Until the early 1980s, MIT considered its students to be adults, who were capable of making their own decisions. As a general rule, MIT tried to avoid taking actions that limited students' choices with respect to how they conducted their lives outside the lecture hall or laboratory. As Dean Steve Immerman told his freshman advisees in 1983, there are two ways in which American universities were commonly set up. One came from Britain, while the other came from Germany. In Britain, universities were established by parents for their children. In Germany, the students themselves banded together to hire their teachers. Since MIT is a technical school, and since many of the technological breakthroughs of the nineteenth century came from Germany, MIT copied the German format. This means that while MIT as a university has a responsibility to provide an education for its students, it also has a responsibility to treat the students like the adults that they are, and to allow them the freedom to make their own decisions about how they live their lives.
During the 1980s, the MIT administration implemented a series of gradual changes that shifted MIT's role away from one of mutual respect between administration and students, and toward the Institute taking on an in loco parentis role. Shirley McBay, who was then Dean for Student Affairs, spearheaded this effort. Of course, many students opposed these changes, but McBay and the Office of the Dean for Student Affairs (ODSA) were careful to announce and begin implementing these changes during final exams, when the students were least able to organize resistance. The ODSA also used grandfather clauses to mitigate much of the objection from the current students, and the new students never got to experience what MIT was like before the changes were implemented.
Coincidentally, the deans and other staff members in the ODSA who happened to both work under McBay and oppose these changes all either resigned due to an inability to work with McBay, or were fired for some other reason. No fewer than nine such people either resigned or were fired between 1983 and 1987.
In response to these efforts, The Tech, in its Tuesday, February 12, 1985 issue, ran an editorial calling for McBay's resignation. The hackers' response was to portray exaggerated versions of these outrages, claiming they were doing so as the ``Secret Police of the ODSA.'' The twofold objective of these hacks was to entertain the students, and to satirize the ODSA, alerting the student body to the insidious things the ODSA was actually doing.
Despite the fact that the SPODSA hacks may have contributed to MIT's ultimate decision to ``encourage'' McBay to resign, very few of her policies were struck down afterward. In fact, her successor, James Tewhey, put the finishing touches on the job she had started, and the MIT administration's current attitude towards its students more closely reflects McBay's attitude than it does the pre-1980s attitude.