Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Motto:	Mens et Manus (Latin)
Motto in English:	Mind and Hand
Established:	1861 (opened 1865)
Type:	Private
Endowment:	US $9.98 billion[1]
Chancellor:	Phillip Clay
President:	Susan Hockfield
Provost:	L. Rafael Reif
Faculty:	998
Undergraduates:	4,127
Postgraduates:	6,126
Location:	Cambridge, Mass., U.S.
Campus:	Urban, 154 acres (0.6 km²)
Athletics:	Division III 41 varsity teams
Colors:	Cardinal Red and Gray
Mascot:	Beaver
Website:	web.mit.edu

University Portal

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing 32 academic departments,^[2] with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research. MIT is one of two private land-grant universities and is also a sea grant and space grant university.

MIT was founded by William Barton Rogers in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States. Although based upon German and French polytechnic models of an institute of technology, MIT's founding philosophy of "learning by doing" made it an early pioneer in the use of laboratory instruction,^[3] undergraduate research, and progressive architectural styles. As a federally funded research and development center during World War II, MIT scientists developed defense-related technologies that would later become integral to computers, radar, and inertial guidance. After the war, MIT's reputation expanded beyond its core competencies in science and engineering into the social sciences including economics, linguistics, political science, and management. MIT's endowment and annual research expenditures are among the largest of any American university.^[4] MIT graduates and faculty are noted for their technical acumen,^[5][6][7] entrepreneurial vigor,^[8][9] and irreverence.^[10][11][12]

[ History

[ Initial years and vision

As early as 1859, the Massachusetts State Legislature was given a proposal for use of newly opened lands in Back Bay in Boston for a museum and Conservatory of Art and Science.^[14] 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. Rogers sought to establish a new form of higher education to address the challenges posed by rapid advances in science and technology during the mid-19th century with which classic institutions were ill-prepared to deal.^{[15] [16]} 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.^[17][18]

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.^[19] Construction of the first MIT buildings was completed in Boston's Back Bay in 1866 and MIT would be known as "Boston Tech." During the next half-century, the focus of the science and engineering curriculum drifted towards vocational concerns instead of theoretical programs. Charles William Eliot, the president of Harvard University, repeatedly attempted to merge MIT with Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School over his 30-year tenure: overtures were made as early as 1869^[20] with other proposals in 1900 and 1914 ultimately being defeated.^{[21][22][23][24]}

[ Expansion

A plaque of George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak, in Building 6. His nose is rubbed by students for good luck.^[25]

The attempted mergers occurred in parallel with MIT's continued expansion beyond the classroom and laboratory space permitted by its Boston campus. President Richard Maclaurin sought to move the campus to a new location when he took office in 1909.^[26] An anonymous donor, later revealed to be George Eastman, donated the funds to build a new campus along a mile-long tract of swamp and industrial land on the Cambridge side of the Charles River. In 1916, MIT moved into its handsome new neoclassical campus designed by the noted architect William W. Bosworth which it occupies to this date. The new campus triggered some changes in the stagnating undergraduate curriculum, but in the 1930s President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush drastically reformed the curriculum 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."^[27] The expansion and reforms thus 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.

MIT was drastically changed by its involvement in military research during World War II. Bush was appointed head of the enormous Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT.^[28][29] During the war and in the post-war years, this government-sponsored research contributed to a fantastic growth in the size of the Institute's research staff and physical plant as well as placing an increased emphasis on graduate education.^[30]

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.^[31][32] However, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, intense protests by student and faculty activists (an era now known as "the troubles")^[33] against the Vietnam War and MIT's defense research required that the MIT administration to divest itself from what would become the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and move all classified research off-campus to the Lincoln Laboratory facility.

[ Challenges and controversies

Ellen Swallow Richards, the first female student and professor at MIT.

MIT has been nominally coeducational since admitting Ellen Swallow Richards in 1870. (Richards also became the first female member of MIT's faculty, specializing in sanitary chemistry.)^[34] Female students, however, remained a very small minority (numbered in dozens) prior to the completion of the first wing of a women's dormitory, McCormick Hall, in 1963.^[35][36] By 1993, 32% of MIT's undergraduates were female and in 2006, the number had increased to near-parity (47.5%).^[37]

A 1998 MIT study concluded that a systemic bias against female faculty existed in its college of science,^[38] although the study's methods were controversial.^[39][40] A 2003 MIT news release cites various statistics suggesting that the status of women improved during the latter years of President Vest's tenure.^[41] Susan Hockfield, a molecular neurobiologist, became MIT's 16th president on December 6, 2004 and is the first woman to hold the post. While the student body has become more balanced in recent years, women are still a distinct minority among faculty.

