Name | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
---|---|
Motto | ''Mens et Manus'' |
Mottoeng | Mind and Hand |
Established | 1861 (opened 1865) |
Type | Private |
Calendar | 4–1–4 |
President | Susan Hockfield |
Provost | L. Rafael Reif |
City | Cambridge |
State | Massachusetts |
Country | United States |
Students | 10,384 |
Undergrad | 4,232 |
Postgrad | 6,152 |
Faculty | 1,009 |
Campus | Urban, |
Mascot | Tim the Beaver |
Athletics | Division III (except for Rowing)33 varsity teams |
Free label | Nobel Laureates |
Free | 76 |
Website | web.mit.edu |
Colors | Cardinal Red and Steel Gray |
Endowment | US$8.3 billion |
Logo | |
Affiliations | NEASC, AAU, COFHE, NASULGC}} |
Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, the institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. MIT's early emphasis on applied technology at the undergraduate and graduate levels led to close cooperation with industry, but curricular reforms under Karl Compton and Vannevar Bush in the 1930s re-emphasized basic scientific research. MIT was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934. Researchers were involved in efforts to develop computers, radar, and inertial guidance in connection with defense research during World War II and the Cold War. Post-war defense research contributed to the rapid expansion of the faculty and campus under James Killian.
The current campus opened in 1916 and extends over along the northern bank of the Charles River basin. In the past 60 years, MIT's educational disciplines have expanded beyond the physical sciences and engineering into fields such as biology, economics, linguistics, political science, and management.
MIT enrolled 4,299 undergraduates and 6,267 graduate students for 2010–2011. It employs around 1,000 faculty members. 76 Nobel laureates, 50 National Medal of Science recipients, and 38 MacArthur Fellows are currently or have previously been affiliated with the university.
MIT has a strong entrepreneurial culture and the aggregated revenues of companies founded by MIT alumni would rank as the eleventh largest economy in the world. MIT managed $718.2 million in research expenditures and an $8.0 billion endowment in 2009.
The "Engineers" sponsor 33 sports, most teams of which compete in the NCAA Division III's New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference; the Division I rowing programs compete as part of the EARC and EAWRC.
In 1859, the Massachusetts General Court was given a proposal for use of newly opened lands in Back Bay in Boston for a museum and Conservatory of Art and Science. On April 10, 1861, the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts signed a charter for the incorporation of the "Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston Society of Natural History", submitted by William Barton Rogers. Rogers sought to establish a new form of higher education to address the challenges posed by rapid advances in science and technology during the mid-19th century with which classic institutions were ill-prepared to deal. Barton believed, “The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.”
The Rogers Plan, as it has come to be known, reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories. Rogers proposed that this new form of education be rooted in three principles: the educational value of useful knowledge, the necessity of “learning by doing”, and integrating a professional and liberal arts education at the undergraduate level.
However, open conflict in the Civil War broke out on April 12, 1861, just two days after issuance of the charter. After years of delay caused by wartime funding and staffing difficulties, MIT's first classes were held in rented space at the Mercantile Building in downtown Boston in 1865. Though it was to be located in the middle of urban Boston, the mission of the new institute matched the intent of the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes." Although the Commonwealth of Massachusetts separately founded what was to become the University of Massachusetts under this act, MIT was also named a land grant school. The proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood in 1866, and MIT informally came to be called "Boston Tech".
During the next half-century, the focus of the science and engineering curriculum drifted towards vocational concerns instead of theoretical programs. During this period, the MIT faculty and alumni repeatedly rejected overtures from former MIT faculty turned Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, to merge MIT with Harvard College's Lawrence Scientific School.
Industrialist George Eastman reinforced MIT's independence by donating funds to build a new campus along a mile-long tract on the Cambridge side of the Charles River, almost entirely on landfill. In 1916, MIT moved into the handsome new neoclassical campus designed by William W. Bosworth.
In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush drastically reformed the applied technology curriculum by re-emphasizing the importance of "pure" sciences like physics and chemistry and by reducing the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. In sharp contrast to the Ivy League, MIT catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants. Despite the challenges of the Great Depression, the Compton reforms "renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering." The expansion and reforms cemented MIT's academic reputation and the school was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934.
