The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is an independent, coeducational university centered on science and technology, located along the Charles River in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts directly across from Boston and downstream from Harvard University.
MIT is one of the premier research universities in the world. The school has a very good academic environment for learning; it is also a pioneer in including undergraduates in actual research groups, with the extensive UROP program, and thereby enhancing undergraduate education from being a dry memorization of prior work.
MIT excels in science and technology, but is also strong in philosophy and a few of the social sciences such as economics, linguistics, and anthropology. Its best-known computer-related labs are Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science (soon to be merged into CSAIL), as well as the Media Lab. The MIT student body comprises roughly 4000 undergraduates and 6000 graduate students.
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MIT's Great Dome, Building 10, and adjoining buildings, as viewed from across the Charles River.
"At night,
floodlights glare from artfully concealing shrubbery and lave the main
building with a white light that emphasizes black-trimmed, three-story
windows rising in uninterrupted, eye-leading verticals toward a
dominant, austere dome mimicked from some classic pile of ancient Rome.
On every slab-sided cornice, like proclamations of faith needing no
explanation, are chiseled Darwin, Newton, Aristotle and, in lesser
letters, the names of the more numerous Lavoisiers and Eulers and
Faradays who have discovered the chemical elements or evolved the
equations or stumbled upon the fundamentals of nature. Indeed, not
unlovely is the breeding ground of technicians and engineers which, as
announced in stone above great, fluted columns, is the MASSACHVSETTS
INSTITVTE OF TECHNOLOGY."
MIT culture is characterized by a love-hate relationship. The informal motto of the school is IHTFP ("I hate this fucking place", although some also render it as as "I have truly found paradise" or "Intriguing Hacks To Fascinate People"). The antipathy felt in some quarters for the Institute as a whole is in contrast with the strong affection students feel for various parts of the school and the fierce loyalty paid to the school after graduation. The school has a powerful anti-authoritarian ethos in which it is believed that one's social status should be determined by raw intellectual prowess (with a strong bias for scientific prowess over mastery of the liberal arts) rather than by social class or organizational position. Other beliefs that are strongly held by people within the school are that information should be widely disseminated and not held secret, and that truth is a matter of empirical reality rather than the result of popular belief or management directive. Many of the values of the Institute have influenced the hacker ethic.
In fact, the term "hacker" and much of hacker culture originated at MIT, starting with the TMRC and MIT AI Lab in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Resident hackers have included Richard Stallman and professors Gerald Jay Sussman and Tom Knight. At MIT, however, the term "hack" also means an elaborate practical joke (see the MIT Hack Gallery).
There is a distinct difference in culture between the dormitories on the east side of campus, where people tend to be more "hippie-ish" and the dormitories on the west side of campus, where people tend to be more "preppie-ish." Random Hall, living up to its name, is on the north side of campus, and Bexley House, in ironic juxtaposition to its "far-out" culture, is located centrally. Within each housing unit, there are often distinctive subcultures on each floor or entry.
The dormitories tend to be extremely close-knit, and the institute provides live-in graduate student tutors and faculty housemasters who have the dual role of both helping students and monitoring them for medical or health problems.
A 2001 Boston Globe study reported that MIT had the highest suicide rate in the 1990s out of 12 major universities of similar caliber, although Institute officials contend that the study was statistically flawed. Suicide rates continue to be a controversial issue that has influenced recent MIT policy, including a mandate of at least one holiday per month and renewed attention to mental health services (at McLean Hospital and elsewhere).
A great many MIT students live in fraternities and independent living groups; however, after an alcohol-related death in the late 1990s, MIT decided that all freshmen must live in Institute housing.
Despite the disdain that many MIT graduates profess for academic tradition, many of them nevertheless choose to wear an MIT class ring—which is large, heavy, distinctive, and easily recognized from a considerable distance. The design varies slightly from year to year, but is always made of solid gold (without any gemstone), and features a three-piece design, with the MIT seal and the class year each appearing on a separate shank, flanking a massive bezel bearing an image of a beaver. It is usually called the "Brass Rat" (but officially named the "Standard Technology Ring").
The number of students who play musical instruments, particularly piano and violin, is quite large for an institution that does not specialize in the arts. A number of a capella singing groups composed of MIT students regularly give free concerts on campus. Among these are the Chorallaries, the Logarhythms, the Cross Products, the Muses, Techiya, the Toons (which also includes some Wellesley women), and Res(((o)))nance. There are also the MIT Gilbert & Sullivan Players and the MIT Musical Theatre Guild.
MIT maintains a strong rivalry with Harvard and other Ivy League schools. Not surprisingly, the rivalry is one-sided. MIT students tend to regard Harvard students as pretententious, arrogant and more interested in social position than in acquiring knowledge. Harvard students tend to regard MIT students not at all; but when pressed, they see their would-be rivals as socially maladjusted geeks. When students from the two schools do have a chance to interact, however, they generally find that they're not as different as they might have thought. The fact that these great centers of learning exist within a few miles along Massachusetts Avenue makes Cambridge one of the most interesting places to live in the United States.
