Given that the Task Force on the Undergraduate Program’s (TFUAP’s) proposal is being discussed around the Institute and in this Faculty Newsletter, we, TFUAP, will describe the core principles that have guided our decisions with regards to the proposal. These principles continue to guide us as we incorporate feedback and revise the final proposal.

Principle 1: MIT‘s leadership in higher education is at stake. Leadership requires that we adapt our curriculum, policies, and governance structures to change with the world. While there is value to having a longstanding canon of knowledge and ways of thinking, we heard widespread feedback and concern that MIT is not staying ahead of the curve. Maintaining our leadership status requires nimble structures that enable MIT faculty and instructors to collaboratively and creatively innovate within the framework of our curriculum. TFUAP heard from the community that: (1) there are clear gaps in our GIRs, and (2) what the students need to know to thrive in today’s world has evolved over time.

Principle 2: It is time to shift MIT’s academic culture. We want to foster an academic culture that increases engagement, instills wonder, prioritizes time for curiosity-driven exploration, and teaches consideration of different perspectives and communities. We are reminded of a quote used in the 2006 Silbey report^[1] – “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” The integrated classes in ‘flexible foundations’ and the moral and civic perspectives classes provide opportunities for students to tackle complex, real world problems and are a means of lighting that fire. In addition, we designed curricular and governance structures to foster collaboration among instructors and departments in order to foster deeper and richer connections across the Institute.

Principle 3: The general institute requirements serve a variety of roles for different students. Our current set of GIRs serves as both a technical foundation for many majors and as a general education for all students, and in trying to achieve both of these aims, it serves some students better than others. At the same time, the bodies of knowledge required for a solid foundation in many disciplines at MIT and those needed to be generally educated in the modern world have both expanded. There is a fundamental tension between preparing students to pursue any major at MIT and to be a generally educated person when they graduate; this tension has been central to TFUAP’s discussions for the past two years. TFUAP’s design aims to provide flexibility and adaptability to suit the needs of students seeing a subject once and the needs of students taking GIRs as a prerequisite for later coursework.

Principle 4: The number of requirements should not increase. We heard concern among faculty and staff about the lack of time that students have to fully engage in the academic pursuits that most motivate them. There is a sense that our students today are in a constant state of triage with few opportunities to take discretionary classes. Students generally want more flexibility, while some faculty and instructors feel that there should be more requirements to make sure students don’t have critical knowledge gaps. TFUAP’s decisions represented a carefully considered balance between these differing views.

Principle 5: Lean into residential education. We often discussed the value of MIT’s residential education. Why are we here, together, in a learning community? We believe that there are aspects of learning that cannot be replicated online or remotely, and that these are the features we should emphasize. We want MIT to be a place where students can engage deeply in their coursework, guided by faculty and instructors who create meaningful in-person educational experiences. We want an MIT where students and instructors bring their best to class and are fully present together. This is what TFUAP sees as the true promise of an MIT education – deep engagement with topics through conversations and collaboration throughout our community.

We are sincerely grateful to the community for all the feedback shared following the release of our draft proposal. We discussed every piece of input submitted (even if we could not individually respond to all the volume), and we continue to consider different solutions to respond to your suggestions. In an interconnected system of such complexity, every piece impacts something or someone else. Over the two years that we have been working, we have accumulated a deep understanding of the many tradeoffs that we need to evaluate for each discrete change. Because these are often too numerous to write about in detail, we wanted to take the opportunity here to articulate the core values and principles the MIT community has identified for our undergraduate academic program so that you can have a sense of what guides our systematic consideration of each suggestion.

Thank you again for your engagement and dedication to this process and for sharing with us your ideas for what we all hope will be an academic program and environment that is best for our students and MIT.

• Adam Martin, Co-Chair; Salvador E. Luria Professor, Department of Biology
• Joel Voldman, Co-Chair; William R. Brody (1965) Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
• Esther Duflo, Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics
• Jeffrey Grossman, Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems, Department of Materials Science
• Isaac Lock ’25, Course 20 and Course 24-1
• Robert Miller, Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
• William Minicozzi, Singer Professor, Department of Mathematics; Chair, Committee on the Undergraduate Program
• Caitlin Ogoe ’25, Course 6-9
• Janet Rankin, Director, Teaching and Learning Lab
• Skylar Tibbits, Morningside Academy for Design Professor, Department of Architecture
• Lily Tsai, Ford Professor, Department of Political Science
• Maria Yang, Vice Provost for Faculty, William E. Leonhard (1940) Professor of Mechanical Engineering
• Karen Zheng, George M. Bunker Professor of Management
• Kate Weishaar, Staff, Division of Graduate and Undergraduate Education
  
  The TFUAP committee can be reached at tfuap@mit.edu.

^[1] https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/sites/default/files/reports/200610_Task_Force_Undergraduate_Educational_Commons.pdf

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