The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1861 to advance "useful knowledge", the university has played a significant role in the development of many areas of technology and science.
William Barton Rogers founded MIT to accelerate American industrialization through scientific knowledge. Initially funded by a federal land grant, the institute adopted a German polytechnic model emphasizing laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering, and moved from Boston's Back Bay to its current campus in Cambridge in 1916. Early growth came through research contracts with private industry, though the institute remained financially constrained and focused primarily on practical engineering education into the 1930s.
MIT's transformation as a research enterprise began during World War II, when projects like the Radiation Laboratory made it the nation's largest non-industrial R&D contractor. Graduate enrollment and research funding grew rapidly in the postwar decades as faculty members such as Vannevar Bush helped shape federal support for basic science. In the late twentieth century, MIT became closely associated with computer science, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, open-source software development, and "big science" initiatives like the Apollo Guidance Computer and the LIGO project. Engineering remains its largest school, though MIT has also developed prominent programs in basic science, economics, management, architecture, and humanities.
MIT has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) along the Charles River. Academic buildings are connected by an extensive corridor system. MIT's off-campus operations include Lincoln Laboratory and Haystack Observatory, as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad and Whitehead Institutes. Undergraduate life is known for hands-on research and elaborate pranks. Tuition is generally not charged to undergraduates from families with incomes below $200,000, and most graduate students are funded by research.
, 105 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. Alumni and faculty have founded many notable companies and served in senior government positions in the United States and abroad.
History
Foundation and vision
In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a "Conservatory of Art and Science", but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.
Rogers, a geologist who had recently arrived in Boston from the University of Virginia, wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education,Lewis 1949, p. 8. proposing that: The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.
The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.
Early developments
Two days after MIT was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT's first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes" and was a land-grant school. In 1863, under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which later developed into the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.
MIT was informally called "Boston Tech". The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.
The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science.Lewis 1949, p. 12. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these "Boston Tech" years, MIT faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot's repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College's Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard and move to then-remote Allston, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. The merger plan collapsed in 1905 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that MIT could not sell its Back Bay land.
In 1912, MIT acquired its current campus by purchasing a one-mile (1.6 km) tract of filled lands along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical "New Technology" campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious "Mr. Smith", starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman, an inventor of film production methods and founder of Eastman Kodak. In 1916, with the first academic buildings complete, the MIT administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion.
Industry dependence and reform Unlike the Ivy League universities, MIT drew an unusually large share of its students from families of moderate means and depended heavily on tuition rather than endowment income for its operating budget. The "Technology Plan," launched by President Richard Maclaurin in 1919, sought to deepen industry patronage. Under the plan, corporations paid MIT an annual retaining fee in exchange for access to faculty, library resources, and technical services. By the late 1920s, more than a third of the teaching staff were engaged in research, testing, or consulting for industry, with MIT handling an expanding volume of corporate contracts. An industry orientation meant that salaries and faculty research funds lagged behind those at other American research universities. Heavy work on industry problems limited basic research and diminished interest from foundations. By the late 1920s MIT was regarded by elite universities as a "mere engineering school servicing industry".
A mandate for reform came from board members tied to industry research: Gerard Swope, president of General Electric, and Frank B. Jewett, head of Bell Telephone Laboratories. Both argued that practice-oriented training was obsolete and industry needed engineers grounded in fundamental science. In 1930 they recruited the physicist Karl Compton to carry out a broad program of reform.
As president, Compton overhauled the science departments first, recruiting a cohort of research-oriented faculty. In 1932, he reorganized MIT into schools of engineering, science, and architecture, created a formal graduate school, and appointed Vannevar Bush as vice president and dean of engineering. To relieve dependence on industry, the pair centralized all industrial contracts, established a patent licensing program, and curtailed faculty consulting. Compton also tripled philanthropic support for research and campaigned for federal government support of university science.
The reforms were uneven. Physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering advanced rapidly, but much of the engineering school did virtually no research well into the 1930s. Faculty resisted changes to shop practice and consulting arrangements. Even so, by the mid-1930s, MIT had been admitted to the Association of American Universities, the organization of the nation's top research universities. The institutional changes of this decade positioned MIT to take a leading role in wartime research after 1940.
Defense research
In June 1940, Vannevar Bush, who had left MIT's administration to lead the Carnegie Institution in Washington, persuaded President Roosevelt to create the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) to mobilize civilian science for defense. The NDRC's first major project was a laboratory for microwave radar research. After other proposed sites fell through, Bush and other science administrators turned to Compton, who agreed to host the project at MIT.
The Radiation Laboratory, as it was called to conceal its purpose, opened in 1940 and grew from a staff of thirty to roughly 4,000 and rivaled the Manhattan Project in scale: the NDRC division under which it operated expended some $1.5 billion on radar systems. The Rad Lab contract was the first and largest wartime research agreement between the federal government and a university; its terms became a model for postwar government–university contracts. By war's end MIT had received $117 million ($ billion in ) in government R&D contracts, more than any industrial contractor and roughly a third of all NDRC spending on university research.
The Rad Lab closed in 1945, but opened a new era of large military research contracts at MIT. New interdepartmental laboratories took shape: the Research Laboratory of Electronics (1946) inherited the Rad Lab's facilities and an Army–Navy contract for basic research in microwaves and electronics; the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (1946) opened with Navy support; Lincoln Laboratory (1951) was created to develop a continental air-defense radar network for the Air Force. Charles Stark Draper's wartime gunsight laboratory, renamed the Instrumentation Laboratory, expanded into inertial guidance for ballistic missiles and computerized guidance for the Apollo lunar mission. The new laboratories became the primary training ground for graduate students in science and engineering and spawned dozens of firms along the Route 128 corridor.
The cumulative effect transformed MIT. Between the early 1930s and the mid-1950s, the faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled. Federal funding, negligible before the war, reached $38 million by 1944, and by 1957 research expenditures represented 72 percent of MIT's operating budget. The Department of Defense was the dominant sponsor for much of this period. By 1962 the physicist Alvin Weinberg said it was difficult "to tell whether MIT is a university with many government research laboratories appended to it or a cluster of government research laboratories with a very good educational institution attached to it."
Most defense-funded work on campus was basic and unclassified. The major exception was the Instrumentation Laboratory, which carried projects from conception through deployment, an anomaly in university research. Its work on guidance systems for American Poseidon MIRV warheads drew particular criticism as destabilizing the Cold War arms race.