--> 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 East Coast research universities, heavy work on industry problems limited basic research, and foundations would not fund an institution solving industrial problems. By the late 1920s MIT was regarded by elite universities as a "mere engineering school servicing industry".
thumb|right|[[Vannevar Bush (l) and Karl Compton (r) led reforms to funding and curriculum]]
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
thumb|right|Navy recruits training on [[MIT Radiation Laboratory|Rad Lab radar systems]]
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.
thumb|left|upright=0.65|[[Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)|Margaret Hamilton wrote guidance code for the Apollo moon landings]]
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.
Vietnam-era opposition
Most defense-funded work on campus was basic and unclassified.
In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Initiative to investigate challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption.
Computation
thumb|right|The 1985 [[MIT Media Lab building, designed by I.M. Pei, houses researchers developing novel uses of computer technology.]]
Programs that emerged from defense projects—Whirlwind, the Research Laboratory of Electronics, and the SAGE air-defense system—gave rise in the 1960s to digital computing laboratories. Project MAC, launched in 1963 with ARPA funding, drew researchers from scattered departments into a single effort around time-sharing and artificial intelligence. Project MAC was reorganized in 1976 as the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). A culture of student programmers grew out of the Tech Model Railroad Club, whose members were more drawn to the electrical switching systems beneath the layout than to the trains themselves. These groups became the nucleus of the AI Laboratory, regarded as the birthplace of hacker culture. When commercial pressures began pulling researchers into spinoff companies in the early 1980s, Richard Stallman responded by launching the GNU Project (1983) and the Free Software Foundation (1985), establishing a framework for free software that shaped the later open-source movement.
In 1983, MIT launched Project Athena, an eight-year partnership with IBM and the Digital Equipment Corporation that placed networked workstations across campus and produced widely adopted infrastructure, including the Kerberos authentication protocol and the X Window System. In 1985, Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT president Jerome Wiesner founded the Media Lab, which focused on integration of computing with communication, design, and the arts, drawing researchers from the AI Lab. Its industry sponsorship model helped draw technology firms to establish research outposts in nearby Kendall Square.
In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee established the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Laboratory for Computer Science to develop open standards for the web. In 2003, the AI Laboratory and LCS merged to form the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), now the largest research laboratory at the Institute. Open-access ideas running from the AI Lab found new expression when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002, a project whose architects explicitly drew on the open-source principle that knowledge systems should be freely accessible. In 2018, MIT announced the creation of the Schwarzman College of Computing, a billion-dollar initiative to integrate artificial intelligence research and education across the Institute.
Institutional life
In 1991, the Department of Justice sued MIT and the eight Ivy League universities, alleging that their practice of jointly setting need-based financial aid for commonly admitted students violated antitrust law. The other schools signed consent decrees and MIT contested the suit alone under President Charles Vest. A federal appeals court ruled in MIT's favor in 1993, and Congress subsequently passed legislation permitting need-based aid coordination among universities.
In 1999, a committee of women faculty in the School of Science, led by biologist Nancy Hopkins, published a report documenting that senior women faculty received less laboratory space, lower salaries, and fewer institutional resources than male colleagues of comparable rank. President Vest publicly acknowledged the findings, writing that he now understood gender discrimination at MIT to be "far more reality than perception." The report prompted policy changes across MIT's schools, spurred similar investigations at nine other universities, and was credited with advancing gender parity in academic science nationally.
Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the bombers on campus, setting off a manhunt that shut down much of the Boston metropolitan area. His memorial service drew more than 10,000 people.
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Campus
thumb|right|upright=1.6|MIT's central campus from above the [[Harvard Bridge. Left of center is the Great Dome, with the Stata Center and Kendall Square behind.]]
MIT's campus in the city of Cambridge spans approximately a mile along the north side of the Charles River basin. The campus is divided roughly in half by Massachusetts Avenue, with most dormitories and student life facilities to the west and most academic buildings to the east. The bridge closest to MIT is the Harvard Bridge, which is known for being marked off in a non-standard unit of length – the smoot.
