Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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"MIT" redirects here. For other uses, see MIT (disambiguation).
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT Seal
MottoMens et Manus (Mind and Hand)
TypePrivate
Established1861, Opened 1865
Endowment$6.7 billion USD[1]
PresidentSusan Hockfield
ProvostL. Rafael Reif
Academic staff
992
Undergraduates4,066
Postgraduates6,140
Location
Cambridge
,
Mass.
,
USA
CampusUrban, 168 acres/68 ha
AthleticsDivision III
41 varsity teams
ColorsCardinal and Gray
Websitemit.edu
MIT Logo
MIT Logo

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT today is organized into five schools and one college, containing 34 academic departments and 53 interdisciplinary laboratories, centers and programs, though it has no medical or law school. [2] As of 2006, MIT's endowment stands at $6.7 billion, sixth-largest in the US.

Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of America, MIT's mission and culture continue to emphasize teaching and research grounded in practical applications of science and technology. As a federally funded research and development center in World War II, MIT scientists developed defense-related technologies that would later become integral to computers, radar, and inertial guidance. After the war, MIT continuted to have a high profile throughout the Space Race and Cold War and its reputation expanded beyond its core competencies in science and engineering into economics, linguistics, and other social sciences as well. MIT graduates and faculty are also noted for their entrepreneurial spirit: a 1997 report by MIT claimed that the aggregated revenues produced by the 4,000 companies founded by MIT and its graduates would make it the twenty-fourth largest economy in the world. [3]

History

The Great Dome at MIT, illuminated at night.

Initial Years & Vision

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. William Barton Rogers sought to establish a new form of higher education to address the challenges posed by rapid advances in science at technology in the mid-19th century that classic institutions were ill-prepared to deal with. [4] 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. [5] MIT was a pioneer in the use of laboratory instruction[6]. 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;"[7] 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.[8]

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 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. [9] 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. [10]

In 1914, a merger of MIT and Harvard's Applied Science departments was formally announced [11] and was to begin "when the Institute will occupy its splendid new buildings in Cambridge." [12] However, in 1917, the arrangement with Harvard was cancelled due to a decision by the State Judicial Court.[13]

Expansion

These attempted mergers occured 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. [citation needed] 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." [14] 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 National Research Defense Committee which later became 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. [15] 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] 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].

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. [17] Richards also became the first female member of MIT's faculty, specializing in environmental health.[citation needed] In 1998, MIT became the first major research university to acknowledge the existance 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. [18] 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.

MIT has not been free from other controversies. 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. [19] 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 the late 1990s and early 2000s, a number of student deaths resulted in considerable media attention to MIT's culture and student life. [20] 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. [21] 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." [22] 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." [23] In late 2001 an MIT task force recommended improvements in mental health services. [24] Chancellor Philip L. Clay announced that MIT would implement the recommendations, including expanding staff and operating hours at the mental health center. [25] These and later cases were significant as well because they sought to prove negligence and liability of administrators as they led an institution responsible for students in loco parentis.[26]

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.

Ranking and reputation

MIT is ranked #2 overall among the world's top 200 universities by The Times Higher Education Supplement (2005/2004) #1 worldwide in technology and engineering, and #2 in science. [27] The National Research Council, in a 1995 study ranking research universities in the US, ranked MIT #1 in "reputation" and #4 in "citations and faculty awards."[28] The Lombardi Program on Measuring University Performance has identified MIT as one of the Top 5 national research universities since it began ranking in 2000. [29]

MIT's graduate programs in chemistry, computer science, economics, engineering, mathematics, and physics were all ranked #1 in the nation in US News and World Report's 2007 rankings. The School of Engineering has been ranked first among graduate programs since the magazine first released the results of its survey in 1988. [30] The MIT Sloan School of Management is ranked #2 in the nation at the undergraduate level and #4 among MBA programs by US News' 2006 rankings. [31] The Washington Monthly ranked MIT #1 in the nation in its inaugural college rankings in 2005, and again in 2006. See current MIT ranking in each subject and departments.