MIT was substantially changed by its involvement in military research during World War II. Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the enormous Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. MIT's Radiation Laboratory was established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing a microwave radar, and the first mass-produced equipments were installed on front-line units within months. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gun and bombsights and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper's Instrumentation Laboratory, the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind, and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, MIT employed a staff of over 4,000 (including more than a fifth of the nation's physicists) and was the nation's single largest wartime R&D; contractor.
In the post-war years, government-sponsored research such as SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo, combined with surging student enrollments under the G.I. Bill, contributed to rapid growth in the size of the Institute's research staff and physical plant, as well as placing an increased emphasis on graduate education. The profound changes that occurred at MIT between 1930 and 1957 included the doubling of its faculty and a quintupling of its graduate student population. These changes were significantly guided and shaped by the institution-building strategies of Karl Taylor Compton, president of MIT between 1930 and 1948, James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957, and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957.
While the school mainly served the needs of industrial patrons in the 1920s, by the 1950s it had gained considerable autonomy from industrial corporations while attracting new patrons and building a close relationship with philanthropic foundations and the federal government. As the Cold War and Space Race intensified and concerns about the technology gap between the US and the Soviet Union grew more pervasive throughout the 1950s and 1960s, MIT's involvement in the military-industrial complex was a source of pride on campus.
Following a comprehensive review of the undergraduate curriculum in 1949 and the successive appointments of more humanistically oriented Presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980, MIT greatly expanded its programs in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors, launching competitive graduate programs, and forming into the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering.
In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and MIT's defense research. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research towards environmental and social problems. Although MIT ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests, the student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during the tumultuous era.
In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at the Project MAC, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer games like ''Spacewar!'' and created much of modern hacker slang. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s; Richard Stallman's GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab, the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology, the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 1,800 MIT classes available online free of charge since 2002, and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005. Upon taking office in 2004, President Hockfield launched an Energy Research Council to investigate how MIT can respond to the interdisciplinary challenges of increasing global energy consumption.
MIT was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus, the Tang Center for Management Education, several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research, and a number of new "backlot" buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus has recently concluded an expansion of the Media Lab, the Sloan's eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest.
MIT's campus spans approximately a mile of the north side of the Charles River basin in the city of Cambridge. 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 MBTA Red Line station is located on the far northeastern edge of the campus in Kendall Square. The Cambridge neighborhoods surrounding MIT are a mixture of high tech companies occupying both modern office and rehabilitated industrial buildings as well as socio-economically diverse residential neighborhoods.
MIT buildings all have a number (or a number and a letter) 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 are connected above ground as well as through an extensive network of underground tunnels, providing protection from the Cambridge weather as well as a venue for roof and tunnel hacking.
MIT's on-campus nuclear reactor is one of the largest university-based nuclear reactors in the United States. The prominence of the reactor's containment building in a densely populated area has been controversial, but MIT maintains that it is well-secured. Other notable campus facilities include a pressurized wind tunnel and a towing tank for testing ship and ocean structure designs. MIT's campus-wide wireless network was completed in the fall of 2005 and consists of nearly 3,000 access points covering of campus.
In 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency sued MIT for violating Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act with regard to its hazardous waste storage and disposal procedures. MIT settled the suit by paying a $155,000 fine and launching three environmental projects. In connection with capital campaigns to expand the campus, the Institute has also extensively renovated existing buildings to improve their energy efficiency. MIT has also taken steps to reduce its environmental impact by running alternative fuel campus shuttles, subsidizing public transportation passes, and building a low-emission cogeneration plant that serves most of the campus electricity, heating, and cooling requirements.
Between 2006 and 2008, MIT reported 16 forcible sex offenses, 4 robberies, 13 aggravated assaults, 536 burglaries, 2 cases of arson, and 16 cases of motor vehicle theft.
Alvar Aalto's Baker House (1947), Eero Saarinen's Chapel and Auditorium (1955), and I.M. Pei's Green, Dreyfus, Landau, and Wiesner buildings represent high forms of post-war modernist architecture. More recent buildings like Frank Gehry's Stata Center (2004), Steven Holl's Simmons Hall (2002), Charles Correa's Building 46 (2005), Fumihiko Maki's Media Lab Extension (2009) are distinctive amongst the Boston area's classical architecture and serve as examples of contemporary campus "starchitecture." These buildings have not always been popularly acclaimed; in 2010, ''The Princeton Review'' included MIT in a list of twenty schools whose campuses are "tiny, unsightly, or both."
