MIT also has a long tradition of pranks , which are called " hacks " at that institution . Many hacks involve placing an item on MIT 's Great Dome or otherwise altering , such as moving a campus police cruiser to its roof , placing full-sized replicas of the Wright Flyer and a firetruck on top of it to acknowledge the anniversaries of first powered controlled flight and the September 11th attacks respectively , and converting it into R2-D2 and a large yellow ring to acknowledge the release of '' Star Wars Episode I '' and '' Lord of the Rings '' respectively . A famous off-campus hack involved MIT students inflating a weather balloon labeled " MIT " at the 50-yard line at the Harvard/Yale football game in 1982
September 11th attacks
September 11 attacks
Caltech–MIT rivalry