Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and science.
William Barton Rogers founded MIT in 1861 to provide "useful knowledge" amid American industrialization. Initially funded by a federal land grant, the institute adopted a German polytechnic model emphasizing laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering, and moved from Boston to Cambridge in 1916. Early growth came through research contracts with private industry, though the institute remained financially constrained and vocationally oriented into the 1930s.
MIT's transformation into a major research enterprise began during World War II, when projects like the Radiation Laboratory made it the nation's largest wartime R&D contractor. Graduate enrollment and research funding grew rapidly in the postwar decades as faculty like Vannevar Bush shaped a new system of federal support for basic science. In the late twentieth century, MIT became closely associated with computer science, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and "big science" initiatives like the Apollo program and the LIGO detector. Engineering remains its largest school, though MIT has also developed leading programs in basic science, economics, management, architecture, and humanities. The institute has an entrepreneurial culture and its faculty and alumni have founded many notable companies.
The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile along the Charles River. Academic buildings are connected by an extensive corridor system, and the campus includes notable modernist buildings. MIT's off-campus operations include the Lincoln Laboratory and the Haystack Observatory, as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad and Whitehead Institutes. Undergraduate life is known for hands-on research and elaborate pranks.
, 105 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 83 Marshall Scholars, 41 astronauts, 16 chief scientists of the US Air Force, and 8 foreign heads of state have been affiliated with MIT.
History
Foundation and vision
In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a "Conservatory of Art and Science", but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.Rogers, a geologist who had recently arrived in Boston from the University of Virginia, wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:
The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.
The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.
Early developments
Two days after MIT was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT's first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes" and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.MIT was informally called "Boston Tech". The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.
The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these "Boston Tech" years, MIT faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot's repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College's Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard and move to then-remote Allston, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. The merger plan collapsed in 1905 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that MIT could not sell its Back Bay land.
In 1912, MIT acquired its current campus by purchasing a one-mile tract of filled lands along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical "New Technology" campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious "Mr. Smith", starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman, an inventor of film production methods and founder of Eastman Kodak. In 1916, with the first academic buildings complete, the MIT administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion.
Needing funds to match Eastman's gift and cover retreating state support, President Richard MacLaurin launched an industry funding model known as the "Technology Plan" in 1920. As MIT grew under the Tech Plan, it built new postgraduate programs that stressed laboratory work on industry problems, including a new program in electrical engineering. Gerard Swope, MIT's chairman and head of General Electric, believed talented engineers needed scientific research training. In 1930, he recruited Karl Taylor Compton to helm MIT's transformation as a "technological" research university and to build more autonomy from private industry.
Curricular reforms
In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms "renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering". Unlike Ivy League schools, MIT catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding.Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at MIT that "the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school", a "partly unjustified" perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously minor faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. Humanities and social science programs continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980.
Defense research
MIT's involvement in military research projects surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at MIT's Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper's Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, MIT became the nation's largest wartime R&D contractor, employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo.These activities affected MIT profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of "any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute" to match the return to peacetime, remembering the "academic tranquility of the prewar years", though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the presidential terms of Karl Taylor Compton, James Rhyne Killian, and chancellor Julius Adams Stratton, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, MIT no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.
In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and MIT's defense research. In this period MIT's various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. MIT ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to "greater strength and unity" after these times of turmoil. However six MIT students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT's role in military research and its suppression of these protests.
In the 1980s, there was more controversy at MIT over its involvement in SDI and CBW research. More recently, MIT's research for the military has included work on robots, drones and 'battle suits'.