Undergraduates are guaranteed four-year housing in one of MIT's 12 undergrad dormitories, although 8% of students live off campus or commute. On-campus housing provides live-in graduate student tutors and faculty housemasters who have the dual role of both helping students and monitoring them for medical or mental health problems. New undergrad students specify their dorm and floor preferences a few days after arrival on campus, and as a result diverse communities arise in living groups; e.g. the dorms on and east of Massachusetts Avenue have typically been more involved in countercultural activities. MIT also has 5 dormitories for single graduate students and 2 apartment buildings on campus for married student families.
MIT has a very active Greek and co-op system which includes 36 fraternities, sororities, and independent living groups (FSILGs). 50% of male undergraduates join a fraternity and 34% of women join sororities. Most FSILGs are located across the river in the Back Bay owing to MIT's historic location there, but eight fraternities are located on MIT's West Campus and in Cambridge. After the 1997 death of Scott Krueger, a new member at the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, MIT required all freshmen to live in the dormitory system starting in 2002. Because the fraternities and independent living groups had previously housed as many as 300 freshmen off-campus, the new policy did not take effect until 2002 after Simmons Hall opened.
MIT is "a university polarized around science, engineering, and the arts." It has five schools (Science, Engineering, Architecture and Planning, Management, and Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences) and one college (Whitaker College of Health Sciences and Technology), but no schools of law or medicine. The chair of each of MIT's 32 academic departments reports to the dean of that department's school, who in turn reports to the Provost under the President. However, faculty committees assert substantial control over many areas of MIT's curriculum, research, student life, and administrative affairs.
MIT's extensive collaboration with the federal government on research projects has also led to several MIT leaders serving as Presidential scientific advisers since 1940. MIT established a Washington Office in 1991 to continue to lobby for research funding and national science policy. In response to MIT, eight Ivy League colleges, and 11 other institutions holding "Overlap Meetings" to prevent bidding wars over promising students from consuming funds for need-based scholarships, the Justice Department began an antitrust investigation in 1989 and in 1991 filed an antitrust suit against these universities. While the Ivy League institutions settled, MIT contested the charges on the grounds that the practice was not anti-competitive because it ensured the availability of aid for the greatest number of students. MIT ultimately prevailed when the Justice Department dropped the case in 1994.
MIT's proximity to Harvard University has created both a quasi-friendly rivalry ("the other school up the river") and a substantial number of research collaborations such as the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and Broad Institute. In addition, students at the two schools can cross-register for credits toward their own school's degrees without any additional fees. A cross-registration program with Wellesley College has existed since 1969 and a significant undergraduate exchange program with the University of Cambridge known as the Cambridge-MIT Institute was also launched in 2002. MIT has more modest cross-registration programs with Boston University, Brandeis University, Tufts University, Massachusetts College of Art, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. MIT maintains substantial research and faculty ties with independent research organizations in the Boston-area like the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as well as international research and educational collaborations through the Singapore-MIT Alliance, MIT-Politecnico di Milano, MIT-Zaragoza International Logistics Program, and other countries through the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) program.
The mass-market magazine ''Technology Review'' is published by MIT through a subsidiary company, as is a special edition that also serves as the Institute's official alumni magazine. The MIT Press is a major university press, publishing over 200 books and 40 journals annually emphasizing science and technology as well as arts, architecture, new media, current events, and social issues.
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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 beginning in early February and ending in late May.
The School of Engineering has been ranked first among graduate and undergraduate programs by ''U.S. News & World Report'' since first published results in 1994. MIT has also consistently ranked first in the Academic Ranking of World Universities in Engineering/Technology and Computer Sciences. A 1995 National Research Council study of US research universities ranked MIT first in "reputation" and fourth in "citations and faculty awards" and a 2005 NBER study of high school students' revealed preferences found MIT to be the 4th most preferred college in the nation.
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 their foundation; for example, Civil and Environmental Engineering is Course I, while Nuclear Science & Engineering is Course XXII. Students majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the most popular department, collectively identify themselves as "Course VI." MIT students use a combination of the department's course number and the number assigned to the class to identify their subjects; the course which many American universities would designate as "Physics 101" is, at MIT, simply "8.01."