As of October 3, 2006, 63 current or former members of the MIT community have won the Nobel Prize, 16 of them in the last six years. [32]. Sixty-four current faculty and staff members belong to the National Academy of Engineering, 61 to the National Academy of Sciences, 22 to the Institute of Medicine, and 118 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. There are 31 National Medal of Science recipients, 80 Guggenheim Fellows, 6 Fulbright Scholars, and 19 MacArthur Fellows among current MIT faculty and staff. [33]

Culture and student life

MIT has never awarded an honorary degree; the only way to receive an MIT diploma is to earn it. [34] In addition, it does not award athletic scholarships, ad eundem degrees, or Latin honors upon graduation — the philosophy is that the honor is in being an MIT graduate. It does, on rare occasions, award honorary professorships; Winston Churchill was so honored in 1949 and Salman Rushdie in 1993. [35] MIT faculty and students pride themselves on pure intellectual ability and achievement, and MIT professors often say that they grade with "all the letters of the alphabet." Due to these academic pressures, MIT culture is characterized by a love-hate relationship. The school's informal motto is the initialism IHTFP [36] ("I hate this [[ ]]ing place," jocularly euphemized as "I have truly found paradise," "Institute has the finest professors," etc.).

A plaque of George Eastman, founder of Kodak, whose nose displays a high polish from generations of MIT students who would rub it for good luck on the way to exams.

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 often outweigh the effect of the "formal curriculum," and that the situation is not unique to MIT.

Many of the values of the Institute have influenced the hacker ethic. The term "hacker" and much of hacker culture originated at MIT, starting with the TMRC and MIT AI Lab in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Resident hackers have included Richard Stallman and professors Gerald Jay Sussman and Tom Knight. At MIT, however, the term "hack" has multiple meanings. "To hack" can mean to physically explore areas (often on-campus, but also off) that are generally off-limits such as rooftops and steam tunnels. "Hack" as a noun also means an elaborate practical joke, and not just a clever technical feat. See also: MIT hacks.

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. [37] Another minor campus uproar occured when the traditional registration day movie was replaced by Star Wars in the late 1970s.

Blizzard of '78, Kresge Oval. Students constructed a giant dragon, along with R2-D2 and C3-P0 nearby

MIT has a student athletics program offering 41 varsity-level sports [38]. The Institute's sports teams are called the Engineers, their mascot since 1914 being a beaver [39], "nature's engineer." (Or sometimes: "The beaver is the engineer among animals—MIT students are the animals among engineers.") Lester Gardner, a member of the Class of 1898, provided the following justification: "The beaver not only typifies the Tech, but his habits are particularly our own. The beaver is noted for his engineering and mechanical skills and habits of industry. His habits are nocturnal. He does his best work in the dark." They participate in the NCAA's Division III, the New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference, the New England Football Conference, and NCAA's Division I and Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges (EARC) for crew. They fielded several dominant intercollegiate Tiddlywinks teams through 1980, winning national and world championships [40]. MIT teams have won or placed highly in national championships in pistol, track and field, cross country, crew, fencing, and water polo.

MIT also features a campus radio station, an annual "mystery hunt" run on Martin Luther King Day weekend, and one of the oldest modern Western square dance clubs in the country. The MIT Science Fiction Society claims to have the "world's largest open-shelf collection of science fiction" in English. The MIT Symphony appeared on a classical record label conducted by David Epstein in the 1970s. It was a tradition for the LSC lecture series committee to show 35mm movies in the 1970s, which often came with the enthusiastic cheer "LSC .... sucks", sometimes heard in other Boston area theaters. They brought many prominent speakers and artists, including Gary Larson, Weird Al Yankovic, and former defence secretary Robert McNamara. Despite the harsh New England winters, severe weather has only forced MIT to cancel classes three times in recent memory: the Blizzard of 1978, Blizzard of 2003, and Blizzard of 2005.[citation needed]

A hack done with the lights of Simmons Hall

Undergraduate housing

MIT guarantees four-year dormitory housing for all undergraduates [41] , and provides live-in graduate student tutors and faculty housemasters who have the dual role of both helping students and monitoring them for medical or mental health problems. Students are permitted to select their dorm and floor upon arrival on campus, and as a result diverse communities arise in living groups. Although many dorms contain a wide range of living options, the dorms on and east of Massachusetts Avenue are stereotypically more involved in countercultural activities. Older dormitories such as Bexley Hall and East Campus permit students wide leeway in decoration, which has included in some cases, wallpaper, bars, a completely black hallway, and in-wall aquariums. [42]

Many upperclassmen choose to live in fraternities, sororities, and independent living groups (FSILG) [43] , most of which are located across the river in the Back Bay owing to MIT's historic location there. Since 2002, all freshmen are required to live in the dormitory system before moving off-campus to into a FSILG.