The 1984 dismissal of David F. Noble, a historian of technology, became a cause celebre about the extent to which academics are granted "freedom of speech" after he published several books and papers critical of MIT's and other research universities' reliance upon financial support from corporations and the military.^[42]

In 1986, Professor David Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate, became embroiled in an investigation of research misconduct that led to Congressional hearings in 1991.^[43]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many American politicians and business leaders accused MIT and other universities of contributing to a declining economy by transferring taxpayer-funded research and technology to international — especially Japanese — firms that were competing with struggling American businesses.^[44][45]

In 1991, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against MIT and the eight Ivy League colleges for holding "Overlap Meetings" to prevent bidding wars over promising students from consuming funds for need-based scholarships. While the Ivy League institutions settled, MIT contested the charges on the grounds that the practice was not anticompetitive because it ensured the availability of aid for the greatest number of students. MIT ultimately prevailed when the Justice Department dropped the case in 1994.^[46]

In 2000, Professor Ted Postol accused the MIT administration of attempting to whitewash potential research misconduct at the Lincoln Lab facility involving a ballistic missile defense test, though a final investigation into the matter has not been completed.^[47]

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a number of student deaths resulted in considerable media attention to MIT's culture and student life.^[48] 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.^[49] 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.^[50][51] In late 2001 a task force's recommended improvements in student mental health services^[52] were implemented, including expanding staff and operating hours at the mental health center.^[53] These and later cases were significant as well because they sought to prove the negligence and liability of university administrators in loco parentis.^[54]

In 2006-2007, MIT's denial of tenure to African-American biological engineering professor James Sherley prompted accusations of racism in MIT's tenure process, eventually leading to a protracted public dispute with the administration, a brief hunger strike, and the resignation of Professor Frank L. Douglas in protest.^[55][56]

In April 2007, Dean of Admissions Marilee Jones resigned after she "misrepresented her academic degrees" when she applied to an administrative assistant position in 1979 and never corrected the record despite her subsequent promotions.^[57][58]

[ Organization

See also Labs and Centers and Departments

MIT is "a university polarized around science, engineering, and the arts."^[59] MIT has five schools (Science, Engineering, Architecture and Planning, Management, and Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences) and one college (Whitaker College of Health Sciences and Technology), but no schools of law or medicine.^[60]

MIT is governed by a 78-member board of trustees known as the MIT Corporation^[61] which approve the budget, degrees, and faculty appointments as well as electing the President.^[62] MIT's endowment and other financial assets are managed through a subsidiary MIT Investment Management Company (MITIMCo).^[63] The chair of each of MIT's 32 academic departments reports to the dean of that department's school, who in turn reports to the Provost under the President. However, faculty committees assert substantial control over many areas of MIT's curriculum, research, student life, and administrative affairs.^[64]

MIT students refer to both their majors and classes using numbers alone. Majors are numbered 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.^[65] Students majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the most popular department, collectively identify themselves as "Course VI." MIT students use a combination of the department's course number and the number assigned to the class to identify their subjects; the course which many American universities would designate as "Physics 101" is, at MIT, simply "8.01."^[66]

[ Campus

Main article: Campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MIT's 168-acre (68.0 ha) Cambridge campus spans approximately a mile of the north side of the Charles River basin. The campus is divided roughly in half by Massachusetts Avenue, with most dormitories and student life facilities to the west and most academic buildings to the east. 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 in Kendall Square. The Cambridge neighborhoods surrounding MIT are a mixture of high tech companies occupying both modern office and rehabilitated industrial buildings as well as socio-economically diverse residential neighborhoods.

Northward view of MIT's campus along the Charles River. Undergraduate dormitories MacGregor House, Burton-Conner House, Baker House, and McCormick Hall, as well as graduate dormitory Ashdown House, can be seen to the west of the Harvard Bridge and Massachusetts Avenue. The Maclaurin buildings and Killian Court can be seen at the center of the image. The Green Building, Walker Memorial, Media Lab, and high-rise offices and laboratories in Kendall Square can be seen to the east.

MIT buildings all have a number (or a number and a letter) designation and most have a name as well.^[67] Typically, academic and office buildings are referred to only by number while residence halls are referred to by name. The organization of building numbers roughly corresponds to the order in which the buildings were built and their location relative (north, west, and east) to the original, center cluster of Maclaurin buildings. Many are connected above ground as well as through an extensive network of underground tunnels, providing protection from the Cambridge weather. MIT also owns commercial real estate and research facilities throughout Cambridge and the greater Boston area.

MIT's on-campus nuclear reactor is the second largest university-based nuclear reactor in the United States. The high visibility of the reactor's containment building in a densely populated area has occasionally caused controversy,^[68][69] but MIT maintains that it is well-secured.^[70] 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 serves most of the campus electricity and heating requirements. MIT's campus-wide wireless network was completed in the fall of 2005 and consists of nearly 3,000 access points covering 9,400,000 square feet (873,289.0 m²) of campus.^[71]

[ Architecture

The Stata Center houses CSAIL, LIDS, and the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy

Frieze on Building 2 dedicated to Isaac Newton

As MIT's school of architecture was the first in the United States,^[72] it has a history of commissioning progressive, if stylistically inconsistent, buildings.^[73] The first buildings constructed on the Cambridge campus, completed in 1916, are known officially as the Maclaurin buildings after Institute president Richard Maclaurin who oversaw their construction. Designed by William Welles Bosworth, these imposing buildings were built of concrete, a first for a non-industrial — much less university — building in the U.S.^[74] The utopian City Beautiful movement greatly influenced Bosworth's design which features the Pantheon-esque Great Dome, housing the Barker Engineering Library, which overlooks Killian Court, where annual Commencement exercises are held. The friezes of the limestone-clad buildings around Killian Court are engraved with the names of important scientists and philosophers. The imposing Building 7 atrium along Massachusetts Avenue is regarded as the entrance to the Infinite Corridor and the rest of the campus.

