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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded in 1861 and has played pivotal roles in the many scientific and technological developments since then.
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Initial years and vision
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In 1861, The Commonwealth of Massachusetts approved a charter for the incorporation of the "Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston Society of Natural History" submitted by William Barton Rogers, a natural scientist. Rogers sought to establish a new form of higher education to address the challenges posed by rapid advances in science and technology in the mid-19th century that classic institutions were ill-prepared to deal with.•
With the charter approved, Rogers began raising funds, developing a curriculum and looking for a suitable location. The Rogers Plan, as it came to be known, was rooted in three principles: the educational value of useful knowledge, the necessity of “learning by doing,” and integrating a professional and liberal arts education at the undergraduate level.•
MIT was a pioneer in the use of laboratory instruction. Its founding philosophy is "the teaching, not of the manipulations and minute details of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of all the scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them;" Because open conflict in the Civil War broke out only a few months later, MIT's first classes were held in rented space at the Mercantile Building in downtown Boston in 1865.
Construction of the first MIT building was completed in Boston's Back Bay in 1866 and would be known as "Boston Tech" until the campus moved across the Charles River to Cambridge in 1916. In the following years, the science and engineering curriculum drifted away from Rogers' ideal of combining general and professional studies and became focused on more vocational or practical and less theoretical concerns. Furthermore, the Institute faced mounting difficulties recruiting faculty and meeting its financial obligations. To the extent that MIT had overspecialized to the detriment of other programs, "the school up the river" courted MIT’s administration with hopes of merging the schools. An initial proposal in 1900 was cancelled after protests from MIT's alumni.•
In 1914, a merger of MIT and Harvard's Applied Science departments was formally announced•
and was to begin "when the Institute will occupy its splendid new buildings in Cambridge."•
However, in 1917, the arrangement with Harvard was cancelled due to a decision by the State Judicial Court.
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Expansion
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These attempted mergers occurred in parallel with MITs continued expansion beyond the classroom and laboratory space permitted by its building in Boston. President Richard Maclaurin sought to move the campus to a new location when he took office in 1909. An anonymous donor, later revealed to be George Eastman, donated the funds to buy a mile-long tract of swamp and industrial land along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. By 1916, MIT moved into its handsome new neoclassical campus and occupies the same site to this date. The new campus fomented some changes in the stagnating undergraduate curriculum, but President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President Vannevar Bush in the 1930s drastically reformed the curriculae by re-emphasizing the importance of "pure" sciences like physics and chemistry and reducing the work required in shops and drafting. Despite the difficulties of the Great Depression, the reforms "renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering."
More fortuitously, they also cemented MIT's academic reputation on the eve of World War Two by attracting scientists and researchers who would later make significant contributions in the Radiation Laboratory, Instrumentation Laboratory, and other defense-related research programs.
MIT was drastically changed by its involvement in military research during World War Two. Bush, who had been MIT's Vice President (effectively Provost) was appointed head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development which was responsible for the Manhattan Project. Government-sponsored research had contributed to a fantastic growth in the size of the Institute's research staff and physical plant as well as a shifting the educational focus away from undergraduates to graduate studies.
As the Cold War and Space Race intensified and concerns about the technology gap between the U.S. and the Soviet Union grew more pervasive throughout the 1950s and 1960s, MIT's involvement in the military-industrial complex was a source of pride on campus. However, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, intense protests by student and faculty activists against this research required that the MIT administration spin these laboratories off into what would become the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and Lincoln Laboratory. The extent of these protests is reflected by the fact that MIT had more names on "President Nixon's enemies list" than any other single organization, among them its president Jerome Wiesner and professor Noam Chomsky. Memos revealed during Watergate indicated that Nixon had ordered MIT's federal subsidy cut "in view of Wiesner's anti-defense bias."•
MIT's particular strain of anti-authoritarianism has manifested itself in other forms. In 1977, two female students, juniors Susan Gilbert and Roxanne Ritchie, were disciplined for publishing an article on April 28 of that year in the "alternative" MIT campus weekly Thursday. Entitled "Consumer Guide to MIT Men," the article was a sex survey of 36 men the two claimed to have slept with, and the men were rated according to their performance. Gilbert and Ritchie had intended to turn the tables on the rating systems and facebooks men use for women, but their article led not only to disciplinary action against them, but also to a protest petition signed by 200 students, as well as condemnation by President Jerome B. Wiesner, who published a fierce criticism of the article.•
Another minor campus uproar occurred when the traditional registration day movie was replaced by Star Wars in the late 1970s.