File:Brass Rat 2007 Finger.jpg
A typical "Brass Rat." The design variation pictured is from the Class of 2007.

Brass Rat

Main article: MIT class ring

Many MIT students and graduates wear an MIT class ring, which is large, heavy, distinctive, and recognizable from a distance. Originally created in 1929, the ring's official name is the "Standard Technology Ring," but its colloquial name is far more well known—the "Brass Rat." The undergraduate ring design varies slightly from year to year to reflect the unique character of the MIT experience for that class but always features a three-piece design, with the MIT seal and the class year each appearing on a separate shank, flanking a large rectangular bezel bearing an image of a beaver. To show that one has graduated from the Insitute, one wears the ring so that the beaver's feet point to the tips of one's fingers, and the wearer looks back on MIT via the Cambridge skyline; those who have not graduated wear the ring so the beaver's feet point toward the wearer's wrist, and the wearer looks away from MIT via the Boston skyline.

Undergraduate academics

Barker Library, inside the Great Dome

There is a large amount of pressure in MIT classes, which has been characterized as "drinking from a fire hose" (often expanded with the explanatory "you get hosed and your parents get soaked") or "academic boot camp." Although the perceived pressure is high, the failure rate and freshmen retention rate at MIT are similar to schools of similar calibre [44].

Although students are assigned letter grades in their first semester, their transcripts report only that they passed, if they did. To allow the students to gradually adjust to regular grading, second semester is ABC/No Record. For both semesters, classes that a student fails are noted on the internal transcript but erased from all external records. (Prior to the 2002-03 academic year, both terms were graded Pass/No Record.) In subsequent terms, students receive letter grades without a modifier (+ or −). A student's grade point average is calculated on a 5.0 scale, with A = 5, B = 4, C = 3, D = 2, and F = 0.

In a practice that confounds most outsiders, MIT undergraduates refer to both their majors and classes using numbers alone. Majors are numbered with Roman numerals in the approximate order of when the department was founded; for example, Civil and Environmental Engineering is Course I, while Nuclear Science & Engineering is Course XXII. Students majoring in Electrical Engineering and/or Computer Science, the most popular department, collectively identify themselves as "Course 6." Subjects within each course also have numeric identifications, which most students use more frequently than the written names; the course number is given with an Arabic numeral, then a decimal point, and a subject number. This pattern differs from that of many U.S. universities; the course which many universities would designate as "Physics 101" is, at MIT, "8.01."

For brevity, course number designations are pronounced without the decimal point and by replacing "oh" for zero (unless zero is the last number). Thus, the above course at MIT would be pronounced "eight oh one," and the course "7.20" would be pronounced "seven twenty." For more information on naming and pronunciation conventions around campus, see here. For a list of course numbers, see here.

Course requirements

MIT has a core undergraduate curriculum comprised of science, writing/communication, HASS (Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences), Institute laboratory, and physical education requirements that is collectively called the General Institute Requirements, or GIRs. The science requirement, generally completed during freshman year as they are prerequisites for many introductory science and engineering classes, is comprised of 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. The classes that fulfill the science requirement are stratifed and offer alternative courses that allow students to pursue more complex or difficult topics than are covered in the general class. Every department offers a laboratory subject requiring substantial hands-on experimentation and written analysis to fulfill the Institute lab requirement.

The writing/communication is intended to foster competency in expository writing, speaking, and the "forms of discourse common to their professional fields" through a two-tiered system of general HASS classes (CI-H) and major-specific (CI-M) classes. The HASS requirement, comprised of eight semester-long classes, is intended to ground a student's technical competency with a broader awareness of "human society, its traditions, and its institutions." Students are both required to take a distribution of four unrelated HASS classes while also selecting a concentration of at least three related HASS classes. Among undergraduates, the HASS and communication requirements are notoriously difficult to understand as some classes arbitrarily fulfill both requirements while seemingly analogous classes fulfill neither. In the spring of 2005, a student-operated advisory committee empaneled to review the GIRs stressed the need to simplify the HASS system in particular. [45]

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 addressing a "big idea." [46]

Class structure

Most of the science and engineering classes follow a standard pattern. Typically, a professor gives a lecture that explains a concept. Then teaching assistants and, less often, professors, lead recitation sections to explore fuller details, or often to provide students help on homework problems. Alternative curriculae also exist like the Experimental Study Group. Problem sets (colloquially known as "p-sets"), given roughly every week, are designed to enable the student to master the concept. Students often gather in informal groups to solve the problem sets and it is within these groups that much of the actual learning takes place. Over time, students compile "bibles," collections of problem set and examination questions and answers. They may be created over several years and are often handed down "from generation to generation"—bearing in mind that "generations" of student time may be short-lived.