Alvar Aalto's Baker House (1947), Eero Saarinen's Chapel and Auditorium (1955), and I.M. Pei's Green, Dreyfus, Landau, and Wiesner buildings represent high forms of post-war modern architecture. More recent buildings like Frank Gehry's Stata Center (2004), Steven Holl's Simmons Hall (2002), and Charles Correa's Building 46 (2005) are distinctive amongst the Boston area's staid architecture^[75] and serve as examples of contemporary campus "starchitecture."^[73] These buildings have not always been popularly accepted; the Princeton Review includes MIT in a list of twenty schools whose campuses are "tiny, unsightly, or both."^[76]

[ Academics

[ Student demographics

MIT enrolls more graduate students (approximately 6,000 in total) than undergraduates (approximately 4,000). In 2006, women constituted 44 percent of all undergraduates and 30 percent of graduate students. The same year, MIT students represented all 50 states, the District of Columbia, three U.S. Territories, and 113 foreign countries.

The admissions rate for freshmen in 2007 was 11.9% with over 69% of admitted freshmen choosing to enroll. Although graduate admissions are less centralized, they are similarly selective: 19.7% of 16,153 applications were admitted with 61.2% of admitted candidates enrolling.^[80]

Undergraduate tuition is $33,400 and graduate tuition is $33,600 per year although 64% of undergraduates receive need-based financial aid and 87% of graduate students are supported by MIT fellowships, research assistantships, or teaching assistantships.^[81][82]

[ Classes

The Infinite Corridor is the primary passageway through campus.

MIT has an extensive core curriculum required of all undergraduates called the General Institute Requirements (GIRs). The science requirement, generally completed during freshman year as prerequisites for classes in science and engineering majors, comprises two semesters of physics classes covering Classical Mechanics 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 simplified with changes to the science, HASS, and Institute Lab requirements.^[83]

Although the difficulty of MIT coursework has been characterized as "drinking from a fire hose,"^[84] the failure rate and freshmen retention rate at MIT are similar to other large research universities.^[85] Some of the pressure for first-year undergraduates is lessened by the existence of the "pass/no-record" grading system. In the first (fall) term, freshmen transcripts only report if a class was passed while no external record exists if a class was not passed. In the second (spring) term, passing grades (ABC) appear on the transcript while non-passing grades are again rendered "no-record."

Most classes rely upon a combination of faculty led lectures, graduate student led recitations, weekly problem sets (p-sets), and tests to teach material, though alternative curricula exist, e.g. Experimental Study Group, Concourse, and Terrascope.^[86][87] Over time, students compile "bibles," collections of problem set and examination questions and answers used as references for later students. In 1970, the then-Dean of Institute Relations, Benson R. Snyder, published The Hidden Curriculum, arguing that unwritten regulations, like the implicit curricula of the bibles, are often counterproductive; they fool professors into believing that their teaching is effective and students into believing they have learned the material.

[ Collaborations

The Harvard/MIT Cooperative Society, or "The Coop", is the official bookstore of Harvard and MIT^[88]

Building 7 (also 77 Massachusetts Avenue) is regarded as the entrance to campus.

MIT historically pioneered research collaborations between industry and government.^[89][90] Fruitful collaborations with industrialists like Alfred P. Sloan and Thomas Alva Edison led President Compton to establish an Office of Corporate Relations and an Industrial Liaison Program in the 1930s and 1940s that now allows over 600 companies to license research and consult with MIT faculty and researchers.^[91] As several MIT leaders served as Presidential scientific advisers since 1940,^[92] MIT established a Washington Office in 1991 to continue to lobby for research funding and national science policy.^[93]

MIT's proximity^[94] to Harvard University has created both a quasi-friendly rivalry ("the other school up the river") 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.^[95][96] In addition, students at the two schools can cross-register without any additional fees, for credits toward their own school's degrees.

MIT has a long-standing cross-registration program with Wellesley College as well as an undergraduate exchange program with the University of Cambridge known as the Cambridge-MIT Institute.^[97] MIT has limited cross-registration programs with Boston University, Brandeis University, Tufts University, Massachusetts College of Art, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.^[97]

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, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as well as international research and educational collaborations through the Singapore-MIT Alliance, MIT-Zaragoza International Logistics Program,^[98] MIT Portugal Program,^[99] and MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) program.^[100] The planned European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) is modelled on MIT.^{[citation needed]}

MIT students, faculty, and staff are involved in over 50 educational outreach and public service programs through the MIT Museum, Edgerton Center,^[101] and MIT Public Service Center.^[102][103] Summer programs like MITES^[104] and thee Research Science Institute^{Source: this wikipedia article, under GFDL.
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