Students at MIT and Harvard can cross-register, i.e. a student at either institution can register for courses at the others, as can students at Wellesley College and MIT.
The one very large beautiful building, nominally several buildings identified only by numbers, which surrounds Killian Court and is the oldest part of the campus (completed in 1916), was successfully designed to admit large amounts of light through (1) exceptionally large windows on the first and second floors, (2) many internal windows, not only on office doors but above door-level, and (3) skylights over huge stairwells. The interior decor of that old building is stylistically consistent throughout. Its major architectural features are the Infinite Corridor, an impressive central dome, and the expansive domed lobby at the Mass. Ave. entrance. The tops of these buildings are adorned in large letters with the names of Aristotle, Newton, Franklin, Pasteur, Lavoisier, Faraday, Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Darwin, and Copernicus; above each of these big names is a cluster of appropriately related smaller names. Lavoisier, for example, is placed in the company of Boyle, Cavendish, Priestley, Dalton, Gay Lussac, Berzelius, Woehler, Liebig, Bunsen, Mendelejeff [sic], Perkin, and van't Hoff.
A major building effort is, as of 2002, underway, including the Stata Center designed by Frank Gehry, the Simmons Hall dormitory designed by Steven Holl, the Media Lab extension designed by Fumihiko Maki, a new gym, and various other complexes.
The building of the Stata Center necessitated the removal of the much-beloved Building 20 in 1998. Building 20 was erected hastily during World War II as a temporary building, intended to last "for the duration of the war and six months thereafter." Over the course of fifty-five years, its "temporary" nature allowed research groups to have more space, and to make more creative use of that space, than was possible in more respectable buildings. Fred Hapgood wrote "The edifice is so ugly...that it is impossible not to admire it, if that makes sense; it has 10 times the righteous nerdly swagger of any other building on campus." Simson Garfinkel quoted Professor Jerome Y. Lettvin as saying "You might regard it as the womb of the Institute. It is kind of messy, but by God it is procreative!"
The buildings built from the 1950s through 1970s have less charm, but at least one contributor to this article finds the "parking garage" description absurd, causing one to wonder if it was written by an alumnus whose impressions are colored by memories of the very onerous nature of the work students do at MIT. All students agree that when it rains or snows, the maze of underground tunnels is a welcomed feature that enables students to get from class to class without getting cold or wet.
The bridge closest to MIT is the Harvard Bridge. It is the longest bridge crossing the Charles River. The bridge is marked off in the fanciful unit called the Smoot: 364.4 Smoots and One Ear. Maxwell Griffith (see picture caption above) wrote of it: "Even the low and ugly bridge connecting Boston and Cambridge adds that kind of beauty inherent in promises of better tomorrows, for it drives into the college campus as if to form a glory road for the march of progress sure to commence somewhere inside this Babel’s tower of modern science." In 1963 the United States Information Agency presented the bridge just as Griffith suggested in a flattering film about MIT entitled "Bridge to Tomorrow."
In contrast to the centrally located subway stop outside Harvard University, the Kendall stop is located at an extremely inconvenient place on one side of the MIT campus. The #1 bus is more centrally located and runs along Massachusetts Avenue to Boston to the south and Harvard Square to the north.
MIT was founded in 1861 by William Barton Rogers, whose last words were given at an MIT commencement and were "bituminous coal". Around 1900, a merger was proposed with Harvard University, but was cancelled after loud protests from the alumni. MIT's prominence increased as a result of World War II (radar, most prominently) and the United States government's investment in science and technology in response to Sputnik. In the 1960s, anti-war protests caused MIT to spin off Draper Laboratories, which designed ICBM guidance systems.
Project Whirlwind (see Whirlwind (Computer))-- the pioneering computer built under the direction of Jay. W. Forrester between 1947 and 1952 deserves special mention, not merely for its technological achievements (including the invention of magnetic core memory), but for its cultural contribution to the development of personal computing. Whereas the Princeton tradition centered around floating point arithmetic and numerical computation, Whirlwind centered around real-time control, a short word length of 16 bits, and, most important, a hands-on operational style. Results were displayed graphically on a cathode ray tube (rather than bring printed on an alphanumeric printer). In later years a pointing device called a "light gun" was devised, as well as interactive operation via a console Flexowriter. The interactive style of the "personal" computer can be traced from Whirlwind, via the PDP-1, TX-2, and TX-0, and MIT's time-sharing experiments.
In 2001, President Charles Vest made history by being the first university official in the world to admit that his institution had severely restricted the career of women faculty members and researchers through sexist discrimination.