These "bibles" were one issue addressed in Snyder's The Hidden Curriculum. 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.

Although professors often use the average performance of a class to gauge the difficulty of an exam or a course, MIT policy does not permit grade cutoffs based purely on predetermined percentages or statistics (i.e., grading "on a curve") [47]. This policy is intended, in part, to prevent a competitive atmosphere where the students want one another to do poorly in order to improve their own prospects. Most classes end with a grade distribution centered around a B.[citation needed]

While there is no official premedical curriculum, roughly 10% of each undergraduate class applies to medical school following their undergraduate work at MIT.

Graduate academics

Unlike most colleges and universities around the world, MIT graduate students outnumber its undergraduates (60% of the student body are graduate students. [48] MIT graduate students can work towards Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D), Doctor of Science (ScD), Engineer, Master of Science (SM), Master of Engineering (MEng), Master of Architecture (MArch), Master in City Planning (MCP), and Master of Business Administration (MBA) depending on their department affiliation.

In addition to the work that each department does for its graduate program, the Graduate Students Office provides additional support for the graduate students, and the Graduate Student Council organizes many events (such as the MIT Graduate Student Orientation) and lobbies for the interests of students. In addition to these two Institute-wide organizations, there are many departmental and special-interest groups that cater to the graduate community.

Campus

Killian Court and The Great Dome

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.

A network of underground tunnels connects many of the main campus buildings, providing protection from the Cambridge weather. The bridge closest to MIT is the Harvard Bridge, which is marked off in the fanciful unit called 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 [49] , MIT operates a highly visible nuclear reactor on campus. Other notable campus facilities include a pressurized wind tunnel and a low-emission cogeneration plant that provides for nearly all of the campus electricity and heating requirements.

Naming and pronunciation

File:MIT-building10-night.jpg
Building 10 at Night

MIT buildings [2] all have a number (or a number and a letter) designation and most have a name as well. Typically, academic and office buildings are referred to only by number while residence halls are referred to by name. Rooms on campus are referred to by building number designation, followed by a dash, followed by the floor in the building on which the room resides, followed by the room number on that floor. Thus, the classroom "10-250" (pronounced "ten two fifty") is actually room "50" on the second floor of building 10.

The organization of building numbers on campus may appear random, but there is some order to it and it is believed to roughly correspond to the order in which the buildings were built. Buildings 1-10 were the original main campus, with building 10, the location of the Great Dome, designed to be the main entrance. Buildings 1-8 are arranged symmetrically around building 10, with odd-numbered buildings to the west and even-numbered buildings to the east.

The east side of campus has "the 6s", several connecting buildings that end with the digit 6 (buildings 6, 16, 26, 36, 56 and 66, with building 46 across the street from 36). The 30s buildings run along Vassar street on the north side of main campus. Buildings that are East of Ames Street are prefixed with an E (e.g. E52, the Sloan Bulding); those West of Massachusetts Avenue generally start with a W (e.g., W20, the Stratton Student Center).

Early constructions

Frieze on Building 2 dedicated to Newton

One striking part of the campus is Killian Court, also known as the Great Court, in front of the Great Dome, where commencement is held annually. Many have accused MIT of lacking the architectural elegance or consistency of other schools as the buildings reflect neoclassical, brutalist, and deconstructuvist styles. Most are connected above ground as well as below, which requires some arithmetic to determine at what floor on will arrive at after leaving one building.

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. 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; they surround Killian Court on three sides. On one 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 Institute as a whole. The Star Trek episode "Bread and Circuses" uses a shot of the Great Dome to depict a generic building on a planet dominated by ancient Roman culture.

