No professional academic will have any trouble thinking of reasonable topics for complaint. There are always plenty of pebbles and even real boulders in our professional paths, and perpetual work to be done in moving them aside. Yet whatever we may say around the water cooler it is equally and more broadly true that American universities and the American research enterprise are major national assets.
This larger claim about higher education seems exceptionally clear from my desk in Building 14. It’s readily demonstrable in terms of discoveries, companies created, attraction of global talent, taxes paid by graduates, and many other real and enduring if more intangible measures. Yet it is not equally clear to our political class, our fellow citizens, even – perhaps – our own families and neighbors. Because the message has not been clearly heard, this national asset is at risk. The risk bears on more than universities. Would it save money in the short term to off-shore basic research, allow or force talent to relocate, sell off infrastructure, and let someone else run trials, collect data, and also train the coming generations of researchers in AI, in ethics, in biosciences, in leadership? Would it help to radically limit the questions that can be asked and answered? I don’t like the world that would result from saying yes. We could build an iron perimeter around this nation, bristling with armament and guarded by warriors; if, within those bounds, we have sown the very ground with salt, the point of defending it becomes less clear.
The case for research universities must be made, both in the corridors of power and in the minds of other Americans. Some advocacy is best done privately and face to face – I will always remember hearing Chuck Vest speak about his persistent, quiet advocacy on “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies to secretaries of defense in the 1990s. But we also need to connect in the open with broader publics. Many of us are thinking about how this might be done. I hope some of you are also thinking along these lines, and seeking to discover what resonates and connects – with our families, our neighbors, and on Capitol Hill where MIT’s leaders, faculty, board, and students have been having many conversations.
The bottom line is, if the United States did not have an MIT, we would give a very great deal to create it. If some rival did have an MIT, what resources would we not devote to the moon shot of building an MIT of our own?
Today we’re lucky: America does have an MIT, and together, you and I and our students and colleagues make MIT what it is. We are also responsible for making it what it can be. In that light, I want to turn towards what we are stewards of, and in particular the core mission of education.
In the early 1300s, Dante imagined his protagonist walking a spiral path up a mountain that was located at the antipodes of Rome, and as he walked, marking time by sensing the Sun’s position relative to points on the Earth’s surface.[1] Two centuries later, European mathematicians, cartographers, and instrument makers were quantifying what, for Dante, was an imaginative projection, and making it amenable to calculation. With the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia, location could be understood in relation to a grid of longitude and latitude that was in turn mapped to a spherical surface. Terrestrial globes were made for the first time in centuries, but now they functioned as precision instruments. Other instruments were being designed to perform accurate survey on land and fix position by the Sun and stars at sea. European mariners had long relied for wayfinding on the accumulated knowledge of landmarks and soundings, and calculated position from estimates of speed, time, and compass heading. This deeply conservative craft, largely practiced in known waters, was transformed by techniques of celestial navigation and the mathematical literacy required to pioneer and map new routes. Artists were enlisted to produce accurate renderings of new coastlines and landfalls; the visual arts themselves had been transformed by the advent of perspective. An English treatise on navigation from the 1590s – roughly contemporary with Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s Night’s Dream – praises “mathematical” achievements that include not only advanced work in algebra and geometry but also globe-making, astronomy, painting, and ship design.[2]
If we just stopped there, the consequences of mathematical thinking and practice to a world ca. 1600 would already be startling – and of course those consequences would grow and spread. The mathematical primers of the day also make clear how far new mathematical skills penetrated into the professions and into daily life. They sought to guide farmers in how to calculate planetary cycles for sowing and planting; to guide practical sailors who simply wanted to get from point to point reliably; to guide merchants in using arithmetic to calculate foreign exchange in unfamiliar and distant markets. As trade was undertaken with unfamiliar partners, weights and measures enabled exchange between disparate economies; beyond their practical function, the presence of systems of weight and measurement was understood as a signal of political and cultural sophistication.[3]
It should be said that a variety of sophisticated mathematical traditions, related and unrelated, predated the particular collision of theory, applications, and dissemination that characterized the 16th century European context. Western Europe didn’t invent math. But within that context, widespread adoption of mathematical methods for new purposes catalyzed transformations whose effects were felt at every scale, from the local to the global, from mathematical theory to daily life. The consequences of this era were foundational to the world we live in now, both for better and for worse.
Why tell this story? One of the benefits of serving as faculty chair is the chance to learn about research across MIT. Deans explain the promotion cases in their schools to Academic Council. Colleagues in computer science share copies of their books and offer tutorials on how machine learning works. Other colleagues in physics, or biology, or mechanical engineering tell stories about how the use of AI is changing their fields in fundamental ways. Yet without being right inside what’s going on, it’s been hard to integrate across this information and imagine what it will mean. A colleague in science remarked a few weeks ago that “in the past, math completely transformed STEM – it’s happening again with AI.” It’s not a perfect analogy – but if computation is now what mathematics was in sixteenth-century Europe, that gives some indication of how profound and pervasive the transformation will be, in virtually all areas of research and study at MIT.