Undergraduates are required to complete an extensive core curriculum called the General Institute Requirements (GIRs). The science requirement, generally completed during freshman year as prerequisites for classes in science and engineering majors, comprises two semesters of physics, two semesters of calculus, one semester of chemistry, one semester of biology, and a laboratory class in their major. The humanities, arts, and social sciences (HASS) requirement, consisting of eight semesters, includes a distribution of three classes across each of the humanities, arts, and social sciences as well as a concentration. The communication requirement consists of two communication-intensive HASS classes and two classes in their major program. Finally, all students are required to complete a swimming test and non-varsity athletes must also take four physical education classes.
Although the difficulty and especially the fast pace of MIT coursework has been characterized as "drinking from a fire hose," the freshmen retention rate at MIT is similar to other national research universities. Some of the pressure for first-year undergraduates is lessened by the existence of the "pass/no-record" grading system. In the first (fall) term, freshmen transcripts only report if a class was passed while no external record exists if a class was not passed. In the second (spring) term, passing grades (ABC) appear on the transcript while non-passing grades are again rendered "no-record". The system had previously been "Pass/No Record" all freshman year, but was amended for the Class of 2006 to prevent students from gaming the system by completing required major classes on a pass/fail basis.
Most classes rely upon a combination of faculty led lectures, graduate student led recitations, weekly problem sets (p-sets), and tests to teach material, though alternative curricula exist, e.g. Experimental Study Group, Concourse, and Terrascope. In recent years, there has been a trend towards "unified" mainstream introductory courses (e.g. in the Physics and the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments), incorporating a coordinated curriculum of theory and hands-on laboratory experiences.
In the past, some organized student groups have compiled "course bibles", collections of problem set and examination questions and answers used as references for later students. In 1970, the then-Dean of Institute Relations, Benson R. Snyder, published ''The Hidden Curriculum,'' arguing that unwritten regulations, like the implicit curricula of the bibles, are often counterproductive; they fool professors into believing that their teaching is effective and students into believing they have learned the material. For further coverage of this topic, see History of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology#Course "Bibles".
In 1969, MIT began the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) to enable undergraduates to collaborate directly with faculty members and researchers. The program, founded by Margaret MacVicar, builds upon the MIT philosophy of "learning by doing". Students join or initiate research projects, colloquially called "UROPs", through postings on the UROP website or by contacting faculty members directly. Over 2,800 undergraduates, 70% of the student body, participate every year for academic credit, pay, or on a volunteer basis. Students often become published, file patent applications, and/or launch start-up companies based upon their experience in UROPs.
MIT awarded 1,474 master's degrees and 607 doctoral degrees in 2009. The School of Engineering is the most popular academic division enrolling 45.4% of graduate students, followed by the Sloan School of Management (17.3%), School of Science (17.3%), School of Architecture and Planning (9.5%), School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (4.9%), and Whitaker College of Health Sciences (2.5%). The largest graduate degree programs are the Sloan MBA, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Chemical Engineering.
In electronics, magnetic core memory, radar, single electron transistors, and inertial guidance controls were invented or substantially developed by MIT researchers. Harold Eugene Edgerton was a pioneer in high speed photography. Claude E. Shannon developed much of modern information theory and discovered the application of Boolean logic to digital circuit design theory. In the domain of computer science, MIT faculty and researchers made fundamental contributions to cybernetics, artificial intelligence, computer languages, machine learning, robotics, and cryptography. At least nine Turing Award laureates and seven recipients of the Draper Prize in engineering have been or are currently associated with MIT.
Current and previous physics faculty have won eight Nobel Prizes, four Dirac Medals, and three Wolf Prizes predominantly for their contributions to subatomic and quantum theory. Members of the chemistry department have been awarded three Nobel Prizes and one Wolf Prize for the discovery of novel syntheses and methods. MIT biologists have been awarded six Nobel Prizes for their contributions to genetics, immunology, oncology, and molecular biology. Professor Eric Lander was one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project. Positronium atoms, synthetic penicillin, synthetic self-replicating molecules, and the genetic bases for Lou Gehrig's disease and Huntington's disease were first discovered at MIT. Jerome Lettvin transformed the study of cognitive science with his paper "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain".
In the domain of humanities, arts, and social sciences, MIT economists have been awarded five Nobel Prizes and nine John Bates Clark Medals. Linguists Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle authored seminal texts on generative grammar and phonology. The MIT Media Lab, founded in 1985 within the School of Architecture and Planning and known for its unconventional research, has been home to influential researchers such as constructivist educator and Logo creator Seymour Papert.