Entrance on 77 Massachusetts Avenue

The Maclaurin buildings, in many ways the public "entrance" of MIT, were designed by William Welles Bosworth based on plans developed by wealthy alumnus and hydraulic engineer John Ripley Freeman. Bosworth's design was drawn so as to admit large amounts of light through exceptionally large windows on the first and second floors, many internal windows—not only on office doors but above door-level, and skylights over huge stairwells. The interior decor of the Maclaurin buildings is stylistically consistent throughout. Its major architectural features are the Infinite Corridor, an impressive central dome, and the expansive domed lobby at the main 77 Massachusetts Ave. entrance. 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. Lavoisier, for example, is placed in the company of Boyle, Cavendish, Priestley, Dalton, Gay Lussac, Berzelius, Woehler, Liebig, Bunsen, Mendelejeff [sic], Perkin, and van't Hoff.

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; Building 66, the Chemical Engineering Department; and the Weisner Building (Building E15), the Media Laboratory, whose tiled exterior was designed by Kenneth Noland.

Recent building efforts

MIT's Stata Center for Computer, Information and Intelligence Sciences

A major building effort has been underway for several years in the wake of a $2 billion development campaign. Simmons Hall (designed by Steven Holl), built in response to the freshmen-on-campus Krueger settlement stipulation, opened in 2002. The Zesiger sports and fitness center, featuring an olympic-class swimming pool, also opened in 2002. Building 46 (designed by Charles Correa) which houses the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research opened in November 2005. The Broad Institute opened its new headquarters in May 2006.

The Frank Gehry-designed Stata Center opened in March, 2004. Boston Globe architecture columnist Robert Campbell wrote a glowing appraisal of the building on April 25th. According to Campbell, "Everything looks improvised, as if thrown up at the last moment. That's the point. The Stata's appearance is a metaphor for the freedom, daring, and creativity of the research that's supposed to occur inside it." Campbell stated that the cost overruns and delays in completion of the Stata Center are of no more importance than similar problems associated with the building of St. Paul's Cathedral. A 2005 college guide [50] recognizes MIT as having the "hottest architecture," placing most of its emphasis on the Stata Center.

The building of the Stata Center necessitated the removal of the much-beloved Building 20 in 1998. Building 20 was erected hastily during World War II as a temporary building that housed the historic Radiation Laboratory. Over the course of fifty-five years, its "temporary" nature allowed research groups to have more space, and to make more creative use of that space, than was possible in more respectable buildings. Simson Garfinkel quoted Professor Jerome Y. Lettvin as saying "You might regard it as the womb of the Institute. It is kind of messy, but by God it is procreative!" [51] [52]

For an overview of the various sculptures and art-related installations at MIT, see MIT artwork.

Organization

File:Tang-center.jpg
The Tang Center at the
MIT Sloan School of Management

MIT schools

MIT is organized into five schools and one college which contain twenty-six academic departments. It was once characterized by James R. Killian as "a university polarized around science, engineering, and the arts," [53]

Each department is listed with its MIT course number, where applicable.

MIT has no school of law or medicine, although the HST program does offer an MD-PhD program with the Harvard Medical School.

Other MIT labs and groups

MIT also has many laboratories, centers and programs which cut across disparate disciplines. These include:

External relationships

MIT has close ties to a number of institutions.

File:Harvard-MIT-coop.png
An example of cooperation, "The Coop" is the official bookstore of both institutions

MIT has a friendly rivalry with Harvard University [56] which dates back to the earliest days of the Institute, and the aforementioned merger talks between the two schools. Today, they cooperate as much as they compete, with many joint conferences and programs, including the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, [57] the Broad Institute, the Center for Ultracold Atoms, Eaton-Peabody Laboratory, and the Harvard-MIT Data Center. [58] 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. [59] Another cross-registration program exists between MIT and Wellesley College, a renowned women's college in suburban Wellesley, MA.

The city of Cambridge is notable for the presence of two major research universities within two miles of each other. A third major research university, Boston University, is located between MIT and Harvard on the Boston side of the Charles River. These three schools jointly run the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. [60]

The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, now an independent defense contractor, was founded as the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, and still shares some facilities and faculty with MIT. (The Draper Lab, which designed missile guidance systems, was spun off during the Vietnam War to assuage antiwar feeling on campus and in the city of Cambridge, while holding on to the more lucrative defense contracts at Lincoln Laboratory.) The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution runs its graduate program jointly with MIT.