The Kendall/MIT subway station is located on the northeastern edge of the campus, in Kendall Square. Since the 1960s, MIT and other firms have intensively developed high-rise educational, retail, residential, startup incubator, and office space around the station. The Cambridge neighborhoods surrounding MIT are a mixture of modern offices for high-tech firms, old industry buildings, and low-rise residential neighborhoods.
Each building at MIT has a number (possibly preceded by a W, N, E, or NW) designation, and most have a name as well. Typically, academic and office buildings are referred to primarily by number while residence halls are referred to by name. The organization of building numbers roughly corresponds to the order in which the buildings were built and their location relative (north, west, and east) to the original center cluster of Maclaurin buildings. Many of the buildings are connected above ground as well as through an extensive network of tunnels, providing protection from the Cambridge weather as well as a venue for roof and tunnel hacking.
The campus' primary energy source is natural gas, supplied by a power plant constructed for the original Cambridge campus. Since the 1990s, the Institute has retrofit existing buildings to improve their energy efficiency, retooled its campus power plant for cogeneration, and jointly financed a 60-megawatt solar power plant in North Carolina to offset carbon use.
Research facilities
MIT's on-campus nuclear reactor is one of the oldest operating nuclear reactors in the United States, and one of only three university research reactors operating above 5 megawatts. MIT allows students to be trained as reactor operators, and the facility was historically used for experimental cancer treatment. The siting of the reactor's containment building in a densely populated area has attracted periodic public scrutiny, but MIT maintains that it is well-secured and routinely inspected.
MIT Nano, also known as Building 12, is the campus' central facility for nanoscale research. Its cleanroom and research space, visible through glass panels, is the largest research facility of its kind in the United States. At US$400 million to construct, it is also one of the costliest buildings on campus. The facility also provides nanoimaging capabilities with vibration damped imaging and metrology suites sitting atop a slab of concrete underground.
Other notable campus facilities include a pressurized wind tunnel for testing aerodynamic research, a towing tank for testing ship and ocean structure designs, and previously Alcator C-Mod, which was the largest fusion device operated by any university. MIT's campus-wide wireless network was completed in the fall of 2005 and consists of nearly 3,000 access points covering of campus.
Architecture
thumb|MIT's Building 10 and Great Dome overlooking Killian Court
MIT has a history of commissioning innovative buildings. The first buildings for the Cambridge campus, completed in 1916 and designed by William Welles Bosworth, were the first non-industrial buildings built from reinforced concrete in the United States. Bosworth's idea—industrial efficiency inside, classical aesthetics outside—was influenced by the City Beautiful movement of the early 1900s. His design features the Pantheon-esque Great Dome overlooking Killian Court, where graduation ceremonies are held each year. |group=lower-alpha The Infinite Corridor runs the east-west length of the Bosworth's buildings, beginning at Lobby 7 despite a name suggesting it has no beginning. After World War II, MIT commissioned many of its new buildings from high-profile architects. Among the post-war modernist architecture on campus is Alvar Aalto's Baker House (1947), Eero Saarinen's MIT Chapel and Kresge Auditorium (1955), and I.M. Pei's four research buildings: Green, Dreyfus, Landau, and Wiesner.
More recent buildings like Frank Gehry's Stata Center (2004), Steven Holl's Simmons Hall (2002), Charles Correa's Building 46 (2005), and Fumihiko Maki's Media Lab Extension (2009) stand out among the Boston area's traditional architecture as examples of contemporary campus "starchitecture". These high-end buildings have not always been well received; in 2010, The Princeton Review included MIT in a list of twenty schools whose campuses are "tiny, unsightly, or both".
Housing
thumb|right|[[Housing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology#Simmons Hall|Simmons Hall, an undergraduate dormitory.]]
Undergraduates are guaranteed four-year housing in one of MIT's 11 undergraduate dormitories. Those living on campus can receive support and mentoring from live-in graduate students and faculty. Because housing assignments are made based on the preferences of the students themselves, diverse social atmospheres can be sustained in different living groups; for example, according to the Yale Daily News staff's The Insider's Guide to the Colleges, 2010, "The split between East Campus and West Campus is a significant characteristic of MIT. East Campus has gained a reputation as a thriving counterculture." MIT also has five dormitories for single graduate students and two apartment buildings on campus for married student families.
