Over the past few weeks, I’ve been transfixed, and saddened, by Eric Gilliam’s three-part series about the history of MIT (my alma mater). I’ll post a few quotations and responses below, but if you’re interested you should just go read the original essays (1, 2, 3).
Professors who are not steeped in hands-on industrial practice could not produce the kinds of workers that were immediately useful to industry. These schools were outputting the kind of men that [Thomas] Edison, and many others mentioned above, did not believe were meeting the needs of industry. And the technical know-how taught in trade schools was great, but an ideal institute of technology should also impart some higher engineering and scientific knowledge to students to enable them to be more innovative, intelligent problem-solvers.
So, MIT was founded to solve this problem. This school was not designed to be a place for purely lecturing and rote learning. A smattering of intelligent men from industry and university men with an applied bent to them made up the original faculty. Content was lectured as needed, but what differentiated MIT was its innovative use of the laboratory method. Instructors taught “through actual handling of the apparatus and by working on problems, shoulder to shoulder with the boys.” And the schedule, from 9-5 (with a lunch break) 5 days a week and additional class on Saturday was meant to simulate a normal work schedule and, thus, ease the eventual transition to life in the working world. (part 1)
This quote highlights how MIT was intended to be a counter-cultural university, founded on a distinctly different model than other institutions (like Harvard). MIT was not meant to be a center of learning and theoretical research, but a school focusing on training the next generation of industrial leaders.
But [MIT President] Maclaurin had an idea: self-support. MIT would capitalize on its own assets and earn money by formally offering its services to industry on a larger scale. High numbers of industrial partners had been eager to engage in ad-hoc courses of research with MIT’s applied professors, often paid for by the company, anyway. Why not turn this into a much larger, more formal program that was facilitated by the Institute? The idea would grow into what was known as the Technology Plan. (part 2)
MIT operated on a different funding model than other universities, relying on support from industry. This is, in essence, what I proposed several weeks ago in my reflection on the similarities between graduate school and consulting. This was seen as important and honorable by its leaders at the time:
“There could be no more legitimate way for a great scientific school to seek support than by being paid for the service it can render in supplying special knowledge where it is needed... Manufacturers may come to us with problems of every kind, be they scientific, simple, technical or foolish. We shall handle each seriously, giving the best the institute has at its disposal” - William Walker, head of the Division for Industrial Cooperation and Research (part 2)
The answer to this question is the subject of Gilliam's third post. It's a bit too complex to fully summarize here, but there were a few key factors:
Crucially, the first two factors are less true today than they were when MIT made this decision, implying that the niche filled by "Old MIT" could be occupied again today.
It seems clear, given MIT’s transition to a more university style of education, that we are left with a hole. We do not have an elite hybrid technical school/applied research institute like this that can draw top talent away from places like Harvard and Stanford to its more hands-on style of education. But, as a country where the manufacturing sector is shrinking (and median wages aren’t doing so well either), we may need a new MIT now more than ever.
There are plenty of individuals at top schools who COULD be swayed to attend a place like this. Speaking for Stanford, where I went to undergrad, there was a large population of people who majored in mechanical engineering and were disenchanted because they did almost exclusively problem set work and very little building of anything real. And I knew even more people majoring in other subjects who abandoned mechanical engineering and majors like it for this reason! “We’re training you to be mechanical engineering managers, not traditional mechanical engineers,” was a common line used in the department. And, while that is a fine goal for a program, it is not what many of the students seem to want. What if I just want to be a top-flight regular engineer who can build awesome stuff? (part 1)
There can and should be individuals who spend almost all of their time on pure research. But it is probably bad for future progress to allow too many of these individuals to work in an environment in which few of their peers are spending a substantial amount of time working on industrial applications and problems. No matter what, some basic research will always find a way of trickling its way down into practical industrial importance. But allowing pure researchers to be siloed from the acquaintance of those who work on industrial applications — and not just the need to work on those problems themselves — feels like it is setting the system up for inefficiency. When we look back on the era of explosive productivity in areas of basic research like physics and math in the early 1900s, even the purest of pure researchers at the time tended to have regular interactions either with industry or with researchers who did industry-related research — due to industry contracts themselves, close friends who did industry work regularly, or conscription to work on military. (part 2)
Gilliam's conclusions seem broadly correct to me. While MIT is still a great school, it's no longer pursuing a distinct model for education. The main factors distinguishing MIT from peer institutions are cultural, and even those are being actively suppressed by the current administration. In total it took less than a century for the entrepreneurial mindset of MIT, a "startup university", to be replaced by the exact institutional conservatism it was founded to oppose. "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
More broadly, there's a broad sense today that innovation, especially in the physical world, is slowing (Peter Thiel may be the most notable proponent of this claim). A century ago, Americans could build whole networks of subways with comparatively primitive technology; now, something as simple as building a single subway station has become a Herculean task. I don't mean to draw too direct of a causal connection between the end of Old MIT and the decline in real-world innovation, but perhaps a new school focused on unglamorous, nuts-and-bolts innovation rather than holistic education is exactly what the US needs now.