History of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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The history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spans almost 150 years since it was founded in 1861. MIT has played pivotal roles in the many scientific and technological developments since then.
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[edit] Vision and mission
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.[1]
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.[2] MIT was a pioneer in the use of laboratory instruction.[3] 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;"[4]
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.[5]
[edit] Boston Tech (1865-1916)
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.[6] 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.[7]
In 1914, a merger of MIT and Harvard's Applied Science departments was formally announced[8] and was to begin "when the Institute will occupy its splendid new buildings in Cambridge."[9] However, in 1917, the arrangement with Harvard was cancelled due to a decision by the State Judicial Court.[10]
MIT was the first university in the nation to have a curriculum in: architecture (1865), electrical engineering (1882), sanitary engineering (1889), naval architecture and marine engineering (1895), aeronautical engineering (1914), meteorology (1928), nuclear physics (1935), and artificial intelligence (1960s).[11]
[edit] Cambridge campus and interwar years (1916-1940)
- Includes the administrations of Richard C. Maclaurin (1909–1920), Samuel W. Stratton (1923–1930), and Karl Taylor Compton (1930–1948)
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 [1]. 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. A distinct new era in MIT's history began when it moved into its new Cambridge campus in 1916. Designed by William Welles Bosworth, who had made a name for himself in designing the AT&T headquarters in New York City,[12] 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."[13] More fortuitously, they also cemented MIT's academic reputation on the eve of World War II by attracting scientists and researchers who would later make significant contributions in the Radiation Laboratory, Instrumentation Laboratory, and other defense-related research programs.
[edit] World War Two and Cold War (1940-1966)
- Includes the administrations of James R. Killian (1948-1959) and Julius A. Stratton (1959-1966)
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.[14]
[edit] Cold War and Space Race
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.[citation needed] MIT's Department of Nuclear Engineering as well as the Center for International Studies were established in 1957.
[edit] Lewis Report
- Report on the Educational commons released in December 1949, recommending drastic changes to undergraduate curriculum. Reflection on wartime changes and post-war responsibilities, shaped curriculum for decades.
- School of Humanities and Social Sciences founded in 1950.
- PhD program in Economics was founded in 1941.
- PhD in Linguistics founded in 1961 [2]
[edit] Social movements and activism (1966-1980)
- Includes the administrations of Howard W. Johnson (1966–1971) and Jerome Wiesner (1971–1980)
[edit] Co-education
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.[15] Richards also became the first female member of MIT's faculty, specializing in environmental health.[citation needed]
[edit] Anti-war protests
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."[16]
[edit] Social movements
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 had sex 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.[17] Another minor campus uproar occurred when the traditional pornographic registration-day movie was replaced by Star Wars in the late 1970s.
[edit] Bibles
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 "bibles" (problem sets and solutions from previous years' classes) 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.
[edit] New programs
- MIT and Wellesley begin cross-registration program in 1968
- UROP program established by Margaret Macvicar in 1969
- Department of Mechanical Engineering offers 2.70 Introduction to Design, a robotics competition
- MIT-Harvard Program in Health Sciences and Technology established in 1970. Becomes Whitaker College of Health Sciences, Technology, and Management in 1977.
- Independent Activities Period (IAP) first offered in 1971
- Council for the Arts founded in 1972.
- Program in Science, Technology, and Society established in 1977.
[edit] Changing roles and priorities (1980-2004)
- Includes the administrations of Paul E. Gray (1980–1990) and Charles M. Vest (1990–2004)
[edit] Ethical disputes
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 Baltimore eventually became an endowed professor at and (temporarily) 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.[18] 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.
[edit] Suicide and mental health
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a number of student deaths resulted in considerable media attention to MIT's culture and student life.[19] 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.[20] 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."[21] 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."[22] In late 2001 an MIT task force recommended improvements in mental health services.[23] Chancellor Philip L. Clay announced that MIT would implement the recommendations, including expanding staff and operating hours at the mental health center.[24] 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.[25]
[edit] Faculty diversity
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.[26] 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.
[edit] Globalization and new initiatives
- In 2001, MIT announced that it planned to put many of its course materials online as part of its OpenCourseWare project.
- Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab is the head of the One Laptop per Child initiative.
- Susan Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research council to explore how MIT can respond to the interdisciplinary challenges of global energy consumption.
- Consolidation of old programs like Ocean Engineering into Mechanical Engineering and emergence of interdisciplinary departments like Biological Engineering and Computational Biology.
- International collaborations and educational initiatives with University of Cambridge in England and National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
[edit] References
- ^ MIT Facts 2006: Mission and Origins (2006). Retrieved on 2006-07-18.
- ^ Lewis, Warren K.; Ronald H. Rornett, C. Richard Soderberg, Julius A. Stratton, John R. Loofbourow, et al (December 1949). Report of the Committee on Educational Survey (Lewis Report). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 8.
- ^ 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, volume 4, p. 292: "[MIT] was a pioneer in introducing as a feature of its original plans laboratory instruction in physics, mechanics, and mining."
