Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a private research university located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Its mission and culture are guided by an emphasis on teaching and research grounded in practical applications of science and technology. MIT is organized into five schools and one college, containing thirty-four academic departments and fifty-three interdisciplinary laboratories, centers and programsMIT Facts 2006: Academic Schools and Departments, Divisions & Sections URL accessed on May 11,2006 . Founded in 1861 by William Barton Rogers, MIT has contributed to defense research during World War II and the early decades of the Cold War as a federally funded research and development center. The Institute has played a key role in developing the electronic digital computerSee Whirlwind (computer), Magnetic core memory, and Apollo guidance computer, the inertial navigation systems used in missiles and spacecraft, and biomedical engineering.

History

The Great Dome at MIT, illuminated at night.

In 1861, 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 believed that the rapidly industrializing United States required a new type of educational institution. With the charter approved, Rogers began raising funds, developing a curriculum and looking for a suitable location. His efforts were hampered by the Civil War, and as a result its first classes were held in rented space at the Mercantile Building in downtown Boston in 1865.Andrews, Elizabeth, Nora Murphy, and Tom Rosko(2004), William Barton Rogers: MIT's Visionary Founder (Charter, laboratory instruction, first classes in Mercantile building).

Construction of the first MIT building was completed in Boston's Back Bay in 1866. In the following years, the Institute taught sciences and engineering and became financially troubled. Some people wanted it to merge with Harvard University which was wealthier and did not focus as strongly on science compared to the liberal arts. Around 1900, a merger with Harvard was proposed, but was cancelled after protests from MIT's alumni.

Boston Daily Globe, January 25, 1914, p. 47

In 1914, a merger of MIT and Harvard's Applied Science departments was actually announced."Tech Alumni Holds Reunion. Record attendence, novel features. Cooperative plan with Harvard announced by Pres. Maclaurin. Gov. Walsh Brings Best Wishes of the State." Boston Daily Globe, Jan. 11, 1914, 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." The merger was to affect all Harvard courses in applied science and was to begin "when the Institute will occupy its splendid new buildings in Cambridge.""Harvard-Tech Merger. Duplication of Work to be Avoided in Future. Instructors Who WIll Hereafter be Members of Both Faculties." Boston Daily Globe, January 25, 1914, p. 47

In 1916, MIT moved across the river to its present location in Cambridge. In 1917, the arrangement with Harvard was cancelled due to State Judicial Court decision.Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

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.

In 1998, MIT president Charles Vest acknowledged fairness problems cited by senior women faculty in the 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.: "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." 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.

After World War II, the United States government began to fund projects at research universities with immediate or potential defense or national security applications (see Vannevar Bush, Lincoln Laboratory, and Charles Stark Draper Laboratory).

During the Watergate scandal, it was revealed that President Nixon's counsel Charles W. Colson had prepared an "enemies list" tabulating people "hostile to the administration." MIT had more names on the 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" (see the article on Wiesner for details)"Lists of White House 'Enemies' and Memorandums Relating to Those Named," The New York Times, June 28 1973, p. 38..

A 1997 report by MIT showed that the aggregated revenues produced by companies founded by MIT and its graduates would make it the twenty-fourth largest economy in the world. In 2001, MIT announced that it planned to put course materials online as part of its OpenCourseWare project.

MIT has developed the use of laboratory instruction1911 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.". 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;"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. MIT has been noted for the Radiation Laboratory's contributions to radar development during the Second World War; for contributions to electronic computation, particularly Project Whirlwind and magnetic core memory; and as an influencer of U. S. national science policies during the years of the Cold War (Leslie, 1994).

As of 2006, MIT's endowment stands at $6.7 billion, sixth-largest in the US. For a survey of the ways popular culture has viewed the school — many of them not so serious — see MIT in popular culture. In addition, see MIT people for a list of individuals who are or have been associated with the Institute.

