Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• 1. Introduction

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  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered on the 10th of April 1861, and two days later the first battle of the Civil War broke out. The new school had no campus yet, only a charter signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts. Its founder, William Barton Rogers, was a geologist who had recently arrived in Boston from the University of Virginia. He wanted a place to advance "useful knowledge" and accelerate American industrialization through scientific principles.

  For decades the institute went by a humbler nickname, "Boston Tech", and fought off repeated attempts to swallow it into Harvard. How did a chronically broke engineering school on filled marshland become an institution affiliated with 105 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists? The answer runs through a wartime radar lab, a moon-bound guidance computer, a model railroad club, and a campus where students steal cannons for fun.

• 2. Surviving Boston Tech

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  In 1859, a proposal to use newly filled lands in Boston's Back Bay for a "Conservatory of Art and Science" was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court, and it failed. Rogers tried again with a different vision. He did not want a professional school but a combination of professional and liberal education, teaching scientific principles rather than the manipulations of the arts. His Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, with an independent faculty and instruction built around seminars and laboratories.

  The first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865, after a long delay through the war years. MIT was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, making it a land-grant school. In 1866 the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay. Under President Francis Amasa Walker in the last two decades of the 19th century, MIT introduced programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering and grew past one thousand students.

  Chronic financial shortages shadowed all of it, and they bred a slow-motion crisis. Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, himself a former MIT faculty member, made repeated attempts to merge MIT into Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. The MIT Corporation eventually approved a formal merger plan that would move the school to then-remote Allston, over the vehement objections of faculty, students, and alumni. That plan collapsed in 1905 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled MIT could not sell its Back Bay land.

• 3. Crossing The Charles

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  In 1912, MIT purchased 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 funded largely by anonymous gifts from a mysterious "Mr. Smith". 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 charter crossed the Charles River on a ceremonial barge called the Bucentaur, built for the occasion. Bosworth's first Cambridge buildings were the first non-industrial buildings made from reinforced concrete in the United States. His idea was industrial efficiency inside and classical aesthetics outside, influenced by the City Beautiful movement. The design features the Pantheon-esque Great Dome overlooking Killian Court, where graduation ceremonies are held each year.

  The friezes of the limestone-clad buildings around Killian Court carry the engraved names of important scientists and philosophers. The Infinite Corridor runs the east-west length of Bosworth's buildings, beginning at Lobby 7 despite a name suggesting it has no beginning. The bridge closest to campus, the Harvard Bridge, is famously marked off in a non-standard unit of length, the smoot.

• 4. From Industry To Science

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  Unlike the Ivy League universities, MIT drew an unusually large share of students from families of moderate means and leaned on tuition rather than endowment income. President Richard Maclaurin's "Technology Plan", launched in 1919, deepened that dependence by having corporations pay an annual retaining fee for access to faculty, libraries, and technical services. By the late 1920s, more than a third of the teaching staff worked on industry research, testing, or consulting. Elite universities dismissed MIT as a "mere engineering school servicing industry".

  A mandate for reform came from two board members tied to corporate research, Gerard Swope, president of General Electric, and Frank B. Jewett, head of Bell Telephone Laboratories. Both argued that practice-oriented training was obsolete and that industry needed engineers grounded in fundamental science. In 1930 they recruited the physicist Karl Compton to carry out the overhaul. Compton reorganized MIT in 1932 into schools of engineering, science, and architecture, created a formal graduate school, and appointed Vannevar Bush as vice president and dean of engineering.

  To loosen the grip of industry, the pair centralized all industrial contracts, established a patent licensing program, and curtailed faculty consulting. Compton also tripled philanthropic support for research. The reforms were uneven. Physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering advanced quickly, while much of the engineering school did virtually no research well into the 1930s. By the mid-1930s, MIT had been admitted to the Association of American Universities, the organization of the nation's top research universities.

• 5. The Radiation Laboratory

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  In June 1940, Vannevar Bush persuaded President Roosevelt to create the National Defense Research Committee to mobilize civilian science for defense. Bush had left MIT to lead the Carnegie Institution in Washington. The committee's first major project was a laboratory for microwave radar research, and after other sites fell through, the administrators turned to Compton, who agreed to host it at MIT.

  The Radiation Laboratory, named to conceal its purpose, opened in 1940 and grew from a staff of thirty to roughly 4,000. The division that ran it expended some $1.5 billion on radar systems, rivaling the Manhattan Project in scale. The Rad Lab contract was the first and largest wartime research agreement between the federal government and a university, and its terms became a model for postwar government-university contracts. By war's end MIT had received $117 million in government R&D contracts, more than any industrial contractor.

  The Rad Lab closed in 1945, but it opened a new era of large military research at MIT. The Research Laboratory of Electronics inherited its facilities in 1946. The Laboratory for Nuclear Science opened the same year with Navy support, and Lincoln Laboratory followed in 1951 to build a continental air-defense radar network for the Air Force. Charles Stark Draper's wartime gunsight laboratory, renamed the Instrumentation Laboratory, expanded into inertial guidance for ballistic missiles and computerized guidance for the Apollo lunar mission.

