<p>I agree that EECS departments (or ECE or separated EE and CS departmeents whatever is the structure at various schools) is often times quite unfriendly, and that it is an embedded feature within the culture of EECS academics. Hence, I am not singling out Berkeley. </p>
<p>But I would say that this is not a uniform and inevitable feature of EECS. EECS does not have to be unfriendly. Anecdotally speaking, I hear that Stanford EE and CS tend to be notably friendlier than Berkeley EECS, and for that matter, the entire Stanford engineering culture is significantly less harsh and less cutthroat than what one might expect from an elite engineering school. While certainly Stanford engineering is no picnic, the department isn’t going to go out of its way to put you through the gauntlet, the way that departments at other schools might. </p>
<p>I would also note that even MIT has changed radically from the way it was in the old days. MIT back in the old days was infamous for impersonality, harshness, and masochism. The administration has changed things to make the atmosphere far less harsh. While it’s still extremely difficult to get top grades, and the workload is still legendarily intense, you no longer have to walk around in constant fear of flunking out the way that you did in the old days. I believe this goes a long way towards explaining why MIT has a higher graduation rate than Berkeley does, despite being a more difficult school. MIT has vastly expanded its course offerings to include notable ‘softer’ subjects, many of which, like Economics, Linguistics, and the Sloan School of Management, are recognized as elite, and others like Poli Sci and Brain and Cognitive Sciences (which is a fancy name for Psychology) which are also highly regarded and steadily gaining in repute. MIT has also enacted an extensive cross-reg program with Harvard so that students who want to study humanities can spend much of their time ‘up-the-river’. MIT had a lot of conflict with old-timer profs who wanted to continue doing things the old ways. The worst were those profs who had themselves studied at MIT and figured that since they had gone through hell themselves as students, they would force other MIT students to go through the same hell. The administration won that battle by basically kicking many of these profs into retirement (i.e. taking on emeritus status) or just by having them no longer teach classes, especially not required undergrad classes. MIT also greatly expanded the ability to take classes P/D/F or even “exploratory”, which I think is a brilliant idea. “Exploratory” means that you, as an MIT sophomore, can elect to take one class on as so-called exploratory basis which means that effectively allows you to take the class to completion, including the final exam, and see your final grade, and if you don’t like it, you can just convert that class to “Listener” status, which means that you basically drop the class after you’ve seen your final grade. This is absolutely brilliant. I think that not only should MIT vastly liberalize the rules surrounding ‘exploratory’ status, but other difficult schools should immediately adopt this idea. </p>
<p>However, my real point is to demonstrate that schools have it within their power to change the culture. Culture is not a purely exogenous phenomenom. It can be shaped. If a school department is known for being predatory and cold, it’s partly because the department WANTS to be known as predatory and cold. </p>
<p>Which all gets back to this notion of people not showing up to office hours. I would submit that when a department insists of using harsh weeders, and almost seems to delight in giving people grades that will threaten their very standing within Berkeley (i.e. grades lower than the 2.0 minimum cutoff you need to maintain minimal academic progress) that displays a certain callousness towards the student body. There are far more humane ways of dealing with your student body, like giving students lots of early exams and homeworks before the drop deadline and making it crystal-clear to all students where exactly they stand in the class from a grading standpoint, so that those students who are doing poorly will know to drop the class.</p>