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Challenges and controversies
MIT has been nominally coeducational since admitting Ellen Swallow Richards in 1870. Female students, however, remained a tiny minority (numbered in dozens) prior to the completion of the first women's dormitory, McCormick Hall, in 1964. Women constituted 43% of the undergraduates and 29% of the graduate students enrolled in 2005.•
Richards also became the first female member of MIT's faculty, specializing in environmental health. In 1998, MIT became the first major research university to acknowledge the existence of a systematic bias against female faculty in its School of Science and supported efforts toward corrective measures; a 2003 MIT news release cites various numbers suggesting that the status of women improved during the latter years of his tenure.•
In August 2004, Susan Hockfield, a molecular neurobiologist, was appointed as MIT's first female president. She took office as the Institute's 16th president on December 6, 2004. In 2006, Professor Susumu Tonegawa was accused of intimidating a promising female faculty candidate and several of his colleagues have called for an investigation.•
In 1986, David Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate, and his colleague, Thereza Imanishi-Kari, were accused of research misconduct. The ensuing controversy involved a Congressional investigation and required him to resign from his new appointment as president of Rockefeller University although the allegations against Imanishi-Kari were dropped and he eventually became president of Caltech. Also in the mid-1980s, David F. Noble, a historian of technology who was not granted tenure, accused MIT of dismissing him without cause when he published several books and papers critical of MIT's reliance upon corporations and the military.•
The case became a cause celebre about the extent to which academics are granted "freedom of speech." In 2000, Professor Ted Postol accused the MIT administration of attempting to cover up potential research misconduct at the Lincoln Lab facility with regard to a ballistic missile defense test, though a final investigation into the matter has not been completed.
In 1970, the then-Dean of Institute Relations, Benson R. Snyder, published The Hidden Curriculum, in which he argues that a mass of unstated assumptions and requirements dominates MIT students' lives and inhibits their ability to function creatively. Snyder contends that these unwritten regulations, like the implicit curriculae of the bibles, often outweigh the effect of the "formal curriculum," and that the situation is not unique to MIT. After studying the behavior of MIT and Wellesley students, Snyder observed that the "bibles" are often in fact counterproductive; they fool professors into believing that their classes are imparting knowledge as intended, locking professors and students into a feedback cycle to the detriment of actual education. However, most professors are very creative, always remaking new problem sets and exams' questions; therefore, even with the circulation of "bibles," students still need to think critically to solve newly created questions.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a number of student deaths resulted in considerable media attention to MIT's culture and student life.• After the alcohol-related death of Scott Krueger in September 1997 as a new member at the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, MIT began requiring all freshmen to live in the dormitory system.• The 2000 suicide of MIT undergraduate Elizabeth Shin drew attention to suicides at MIT and created a controversy over whether MIT had an unusually high suicide rate. A Boston Globe article asserted that MIT students "have been far more likely to" than at eleven other comparable universities, and quoted a psychiatrist who perceived a pattern of "suicide contagion."•
Whether MIT's suicide rate is actually higher was strongly disputed; for example, a licensed social worker writing in the Psychiatric Times noted that "MIT's suicide rate is below the national average if one adjusts figures for the school's overwhelmingly male student body."•
In late 2001 an MIT task force recommended improvements in mental health services.•
Chancellor Philip L. Clay announced that MIT would implement the recommendations, including expanding staff and operating hours at the mental health center.• These and later cases were significant as well because they sought to prove negligence and liability of administrators as they would be responsible for students in loco parentis.•
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Initiatives
Many members of the MIT community are involved with free software like Richard Stallman and Hal Abelson. The MIT student newspaper, The MIT Tech, was the first newspaper on the WWW. In 2001, MIT announced that it planned to put many of its course materials online as part of its OpenCourseWare project. Similarly, Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab is the head of the One Laptop per Child initiative.
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