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.•
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. 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." For the next half-century, the science and engineering curriculum drifted away from Rogers' ideal became more focused on more vocational concerns to the detriment of more theoretical programs. Proposals to merge MIT with "the school up the river" began as early as 1869 but other proposals in 1900 and 1914 were ultimately canceled.•••

The 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 (effectively Provost) 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 was appointed head of the enormous Office of Scientific Research and Development. 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 has an extensive core curriculum required of all undergraduates called the General Institute Requirements, or GIRs. The science requirement, generally completed during freshman year as a prerequisite for many introductory science and engineering classes, comprises two semesters of physics classes covering kinematics and E&M, two semesters of math covering single variable calculus and multivariable calculus, one semester of chemistry, and one semester of biology. Undergraduates are required to take a laboratory class in their major, eight Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) classes (at least three in a concentration and another four unrelated subjects), and non-varsity athletes must also take four physical education classes.

In May 2006 a faculty task force recommended that the current GIR system be modified on several counts. While the required two semesters of math and first semester of physics would remain, the science core would be replaced by a "Science-Math-Engineering" core that would allow students to pick five classes from six categories of math, physics, chemistry, life sciences, computation, and engineering, and a "project-based freshman experience." The Institute lab requirement would also be dropped and the HASS requirement would include addressing a "big idea."•

MIT has close ties with many institutions throughout the Boston area as well as internationally.


MIT has both a friendly rivalry with Harvard University as well as a substantial number of research collaborations such as the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Broad Institute, Center for Ultracold Atoms, and Harvard-MIT Data Center. In addition, students at the two schools can cross-register without any additional fees, for credits toward their own school's degrees. The relationship and proximity between the two institutions is remarkable, considering they are often regarded as the world's top two universities.•

Boston University lies between MIT and Harvard on the Boston-side of Charles River and collaborates with both on the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. MIT has an extensive cross-registration program Wellesley College and an undergraduate exchange program with the University of Cambridge known as the Cambridge-MIT Institute. MIT also has limited cross-registration programs with BU, Brandeis University, Tufts University, and Massachusetts College of Art.•

MIT maintains substantial research and faculty ties with independent research organizations in the Boston-area like the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Through the Singapore-MIT Alliance, MIT-Zargoza International Logistics Program, and MISTI programs, MIT supports international science and engineering education as well as collaborating with international universities like Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and the Malaysia University of Science and Technology.

MIT publishes the mass-market magazine Technology Review through a subsidiary company as well as a special edition which also serves as the Institute's official alumni magazine.

MIT students, faculty, and staff are also involved in over 50 educational outreach programs through the MIT Museum, Edgerton Center, and MIT Public Service Center.•

Main article: List of Massachusetts Institute of Technology people

MIT has over 380 recognized student activity groups•, including a campus radio station, student-run ambulance, publications (''The Tech'',''Counterpoint'', ''VooDoo''), performance groups (MIT Symphony Orchestra, Musical Theater Guild, DanceTroupe) cultural and religious groups, honor societies (Pi Tau Sigma, Eta Kappa Nu), and club sport teams. The MIT Science Fiction Society claims to have the "world's largest open-shelf collection of science fiction" in English. The Lecture Series Committee (LSC) has weekly screenings of popular films as well as lectures by prominent speakers. The annual MIT Entrepreneurship Competition has supported the creation of at least 60 companies worth $10.5 billion since it started in 1990.•

MIT's Independent Activities Period is a four-week long "term" offering hundreds of optional classes, lectures, demonstrations, and other activities throughout the month of January between the Fall and Spring terms. Some of the most popular recurring IAP activities are the 6.270, 6.370, Maslab competitions, the annual "mystery hunt", and Charm School. Despite the harsh New England winters, severe weather has only forced MIT to cancel classes or close the campus three times in recent memory: the Blizzard of 1978, Blizzard of 2003, and Blizzard of 2005.

MIT's main Cambridge campus spans approximately a mile of the Charles River front. The campus is divided roughly in half by Massachusetts Avenue, with most academic buildings to the east and most dormitories and student life facilities to the west. Essentially all classes are held on main campus, although MIT owns or leases a number of research facilities throughout Cambridge and the greater Boston area.

The bridge closest to MIT is the Harvard Bridge, which is marked off in the fanciful unit – the Smoot. The Kendall MBTA Red Line station is located on the far northeastern edge of the campus. The neighborhood of MIT is a mixture of high tech companies combined with residential neighborhoods of Cambridge (see Kendall Square).

Somewhat controversially,• MIT operates a highly visible nuclear reactor on campus. Other notable campus facilities include a pressurized wind tunnel, a towing tank for testing ship and ocean structure designs, and a low-emission cogeneration plant that provides most of the campus electricity and heating requirements.

MIT's campus is noted for its progressive, if inconsistent, architecture;• many buildings exemplify neoclassical, brutalist, and deconstructivist styles. Princeton Review includes MIT in a list of twenty schools whose campuses are "tiny, unsightly, or both."• Many are connected above ground as well as through an extensive network of underground tunnels, providing protection from the Cambridge weather.


The first buildings constructed on the Cambridge campus are known officially as the Maclaurin buildings, completed in 1916, after Institute president Richard Maclaurin who oversaw their construction. Designed by William Welles Bosworth based on plans developed by wealthy alumnus and hydraulic engineer John Ripley Freeman, these imposing buildings surround Killian Court on three sides. On the north side of Killian Court is the Infinite Corridor, which serves as something of a main artery for the campus, connecting east campus with west campus. The Infinite Corridor runs through two domes: the Great Dome, which is featured in most publicity shots, and the lesser dome (surmounting what is known as "Lobby 7" after its building number), which opens into Massachusetts Avenue, and which is the entrance most often used as well as the official address of the entire Institute. The friezes of these buildings are carved in large Roman letters with the names of Aristotle, Newton, Franklin, Pasteur, Lavoisier, Faraday, Archimedes, da Vinci, Darwin, and Copernicus; each of these names is surmounted by a cluster of appropriately related names in smaller letters.


A few other buildings are architecturally significant, including Baker House (the dormitory designed by Alvar Aalto) and Eero Saarinen's Kresge Auditorium and MIT Chapel. I. M. Pei '40 designed a number of MIT buildings constructed in this period, including the Green Building (Building 54), headquarters of the Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Science Department and the tallest building on campus; the Dreyfus Building (Building 18), the Chemistry Department; the Landau Building (Building 66), the Chemical Engineering Department; the Weisner Building (Building E15), the Media Laboratory, whose tiled exterior was designed by Kenneth Noland; and the master plan for the southast corner of the central campus.