues of co-educational dorms and male guests in female rooms seem less relevant in most, but certainly not all, colleges. It is also perhaps telling that Snyder describes all of his pseudonymous test subjects as male.

On the other hand, some passages about MIT in particular read almost like a satire of the Institute in later years. Snyder's epilogue, for example, describes how since 1961 the tightly interwoven stresses of the freshman year had been loosened. "Now a freshman has pass/fail with specific comments from the faculty," but in 2002 the pass/fail grading was reduced to the first term of freshman year. A little later, he remarks that most of the students visiting the Psychiatric Service turned out to be "reasonably healthy individuals" who were seeking a neutral forum for working out their personal issues. As of 2004, MIT Mental Health is proverbial among students for sending depressed patients to McLean Hospital, and for occasionally refusing to let them return after McLean's staff believes they are healthy. This habit has drawn both commentary and derision .

In November 2001, the "Mental Health Task Force" released a report describing the psychological condition of the student population . The Task Force report relates a survey, conducted in the spring of 2001, whose results they found troubling:

Of the students who responded to the survey (half undergraduate and half graduate), 74% reported having had an emotional problem that interfered with their daily functioning while at MIT, while only 28% had used the MIT Mental Health Service. Even more worrisome, 35% of students reported a wait of 10 or more days for their initial appointment with the service, and 80% of the students were not aware of the daily afternoon walk-in hours. While nearly two-thirds of students rated their experience with the MIT Mental Health Service as satisfactory to excellent, only half would recommend the service to a friend, and overall, students saw the service as having a mediocre reputation.

Interestingly, Snyder reports that in the early 1960s only about 10% of the student body sought out the Mental Health services during their time at MIT.

In 1992, Todd Riggs published a survey on the interactions between doctoral students and their thesis supervisors . After interviewing four MIT professors, he concluded,

The parallels between what Snyder wrote and what my subjects commented upon, despite over two decades of time intervention, is stunning, astonishing, even frightening.

Trow's contention that MIT is in some way inherently paradoxical foreshadows an observation James Burke would later make in the book and television series The Day the Universe Changed. In the series' first episode, "The Way We Are", Burke argues that when human beings find they enjoy or appreciate some aspect of life, they "institutionalize" it and protect it from further change. What was once a rational response to social need becomes a ritual, performed without regard to its origins. This leads to a puzzling contradiction when a society learns that it can benefit from technological change: scientific discovery becomes a kind of ritual. In this view, scientific research laboratories are the institutionalization of change; they are the facilities set up so that "tomorrow can be better than today". (Burke's show Connections illustrates the point with the DuPont motto: "Better things for better living through chemistry.")

Other education commentators such as John D. Wilson have summarized Snyder's observations, noting that no matter how hard a first year MIT student may be prepared to work, the expectations of staff usually exceed a student's capacity to fulfill them.