- ^ The Founding of MIT, cites (1) Letter, William Barton Rogers to Henry Darwin Rogers, March 13, 1846, William Barton Rogers Papers (MC 1), Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries.
- ^ Andrews, Elizabeth, Nora Murphy, and Tom Rosko(2004), William Barton Rogers: MIT's Visionary Founder (Charter, laboratory instruction, first classes in Mercantile building).
- ^ Report of the Committee on Educational Survey, page 11
- ^ National Selection Committee Ballot - Power of the NSC. Retrieved on November 23, 2005.
- ^ "Tech Alumni Holds Reunion. Record attendance, novel features. Cooperative plan with Harvard announced by Pres. Maclaurin. Gov. Walsh Brings Best Wishes of the State.", Boston Daily Globe, 1914-01-11, p. 117.
Maclaurin quoted: "in future Harvard agrees to carry out all its work in engineering and mining in the buildings of Technology under the executive control of the president of Technology, and, what is of the first importance, to commit all instruction and the laying down of all courses to the faculty of Technology, after that faculty has been enlarged and strengthened by the addition to its existing members of men of eminence from Harvard's Graduate School of Applied Science." - ^ "Harvard-Tech Merger. Duplication of Work to be Avoided in Future. Instructors Who WIll Hereafter be Members of Both Faculties", Boston Daily Globe, 1914-01-25, p. 47.
- ^ Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
- ^ Explore campus, visit boston, and find out if MIT fits you to a tea (2006-12-16). Retrieved on 2006-12-16.
- ^ For a discussion of the building and the history of its design, see: Mark Jarzombek Designing MIT: Bosworth's New Tech (Northeastern University Press, 2004.~~~~
- ^ Report of the Committee on Educational Survey, page 13
- ^ Report of the Committee on Educational Survey, page 13
- ^ MIT Facts 2006. MIT (Registrar's office) (2006). Retrieved on 2006-06-28.
- ^ "Lists of White House 'Enemies' and Memorandums Relating to Those Named", The New York Times, 1973-06-28, p. 38.
- ^ Koretz, David B. (1977-07-26). Four Students Disciplined for Thursday Sex Article 12. The Tech. Retrieved on 2006-10-04.
- ^ Professor Sues M.I.T. Over Refusal of Tenure. New York Times (1986-09-10). Retrieved on 2006-10-03.
- ^ MIT's Inaction Blamed for Contributing to Death of a Freshman. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on 2006-10-07.
- ^ Levine, Dana (2000-09-15). Institute Will Pay Kruegers $6M for Role in Death. The Tech. Retrieved on 2006-10-04.
- ^ Healy, Patrick. "11 years, 11 suicides—Critics Say Spate of MIT Jumping Deaths Show a 'Contagion'", The Boston Globe, 2001-02-05, pp. A1.
"Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been far more likely to over the past decade compared to those at 11 other universities with elite science and engineering programs—38 percent more often than the next school, Harvard, and four times more than campuses with the lowest rate."Madelyn Gould, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, said these patterns showed a 'suicide contagion' at MIT - victim begetting victim in the same small community. 'It appears there's a culture at MIT that has reinforced suicide and jumping as a means of escaping,' said Gould, an authority on suicide and contagion. 'Somehow they've normalized that jumping out a window is OK.'"
- ^ Elizabeth Fried Ellen, LICSW (2002). Prevention on Campus. Psychiatric Times. Retrieved on 2006-06-26.
"There is considerable debate as to whether a school's selectivity increases the likelihood of student suicide. The latest round of the debate is being played out in Cambridge, Mass., where Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is in the midst of a $27 million wrongful death suit over the death of a troubled sophomore in April 2000. Media reports have painted a portrait of an institution in the midst of a suicide epidemic. In fact, MIT's suicide rate is below the national average if one adjusts figures for the school's overwhelmingly male student body (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 2002)" - ^ MIT Mental Health Task Force Fact Sheet. MIT New Office (2001-11-14). Retrieved on 2006-06-25.
- ^ Clay endorses Mental Health Task Force Recommendations. MIT News Office (2001-11-28). Retrieved on 2006-06-25.
- ^ Who Was Responsible for Elizabeth Shin?. New York Times (2002-04-28). Retrieved on 2006-10-07.
- ^ MIT News Office (2003-12-05). Charles Vest to step down from MIT presidency, Has been staunch national advocate for education and research. Retrieved on 2006-06-28.
"Over the past decade, the number of women undergraduates increased from 34 percent to 42 percent. Women now outnumber men in 10 undergraduate majors at MIT. The proportion of women graduate students has increased from 20 percent to 29 percent.""During Vest's presidency, MIT appointed its first woman department head in the School of Science, its first two minority department heads in the School of Engineering, and its first five women vice presidents."
[edit] External links
- MIT Institute Archives
- MIT Museum
- MIT HOUSING 1916-1997: A chronology of events, reports and other publications
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