Spanning many of the above fields, MacArthur Fellowships (the so-called "Genius Grants") have been awarded to 38 people associated with MIT. Four Pulitzer Prize winning writers currently work at or have retired from MIT. Four current or former faculty are members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Given MIT's prominence, allegations of research misconduct or improprieties have received substantial press coverage. Professor David Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate, became embroiled in a misconduct investigation starting in 1986 that led to Congressional hearings in 1991. Professor Ted Postol has accused the MIT administration since 2000 of attempting to whitewash potential research misconduct at the Lincoln Lab facility involving a ballistic missile defense test, though a final investigation into the matter has not been completed. Associate Professor Luk Van Parijs was dismissed in 2005 following allegations of scientific misconduct and found guilty of the same by the United States Office of Research Integrity in 2009.
The faculty and student body highly value meritocracy and technical proficiency. MIT has never awarded an honorary degree, nor does it award athletic scholarships, ad eundem degrees, or Latin honors upon graduation. However, MIT has twice awarded honorary professorships; to Winston Churchill in 1949 and Salman Rushdie in 1993.
Many upperclass students and alumni wear a large, heavy, distinctive class ring known as the "Brass Rat". Originally created in 1929, the ring's official name is the "Standard Technology Ring." The undergraduate ring design (a separate graduate student version exists as well) varies slightly from year to year to reflect the unique character of the MIT experience for that class, but always features a three-piece design, with the MIT seal and the class year each appearing on a separate face, flanking a large rectangular bezel bearing an image of a beaver. The initialism IHTFP, representing the informal school motto "I Hate This Fucking Place" and jocularly euphemized as "I Have Truly Found Paradise," "Institute Has The Finest Professors," "It's Hard to Fondle Penguins," and other variations, has occasionally been featured on the ring given its historical prominence in student culture.
The Independent Activities Period is a four-week long "term" offering hundreds of optional classes, lectures, demonstrations, and other activities throughout the month of January between the Fall and Spring semesters. Some of the most popular recurring IAP activities are the 6.270, 6.370, and MasLab competitions, the annual "mystery hunt", and Charm School. Students also have the opportunity of pursuing externships at companies in the US and abroad.
Many MIT students also engage in "hacking," which encompasses both the physical exploration of areas that are generally off-limits (such as rooftops and steam tunnels), as well as elaborate practical jokes. Recent high-profile hacks have included the theft of Caltech's cannon, reconstructing a Wright Flyer atop the Great Dome, and adorning the John Harvard statue with the Master Chief's Spartan Helmet.
The Institute's sports teams are called the Engineers, their mascot since 1914 being a beaver, "nature's engineer." Lester Gardner, a member of the Class of 1898, provided the following justification: }}
MIT fielded several dominant intercollegiate Tiddlywinks teams through 1980, winning national and world championships. The Engineers have won or placed highly in national championships in pistol, taekwondo, track and field, swimming and diving, cross country, crew, fencing, and water polo. MIT has produced 128 Academic All-Americans, the third largest membership in the country for any division and the highest number of members for Division III.
The Zesiger sports and fitness center (Z-Center) which opened in 2002, significantly expanded the capacity and quality of MIT's athletics, physical education, and recreation offerings to 10 buildings and of playing fields. The facility features an Olympic-class swimming pool, international-scale squash courts, and a two-story fitness center.
MIT enrolled 4,232 undergraduates and 6,152 graduate students in 2009–2010. Women constituted 45.3 percent of undergraduates and 31.1 percent of graduate students. Undergraduate and graduate students are drawn from all 50 states as well as 118 foreign countries.
MIT received 15,661 applications for admission to the Class of 2014; 1675 were admitted (10.7 percent) and 1078 enrolled (63.9 percent). 19,446 applications were received for advanced degree program across all departments; 2,991 were admitted (15.4 percent) and 1,880 enrolled (62.8 percent). The interquartile range on the SAT was 2030–2320 and 95 percent of students ranked in the top tenth of their high school graduating class. 97 percent of the Class of 2012 returned as sophomores; 82.3 percent of the Class of 2007 graduated within 4 years, and 91.3 percent (92 percent of the men and 96 percent of the women) graduated within 6 years.
