Higher education postcard: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Here’s yet another postcard of a Cambridge college. But before you start to complain of Oxbridge bias, this one is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the college is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – or MIT, as it is now almost universally known.

MIT was founded in 1861 and, as its name suggests, focuses on science and technology. A comparison between UK and US approaches to encouraging technical education in the nineteenth century is instructive.

In the UK, there were mechanics institutes, and similar charitable enterprises founded by local industrialists. Some of these eventually become universities. There were also government schools of design, starting with the Royal College of Art, designated and to some extent funded by the state to support technical and design education in specific industries.

In the USA, things were different. To quote Bell’s Weekly Messenger, of Monday September 11 1865:

… things, whether of war or peace, being done on the other side of the Atlantic on a scale commensurate with the vast area of the country…

In 1862 the US – even while at war with the confederate states – passed the Land Grant Act (aka the Morrill Act) enabling states to sell public land in the west of the USA. States were permitted to sell up to 30,000 acres for each senator and member of congress that the state had, the sale was conditional upon the proceeds being used to endow institutes for technical education. These were the land-grant universities. And there’s lots of them: the US Department of Agriculture lists 113 land grant universities across the USA and its overseas territories. (Readers will reflect that it is easier to sell land which you’ve stolen from others than land which was yours in the first place. The list also shows that the USA has what might be called colonies if you were so inclined…)

MIT had gained its charter in 1861, but civil war broke out almost immediately thereafter; not caused, I hasten to add, by the establishment of MIT. This prevented the enrolment of actual students. So when the first students were enrolled in 1865, MIT was one of the two land grant institutions in Massachusetts, the other being what is now University of Massachusetts Amherst. It aimed to satisfy both hand and mind – mens et manus, the Institute’s motto – and the thinking is set out in this 1869 piece in The Atlantic.

The guiding force behind the establishment of MIT was William Barton Rogers. Rogers was a professor at William and Mary College in Virginia, and then at the University of Virginia, before moving to Boston in 1853 to better pursue his ambition of creating a new sort of technical education. This would culminate in his being MIT’s first president, from 1862 to 1870 and then again its third president, from 1879 to 1881. His second stint as president arose as no suitable appointment could be made, and he accepted it only on the understanding that it would be on an interim basis, and that a new leader would energetically be sought. The economist Francis Amasa Walker was appointed, and took office in 1881. At Walker’s first ceremonial event, commencement on 30 May 1882, Rogers was giving a speech:

There was silence in the midst of speech; that stately figure suddenly drooped…and, before one of his attentive listeners had time to suspect the cause, he fell to the platform instantly dead.

Legend has it that his last words were “bituminous coal”.

MIT was originally sited on the other side of the river to where it is today (and where it is shown in the card). This was in Boston proper, and MIT was known as Boston Tech. But by 1916 space was too tight on the existing campus, and there were also restrictions on the use of the original land on which Boston tech had been built. So the institute upped sticks and moved from Boston to Cambridge, establishing itself in the site which – much expanded – it occupies today.

There was also the question of the other university. 20 minutes’ walk north up Massachusetts Avenue from MIT’s campus you will find Harvard University, the oldest and most prestigious university in the USA, and one which is considerably better off, financially, than even today’s MIT. From the earliest days of MIT’s existence – in 1870 and again in 1878 – Harvard had made overtures to MIT that it should become part of its more prestigious neighbour. Over the years, according to some counts, there have been six attempts to merge MIT into Harvard – all, so far, unsuccessful. MIT no longer has the financial troubles which it had in its early days: I’d hazard a guess that its autonomy is now secure.

MIT proudly claims to have had an international outlook right from the start. There’s a good blog post by Yuliya K, an alumna, giving a brief history of its internationalisation: for example, in 1895 there were three times as many MIT students from Turkey as from Texas. The first international student enrolled in 1866, as part of the second cohort at MIT. Other firsts for MIT include Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to graduate in a STEM discipline in the USA, and a pioneer in drinking water safety; and Robert Robinson Taylor, MIT’s first African American student, who enrolled at MIT in 1888. He became the USA’s first accredited African-American architect, and was a driving force within the then Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, being Booker T Washington’s deputy.

MIT publishes a brief history which shows how the developing influence of science and technology on society and international relations through the twentieth century has been mirrored in the growth and development of MIT. After World War Two, US government spending on scientific research rose, and plenty of it went MIT’s way.

There was also soul-searching: do science and technology bring good to the world? This was not a new topic for MIT: Francis Amasa Waler, as President of MIT, had introduced a general course of study covering a range of social sciences, humanities and languages. This ran until the early twentieth century, when departments of economics and social science, and history and political science, were established at MIT. In 1950 MIT established a School of Humanities, which offered programmes leading to degrees. Since 1975, all MIT undergraduates are required to student some courses in humanities, arts and social sciences.

Many scientific advances and developments have come from MIT (here’s a few of the more recent ones) and twenty-four Nobel prize-winners have been affiliated with MIT when their prize was awarded. Educationally, MIT is notable for being an early pioneer of open courseware: all of its course materials are freely available, in an initiative started in 2001.

So that’s MIT.

And of course, there’s the fact that it’s one of the few university institutions across the world which are primarily known by an abbreviation, not by their full name. Now clearly there’s an element of availability bias here: for any given country, its inhabitants are more likely to know about institutions within that country, rather than more broadly. That said, I can think of five current UK university institutions which are known by abbreviations – usually initials – and five others in the rest of the world. But maybe that just reflects my limited knowledge – I’d be interested in the comments to see which institutions you know of by abbreviation, as it were.