MIT has an active Greek and co-op housing system, including thirty-six fraternities, sororities, and independent living groups (FSILGs). , 98% of all undergraduates lived in MIT-affiliated housing; 54% of the men participated in fraternities and 20% of the women were involved in sororities. Most FSILGs are located across the river in Back Bay near where MIT was founded, and there is also a cluster of fraternities on MIT's West Campus that face the Charles River Basin. After the 1997 alcohol-related death of Scott Krueger, a new pledge at the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, MIT required all freshmen to live in the dormitory system starting in 2002. Because FSILGs had previously housed as many as 300 freshmen off-campus, the new policy could not be implemented until Simmons Hall opened in that year.
In 2013–2014, MIT abruptly closed and then demolished undergrad dorm Bexley Hall, citing extensive water damage that made repairs infeasible. In 2017, MIT shut down Senior House after a century of service as an undergrad dorm. That year, MIT administrators released data showing just 60% of Senior House residents had graduated in four years. Campus-wide, the four-year graduation rate is 84% (the cumulative graduation rate is significantly higher).
Off-campus real estate
MIT has substantial commercial real estate holdings in Cambridge on which it pays property taxes, plus an additional voluntary payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) on academic buildings which are legally tax-exempt. , it is the largest taxpayer in the city, contributing 14% of the city's local tax revenues. Holdings include Technology Square, parts of Kendall Square, University Park, and many properties in Cambridgeport and Area 4 neighboring the main campus. The land is used for investment purposes and held for potential long-term expansion.
Organization and administration
upright|thumb|Lobby 7 at 77 [[Massachusetts Avenue (metropolitan Boston)|Massachusetts Avenue is regarded as the main entrance to campus.]]
MIT is a state-chartered nonprofit corporation governed by a privately appointed board known as the MIT Corporation. The Corporation has 60–80 members at any time, some with fixed terms, some with life appointments, and eight who serve ex officio. The Corporation approves the budget, new programs, degrees and faculty appointments, and elects a president to manage the university and preside for the Institute's faculty. The current president is Sally Kornbluth, a cell biologist and former provost at Duke University, who became MIT's eighteenth president in January 2023.
MIT has five schools (Science, Engineering, Architecture and Planning, Management, and Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences) and one college (Schwarzman College of Computing); the institute does not operate a law school or a medical school. Faculty committees control many areas of MIT's curriculum, research, student life, and administrative affairs. The chair of each of MIT's academic departments reports to the dean of that department's school, who in turn reports to the Provost. Academic departments also report to "Visiting Committees," specialized bodies of Corporation members and outside experts who evaluate the performance, activities, and needs of each department.
MIT's endowment, real estate, and other financial assets are managed through by the MIT Investment Management Company (MITIMCo), a subsidiary of the MIT Corporation created in 2004. A minor revenue source for much of the Institute's history, the endowment's role in MIT operations has grown due to strong investment returns since the 1990s, making it one the largest U.S. university endowments. Among its holdings are a majority of shares in the audio equipment manufacturer Bose Corporation, as well as a commercial real estate portfolio in Kendall Square.
Academics
MIT is a large, highly residential, research university with a majority of enrollments in graduate and professional programs. The university has been accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges since 1929. MIT operates on a 4–1–4 academic calendar with the fall semester beginning after Labor Day and ending in mid-December, a 4-week "Independent Activities Period" in the month of January, and the spring semester commencing in early February and ceasing in late May.
MIT students refer to both their majors and classes using numbers or acronyms alone. Departments and their corresponding majors are numbered in the approximate order of their foundation; for example, Civil and Environmental Engineering is , while Linguistics and Philosophy is . Students majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), the most popular department, collectively identify themselves as "Course 6". MIT students use a combination of the department's course number and the number assigned to the class to identify their subjects; for instance, the introductory calculus-based classical mechanics course is simply "8.01" (pronounced eight-oh-one) at MIT.