Ranking and reputation

MIT is ranked #2 overall among the world's top 200 universities by The Times Higher Education Supplement (2005) and #1 worldwide in technology.Wikipedia's summaries: Top universities overall (worldwide); Top universities worldwide for technology; Top universities worldwide for science The National Research Council, in a 1995 study ranking research universities in the US, ranked MIT #1 in "reputation" and #4 for "citations or awards density" for all programs. Diamond, Nancy and Hugh Davis Graham (1995), How should we rate research universities?

MIT's Sloan School of Management is also ranked #4 in the nation in both undergraduate and graduate MBA programs by US News 2006 rankings.

MIT's graduate programs in chemistry, computer science, economics, engineering, mathematics, and physics placed first in U. S. News and World Reports' 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.

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.

The 2006 Princeton Review of college student opinions ranked MIT #1 in selectivity as well as in the top 10 for diversity and racial interactions.
According to the US News and World Report "Best Colleges" survey, MIT's overall undergraduate program ranking has fluctuated between #3 and #7 in the nation. However, it is the only school to be ranked #1 in "academic reputation" every single year (a rank shared by as many as five schools).In U. S. News' ranking of "academic reputation," Harvard and Stanford are often tied with MIT at #1, and in the last several years, Princeton and Yale have also tied with it for #1. The Atlantic Monthly ranked MIT in 2004 as the #1 most selective undergraduate college in the United States.

Culture and student life

MIT has never awarded an honorary degree; the only way to receive an MIT diploma is to earn it.:"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.'" 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.Daniel C. Stevenson. "Rushdie Stuns Audience 26-100" MIT Tech Vol. 113, No. 61 (30 November 1993): 1. 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 ("I hate this fucking 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 sexual 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. Ted Morgan, On Becoming American (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1978), pp. 330-1.

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 kill themselves" than at eleven other comparable universities, and quoted a psychiatrist who perceived a pattern of "suicide contagion."Healy, Patrick (2001), "11 years, 11 suicides—Critics Say Spate of MIT Jumping Deaths Show a 'Contagion'". The Boston Globe, February 5, 2001, p. A1: "Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been far more likely to kill themselves 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'" 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.", "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)" In late 2001 an MIT task force recommended improvements in mental health services. Chancellor Philip L. Clay announced that MIT would implement the recommendations, including expanding staff and operating hours at the mental health center.

MIT has a student athletics program offering 41 varsity-level sports . The Institute's sports teams are called the Engineers, their mascot since 1914 being a beaverOther schools with the beaver as their mascot include Babson College, which is less than fifteen miles from MIT, and Oregon State University., "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. 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.

A hack done with the lights of Simmons Hall

Undergraduate housing

MIT guarantees four-year dormitory housing for all undergraduateshttp://web.mit.edu/housing/undergrad/faqs.html#Eligibility, 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 east of Massachusetts Avenue are stereotypically more involved in countercultural activities.

Many upperclassmen choose to live in fraternities, sororities, and independent living groups, most of which are located across the river in the Back Bay owing to MIT's historic location there. Before 2002, freshmen who obtained membership in these organizations could move in immediately, bypassing the dormitory system. 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 .

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

Brass Rat

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, as measured by both the freshmen retention rate, is as high as schools of similar calibre .

Students are not assigned letter grades in their first semester; instead, they are graded Pass/No Record. 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, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) is Course VI, while Nuclear Science & Engineering is Course XXII. Thus, students majoring in EECS 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."

Course requirements

MIT has a core undergraduate curriculum comprised of a science, writing/communication, HASS, 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.

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."

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 (or sometimes tenured professors) lead recitation sections to explore fuller details, or often to provide students help on homework problems. 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") . 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.

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 [1]). 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).

Building 10 at Night

Somewhat controversially [2], 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

MIT buildings [3] 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. Campus visitors will often be confused when they hear students say something like "I have 18.02 ['eighteen oh two'] in 2-102 ['two one oh two'] and then 5.111 ['five eleven one'] in 10-250," and indeed this contributes to MIT's eccentric reputation. (For information on pronouncing course number designations, see here.) However, based on the above, it is clear that this phrase translates into English as "I have Multivariable Calculus in building 2, first floor, room 2 followed by Introductory Chemistry in building 10, second floor, room 50."

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