What they didn’t know—and what they couldn’t have known from reading the consent form that accompanied it—was that MIT had embedded metadata that allowed the administration to pinpoint the location of those filling out the questionnaire, enabling them to segment the results by dorm. The only question about dorm type in the survey was vague—“What kind of dorm do you live in? Small, large, off campus?”—but by tracking the metadata, Barnhart and the administration were able to see exactly where respondents lived.

It was this data that enabled Barnhart to see what she called a troubling hot spot of drug use. “If it wasn’t a direct violation, it was at least a violation of the spirit of informed consent,” Johnson says.

Senior House defenders tried to use this issue to attack the administration’s closure of the dorm. “I am extremely angry that MIT used data obtained in a questionable manner to inform their policies with regards to any of their students, regardless of their residence,” wrote MIT parent Elizabeth Glaser in an op-ed in The Tech. Though her son was not part of Senior House, he took the survey and was upset about how it had been used. Glaser, herself an expert in research ethics, took it upon herself to contact the creators of the survey and review its methodology. It was she who discovered the metadata.

Murals were an important part of Senior House's identity. Courtesy Senior House Joseph Sokol-Margolis

Critics of the administration also took issue with the data purportedly showing Senior House had a relatively low graduation rate. Some worry it was based only on where students lived their freshman year, not taking into account that some people do switch dorms. Barnhart says the data accounted for this. When WIRED asked for access to the data to analyze the methods, the administration declined. More troubling to critics is that, based on the way the data was presented to the student body, it doesn’t appear to take into account that the students in Senior House tended to be marginalized in one way or another—and that those students tend to have a lower graduation rate. Barnhart says that the school took that into account as well, looking at marginalized groups in other houses. Again, it’s hard to judge who is correct without access to the raw data or detailed information about who and how it was analyzed.

As school began again last week, Senior House was gone. It’s just 70 Amherst Street now. Was Senior House a toxic environment full of drug dealers and drunks? A respite in an intellectual gauntlet? An artistic outlet? A nihilistic void? It depends on whom you ask.

Alumni and current students describe a community that helped each other, that made people feel safe enough to talk about their real problems. Over and over again people say Senior House was the first place they’d ever not felt judged. What they are describing is, in many ways, a safe place. And yet it was the claim that the dorm was dangerous that led the administration to shut it down.

Johnson got lucky. He’s moving into the student residence next door, East Campus, with a few other Senior House expats. Survilaite had hoped to live there too—cockroaches and all—but there was no room. She’s moving into a co-ed fraternity off campus instead. As Senior House students spread out across campus this year, former advisers worry that they’ll be at even greater risk. They can reach out to MIT’s mental health services if they need it, the chancellor says. Survilaite plans to. Others won’t be so easy to track, like the former president of the house, who has opted to take a year off after the struggles of the past year.

That’s not an option for Survilaite or Johnson. They are going to get their degrees, and even without a courtyard to roast a steer, they are going to hold on to each other. “I’m never going to let go of these people. They are my family. We belong together,” Johnson says. When school ends, they’ll head out into the big wide world, where building a nurturing community sometimes feels hard. Maybe the invisible threads of the internet will help bind them. Maybe Senior House alums will meet up in different cities to drink beer and trade stories of Steer Roasts past or find themselves across from each other at tech company boardroom tables, the memory of that shared place a secret tie between them. Maybe, just maybe, their weird community will persist, away from the place that once rooted it. But it’ll be something else. Something different.