MIT maintains an undergraduate exchange program with the University of Cambridge in England, in a partnership known as the Cambridge-MIT Institute, which was established to bring the entrepreneurial spirit of MIT to the United Kingdom and to increase knowledge exchange between universities and industry. MIT also has close but informal ties with one of the United Kingdom's top engineering universities, the University of Southampton, which has its own thriving collection of spin-off businesses.

MIT was instrumental in the setup and development of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT Kanpur). A large number of students from IIT Kanpur have pursued advanced degrees in the USA and many of them have grown to become international authorities in critical areas of science and technology.

MIT has also set up relationships with the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore known as the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA), which covers 5 major programs. This has enabled it to bring quality engineering education to a higher number of students. In 2004, MIT set up the MIT-Zaragoza Logistics Program modelled on its own masters degree in logistics. The MIT-Zaragoza program was set up with the local government of Aragon in Spain. The University of Zaragoza and MIT hope to further improve education in Europe.

The Malaysia University of Science and Technology (MUST) was set up under a collaborative agreement between MIT and MUST Ehsan Foundation. MUST's syllabi are modelled after MIT's selected courses in order to create a curriculum for MUST's Masters degree program.[61]

MIT publishes the mass-market magazine Technology Review through a subsidiary company. Alumni of the Institute receive copies with an "MIT News" section added, so that Technology Review serves as the Institute's official alumni magazine.

MIT students are involved in a variety of community service projects, especially in educational outreach to middle and high school students. This ranges from programs held on the MIT campus to federal work-study working with students at a variety of local schools.

Further reading

  • Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford, Columbia University Press 1994
  • T. F. Peterson, Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT, MIT Press, 2003.
  • Julius A. Stratton and Loretta H. Mannix, Mind and Hand: The Birth of MIT, MIT Press, 2005.

References

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  2. ^ "MIT Facts 2006: Academic Schools and Departments, Divisions & Sections". Retrieved 2006-10-04.
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  4. ^ "MIT Facts 2006: Mission and Origins". 2006. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
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  6. ^ 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."
  7. ^ 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.
  8. ^ Andrews, Elizabeth, Nora Murphy, and Tom Rosko(2004), William Barton Rogers: MIT's Visionary Founder (Charter, laboratory instruction, first classes in Mercantile building).
  9. ^ Report of the Committee on Educational Survey, page 11
  10. ^ "National Selection Committee Ballot - Power of the NSC". Retrieved November 23. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  11. ^ "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."
  12. ^ "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.
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  18. ^ MIT News Office (2003-12-05). "Charles Vest to step down from MIT presidency, Has been staunch national advocate for education and research". Retrieved 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."

  19. ^ "Professor Sues M.I.T. Over Refusal of Tenure". New York Times. 1986-09-10. Retrieved 2006-10-03.
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    "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 reenforced 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.'"

  23. ^ Elizabeth Fried Ellen, LICSW (2002). "Prevention on Campus". Psychiatric Times. Retrieved 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)"
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    "MIT's founder, William Barton Rogers, regarded the practice of giving honorary degrees as 'literary almsgiving ... of spurious merit and noisy popularity....' Rogers was a geologist from the University of Virginia who believed in Thomas Jefferson's policy barring honorary degrees at the university, which was founded in 1819.... When Charles M. Vest... was offered the job of president of MIT in 1990, he met with Wiesner, who also had come to MIT from the University of Michigan. Wiesner, in ten words of concise persuasion, cited three worries of university presidents that Vest would not have at MIT—'No big time athletics. No medical school. No honorary degrees.'"
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  39. ^ Other schools with the beaver as their mascot include Babson College, which is less than fifteen miles from MIT, and Oregon State University.
  40. ^ Shapiro, Fred (1972-04-25). "MIT's World Champions" (PDF). The Tech. p. 7. Retrieved 2006-10-04.
  41. ^ MIT Housing Office (2005-08-25). "MIT Undergraduate Housing FAQ:19 Frequently Asked Questions". Retrieved 2006-10-04.
  42. ^ Bexley 210 in particular had wallpaper, a bar and in-wall aquarium in the 70s-80s according to a former resident
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  52. ^ Quotes and Stories about Building 20
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  59. ^ "Times Higher Education Supplement World Rankings 2005". Retrieved 2006-10-04. The US has the world's top two universities by our reckoning — Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, neighbours on the Charles River.
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