This is the landscape within which the Task Force on the Undergraduate Academic Program is working, as it reviews our mission of undergraduate education and considers how education may change in tandem with changes to the disciplines themselves. As I write, the Task Force is just over a year into its process of discovery and deliberation, and in the late stages of reviewing more than 70 white papers submitted for its consideration. They will be returning to School Councils next month, and plan to work intensively over the summer so that scenarios can begin to take shape for discussion next year. As we all know, it has been a long time since the faculty have approved significant changes to the undergraduate program. That isn’t to say that nothing has changed – within departments and Schools, and within individual GIR subjects, there has been continuous innovation and effort. Yet what we have undertaken now is a system-level examination of where we are and where we could be, to set MIT on a trajectory for those who will come after us as both students and teachers. It’s always hard to let go of the “now,” but I hope the Task Force will be able to galvanize us with the needs and possibilities of “next.”
To revert back to the first section of this column, transformations and advances in our disciplines and our educational program seem likely to be unfolding at a time when research universities themselves may face a kind of change that is unprecedented – a trajectory that might reverse their expansion in the post-World War II era, when federal funding for research shaped a financial model of interdependence that presented both risks and tremendous opportunities.
This level of change – the transformative power and risks of new computational methods, the foundational challenges to the mission of research universities – raises questions for us, for our students, and indeed for all of MIT. We know our extraordinary strengths in human capital and the infrastructure we’ve built to enable discovery. We don’t know how science and engineering will find ways to flourish if the “social contract” with the federal government that has long enabled them no longer holds good.[4] As an institute of technology, MIT may be a very different place in five- or 10-years’ time, let alone 20 or 30.
How will we be living in the world that stretches forward from this present, with the change it promises and the challenges we already inhabit? Some of us work in fields where research projects have already been slowed or cancelled by changes in federal policy; others are trying to estimate how to plan for very significant future risk.
Yet other aspects of the university are not likely to change at the same rate and that, itself, can be a resource. A colleague in engineering remarked that reading is good for us, emotionally and cognitively – and books are hard to cancel or defund. When the waves of the computing revolution really reach the humanities, we may find ways to empower new readers far beyond our campus, not by generating summaries of complex texts – that, honestly, has been in process for centuries – but by broadening access to a deep experience of the real thing, whether it’s a classic of the Eastern or Western literary canon or a rap crafted yesterday. (If that happens, I’ll be ready to dive in.) But when push comes to shove, language art not only doesn’t call for compute or decadal investments – it can persist and flourish if it must with no more than voice, hearing, memory, and skill.
It’s good to remember that some things are inalienable. What can they do for us? As I’ve repeatedly heard from colleagues on Academic Council and on the MIT Corporation, art can help us think imaginatively or systematically about the futures we may be living into, and the responses we might create. I’ve been thinking more, though, about the record of the past.
We are living in unsettling times – yet while they are new to us, not much is unprecedented in human history, and the humans who live through things often write (and make art) about their experiences. History tells us what it’s like to live in a world where you have to fear a 3 a.m. knock on the door, or where it takes courage and ingenuity to defend and exercise everyday freedoms. How best to remain human in circumstances that challenge your humanity. How to hold onto hope when home is no longer a refuge. We may not absolutely need those particular lessons, but there are other ones: how to exercise patience and discipline through difficult times, how to exercise empathy across apparently unbridgeable divides. Neither as individuals nor as a generation are we alone in bearing the burden of what is intolerable and insoluble in the world as we try to make it better. Generations before us have passed through the valley of the shadow and left their marks.
Reckoning with the resources provided by all times past seems especially compelling in a moment when the arcs of physical and moral universes alike appear to bend towards a future we might not have chosen. No counselling service can meet all the demands of living in a difficult world. Art and history can help – and what else? Here at MIT, we know that deep work also feeds us. Whatever is going on — economic insecurity, disease, fear for the world itself, or simple sadness – feeling the charge of using our gifts to their fullest provides a resource that goes far beyond promotion or a strong GPA. Excellence isn’t only when you win – it’s also going all-in, burning down the candle together, getting up to keep working on the obstacles that have so far defeated us.
If universities, MIT in particular, are a national treasure, it is because we and our predecessors have collaborated and contributed to make it so. In doing what we do, we have continually redefined through our practice the excellence that is at the heart of our endeavor. I don’t believe that entities or agents outside of higher education can do a better job of making us MIT than we can. Let’s take heart, and let’s keep at it.
[1] MIT students have pointed out Purgatorio’s pervasive attention to optics and astronomy. For a wonderful look at the use of scientific instruments in the medieval Mediterranean world, see Franz Lidz and Clara Vannucci, “This 1,000-Year-Old Smartphone Just Dialed In,” The New York Times, March 12, 2024.
[2] John Davis, Epistle Dedicatorie, The Seamans Secrets (London, 1595).
[3] Such systems were admired by English traders in West Africa; those traders were advised to display their own weights and coins as bona fides to counterparts in China (should they succeed in arriving there).
[4] I borrow the phrase in this context from “Written Testimony of Dr. Kelvin K. Droegemeier” to a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on “The Role of Facilities and Administrative costs in Supporting NIH-Funded Research,” 10/24/2017, https://www.cogr.edu/sites/default/files/Droegemeier%20Full%20Written%20Testimony%20FINAL.pdf
