“Most human beings operate like historians: they only recognize the nature of their experience in retrospect.” This comment, by the late historian Eric Hobsbawm [The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (Vintage, 1994)] describes many human beings at MIT these days. Not just the authors of “What’s Driving This Bus?” (the editorial in the November/December FNL), but others of us at MIT find ourselves looking to past experience here in order to understand a puzzling present. Are we still an “engineering school,” or have we morphed into something else? If so, what is that something else, and what are the forces that are currently defining the Institute? Why are some citizens seeing universities as enemies? How does past experience suggest where we are headed?
Hobsbawm contends that from mid- to late-twentieth century, “the world, particularly the world of developed capitalism, had passed through an altogether exceptional phase of its history; perhaps a unique one.” (257-258). According to Hobsbawm, this period was “the greatest and most dramatic, rapid and universal social transformation in human history.” (288). It was a worldwide phenomenon, bringing an end to some aspects of human life that had seemed timeless – the central role of the peasantry, for example – but also bringing science and technology into every corner of human activity.
Through it all, MIT was in the thick of this great transformation. The postwar epoch was exceptional, and the role of MIT in that epoch was exceptional. The design of the Institute matched the needs of what Hobsbawm calls “developed capitalism.” MIT invented, innovated, promoted, and benefitted from technological innovation, scientific research, economic expansion, global influence, and widespread social and political support. In retrospect, it looked like a Golden Age.
What puzzles the authors of the editorial is how MIT managed to do this more or less intuitively, despite the lack of a Master Plan.
How is it, they ask, that various processes interacted to ground this remarkable institution on the swampy north shore of the River Charles? How is it that MIT has so far managed to maintain a sense of direction and cohesion through unexpected, unsettling “moments of decision” [David Kaiser, ed. Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision (The MIT Press, 2010)]? There seems to have been a sort of magical realism at work.
The authors invite us to find more plausible reasons for MIT’s evolution. They give us a historian’s version of a problem set – a wide, thought-provoking range of examples of institutional changes over time. They invite us to think about these examples and to propose some conclusions about the processes that in their interactions have shaped this institution.
They do this in order to understand their own experience, but also to try to convince other people, including many not associated with MIT, to take a more informed view of our institutional home. “In light of perceived and in some cases explicit threats to universities,” they tell us at the beginning of their essay, “we are being challenged . . . to explain the ways that we operate.” The implied hope is that once “we try to explain these processes to others,” they will take a less threatening view of MIT.
The problem is that the two key concepts they turn to in order to “explain the ways that we operate” – institutions and processes – are now widely suspect. When processes that shape and sustain institutions are distrusted, no logic can overcome the lack of trust in the key concepts. The dilemma of MIT today is that the assumptions that thrived during the Golden Age are increasingly regarded as problematic. The processes and institution we want to defend may be dismissed as elitist. The expertise they embody is denounced as an inherently unfair meritocracy.
The editorial asks excellent questions, ones that are not asked very often when processes and institutions are taken for granted. How and why has the balance between undergraduate and graduate students changed in recent decades? Who wins and who loses from that rebalancing? Why and how have grading options multiplied? How has the balance between graduates going into existing businesses and those starting new businesses changed in recent years? What about those who don’t go into business at all? Where and how do people at MIT socialize? Does it matter that the Faculty Club lunchroom and the F&T diner are gone?
Such questions and the discussions they provoke are valuable to those of us associated with MIT and to those beyond our non-ivy-covered walls. However, we should not assume that discussing them will make the world more appreciative of us. Events of the past year have made it clear that suspicion about universities is not just an MIT phenomenon. Many universities, along with many other institutions, are on the defensive. As discussed in the faculty meeting of November 20, in this respect MIT has certain advantages over other “elite” universities, apparently because MIT’s “polarization” around science and technology, deservedly or otherwise, seems to work in our favor.
There are advantages to this reputation, but also the dangers of misrepresenting MIT. When James Killian described the postwar evolution of the Institute, he described it as “a university polarized around science, engineering, and the arts.” Science, engineering, and the arts: one thing to be learned from a historical view of MIT is its constant, conscious effort to understand science and technology as part of “a broader educational mission” (the title of chapter three of the 1949 Lewis Report).
In this time of threats to universities, safety is to be found in numbers and in united fronts.
However special MIT may be, it already has multiple connections not only with other research universities, but also with other four- and two-year degree-granting institutions, including ones that share its Land Grant origins.
Such coalition-building could go far in addressing a major problem in higher education today: the need for technical and scientific education that goes beyond secondary school levels but does not necessarily require a four-year degree. MIT already has done a lot to address this need through OpenCourseWare and related initiatives: there are many more possibilities that could be explored. The most effective way to rebuild institutional trust is to provide such concrete collective benefits.
The history of MIT reminds us that its current institutional form – a Research 1 university – was by no means foreseen when it was launched. When William Barton Rogers managed to get approval for this private Massachusetts corporation in early April 1861 – two days before the Civil War broke out – he included in the plan not only a School of Industrial Science but also a museum and a Society of Arts. Some mixture of these elements, he believed, could provide a broader kind of education than an industrial science school alone. The founders of MIT emphasized that they were trying to define a “New Education” combining craftwork and professional education [Roe Smith, “’God Speed the Institute,’ The Foundational Years, 1861-1894” in Kaiser (ed.), p. 21].
MIT has never had a Master Plan, but it has consistently sought a New Education. We keep changing our processes and institutional forms, but we are consistent in our goals: to understand the universe, and to understand ourselves. MIT has been wildly successful as a research university, but it has also experimented with other educational models and has collaborated with many different partners in these experiments. MIT is in a strong position now to respond to the moment with coalitions and innovations that will move the discussion from defense of the present to imagining new futures.