  The transformation was staggering. Between the early 1930s and the mid-1950s the faculty doubled and the graduate body quintupled. By 1957 research expenditures represented 72 percent of MIT's operating budget. In 1962 the physicist Alvin Weinberg, who coined the term "big science", said it was hard to tell whether MIT was a university with government laboratories appended to it or a cluster of government laboratories with a good educational institution attached.

• 6. Protest And Reform

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  On the 4th of March 1969, students and faculty organized a research stoppage to protest the military applications of science. Most defense-funded work on campus was basic and unclassified, but the Instrumentation Laboratory was the major exception. Its work on guidance systems for Poseidon MIRV warheads drew particular criticism as destabilizing the Cold War arms race. Out of the faculty effort grew the Union of Concerned Scientists.

  President Howard Johnson convened a review panel chaired by Sloan School dean William Pounds, even as demonstrations continued into the fall. The Pounds Panel reaffirmed the place of the labs at MIT and recommended diversification and oversight rather than military divestiture. In May 1970, Johnson announced that the Instrumentation Laboratory would be separated, and it became the independent Draper Laboratory in 1973. MIT then required that on-campus research be open and publishable, with classified work consolidated at Lincoln Laboratory's off-campus site.

  The Institute's new scale forced a reckoning over teaching too. At Vice President James Killian's urging in 1947, the faculty formed a Committee on Educational Survey chaired by chemical engineer Warren K. Lewis. The Lewis Committee warned that a preoccupation with research was coming at the expense of undergraduate teaching. In 1950 the Corporation approved its recommendation for a School of Humanities and Social Studies to stand on equal footing with the existing schools.

  New experiments reshaped undergraduate life. In 1957, Edwin H. Land, the inventor of instant photography, argued that students should engage in original research from their arrival rather than waiting years to reach the frontier. In 1969, the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, directed by physicist Margaret MacVicar, let undergraduates join research projects across the Institute. Clark Kerr later identified it as one of the few genuine university reforms from the 1960s.

• 7. Hackers And Free Software

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  Project MAC launched in 1963 with ARPA funding, drawing researchers from scattered departments into a single effort around time-sharing and artificial intelligence. A culture of student programmers had grown out of the Tech Model Railroad Club, whose members were more drawn to the electrical switching systems beneath the layout than to the trains. These groups became the nucleus of the AI Laboratory, regarded as the birthplace of hacker culture.

  When commercial pressures began pulling researchers into spinoff companies in the early 1980s, Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project in 1983 and the Free Software Foundation in 1985. In 1983, MIT launched Project Athena, an eight-year partnership with IBM and the Digital Equipment Corporation that placed networked workstations across campus. Athena produced widely adopted infrastructure, including the Kerberos authentication protocol and the X Window System.

  In 1985, Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT president Jerome Wiesner founded the Media Lab, focused on integrating computing with communication, design, and the arts. In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee established the World Wide Web Consortium at the Laboratory for Computer Science to develop open standards for the web. In 2003, the AI Laboratory and the Laboratory for Computer Science merged into the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, now the largest research lab at the Institute.

  The open-access habit found wider expression when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002, drawing on the open-source principle that knowledge systems should be freely accessible. In 2018, MIT announced the Schwarzman College of Computing, a billion-dollar initiative to integrate artificial intelligence research and education across the Institute.

• 8. Mind And Hand

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  The motto mens et manus, "mind and hand", compresses MIT's ideal of holding classroom time in balance with learning by doing. Students refer to majors and classes by number alone, numbered roughly in the order departments were founded. Civil and Environmental Engineering is Course 1, Linguistics and Philosophy is Course 24, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is the popular Course 6. The introductory classical mechanics course is simply "8.01".

  MIT has never awarded an honorary degree, athletic scholarships, or Latin honors, though it twice granted honorary professorships, to Winston Churchill in 1949 and Salman Rushdie in 1993. Many students wear a heavy class ring known as the "Brass Rat", first created in 1929 and officially named the "Standard Technology Ring". Its design varies slightly each year but always bears an image of a beaver. The initialism IHTFP, with its many jocular expansions, has long marked student culture.

  Hacking at MIT means both exploring off-limits rooftops and steam tunnels and pulling elaborate practical jokes. Students once reconstructed a Wright Flyer atop the Great Dome and adorned the John Harvard statue with Master Chief's helmet. The rivalry with the California Institute of Technology, some 2,580 miles away, runs on academics and pranks rather than sports. In 2006, MIT students posed as contractors and stole Caltech's 1.7-ton, 130-year-old Fleming cannon, displaying it in Cambridge during Campus Preview Weekend.

  The demands behind the play are real. Teaching leans on lectures, recitations, weekly problem sets, and frequent exams, a pace likened to "drinking from a fire hose". To ease the adjustment, fall-term subjects appear on the transcript only if passed. One hurdle survives from an older era: to graduate, every student must pass a swimming test.