Undergraduate tuition and fees total $37,782 and annual expenses are estimated at $50,100. 61 percent of students received need-based financial aid in the form of scholarships and grants from federal, state, institutional, and external sources averaging $35,202 per student. MIT awarded $87.6 million in scholarships and grants, the vast majority ($73.4 million) coming from institutional support. The annual increase in expenses has led to a student tradition (dating back to the 1960s) of tongue-in-cheek "tuition riots".
MIT has been nominally coeducational since admitting Ellen Swallow Richards in 1870. Richards also became the first female member of MIT's faculty, specializing in sanitary chemistry. Female students remained a very small minority (less than 3 percent) prior to the completion of the first wing of a women's dormitory, McCormick Hall, in 1962. Between 1993 and 2009, the proportion of women rose from 34 percent to 45 percent of undergraduates and from 20 percent to 31 percent of graduate students. Women currently outnumber men in Biology, Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Architecture, Urban Planning, and Biological Engineering.
A number of student deaths in the late 1990s and early 2000s resulted in considerable media attention to MIT's culture and student life. After the alcohol-related death of Scott Krueger in September 1997 as a new member at the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, MIT began requiring all freshmen to live in the dormitory system. The 2000 suicide of MIT undergraduate Elizabeth Shin drew attention to suicides at MIT and created a controversy over whether MIT had an unusually high suicide rate. In late 2001 a task force's recommended improvements in student mental health services were implemented, including expanding staff and operating hours at the mental health center. These and later cases were significant as well because they sought to prove the negligence and liability of university administrators ''in loco parentis''.
A 1998 MIT study concluded that a systemic bias against female faculty existed in its college of science, although the study's methods were controversial. Since the study, though, women have headed departments within the Schools of Science and Engineering, and MIT has appointed several female vice presidents, although allegations of sexism continue to be made. Susan Hockfield, a molecular neurobiologist, became MIT's 16th president in 2004 and is the first woman to hold the post.
Tenure outcomes have vaulted MIT into the national spotlight on several occasions. The 1984 dismissal of David F. Noble, a historian of technology, became a ''cause célèbre'' about the extent to which academics are granted freedom of speech after he published several books and papers critical of MIT's and other research universities' reliance upon financial support from corporations and the military. Former materials science professor Gretchen Kalonji sued MIT in 1994 alleging that she was denied tenure because of sexual discrimination. In 1997, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination issued a probable cause finding supporting James Jennings' allegations of racial discrimination after a senior faculty search committee in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning did not offer him reciprocal tenure. In 2006–2007, MIT's denial of tenure to African-American biological engineering professor James Sherley reignited accusations of racism in the tenure process, eventually leading to a protracted public dispute with the administration, a brief hunger strike, and the resignation of Professor Frank L. Douglas in protest.
MIT faculty members have often been recruited to lead other colleges and universities; former Provost Robert A. Brown is President of Boston University, former Provost Mark Wrighton is Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, former Associate Provost Alice Gast is president of Lehigh University, former Dean of the School of Science Robert J. Birgeneau is the Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and former professor David Baltimore had been President of Caltech. In addition, faculty members have been recruited to lead governmental agencies; for example, former professor Marcia McNutt is the director of the United States Geological Survey, urban studies professor Xavier de Souza Briggs is currently the associate director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and biology professor Eric Lander is a co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Alumni in American politics and public service include Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, MA-1 Representative John Olver, CA-13 Representative Pete Stark, former National Economic Council chairman Lawrence H. Summers, and former Council of Economic Advisors chairwoman Christina Romer. MIT alumni in international politics include former British Foreign Minister David Miliband, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, physicist Richard Feynman, and former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi.
MIT alumni founded or co-founded many notable companies, such as Intel, McDonnell Douglas, Texas Instruments, 3Com, Qualcomm, Bose, Raytheon, Koch Industries, Rockwell International, Genentech, and Campbell Soup. According to the British newspaper, ''The Guardian'', "a survey of living MIT alumni found that they have formed 25,800 companies, employing more than three million people including about a quarter of the workforce of Silicon Valley. Those firms between them generate global revenues of about $1.9tn (£1.2tn) a year. If MIT was a country, it would have the 11th highest GDP of any nation in the world." MIT managed $718.2 million in research expenditures and an $8.0 billion endowment in 2009.
Prominent institutions of higher education have been led by MIT alumni, including the University of California system, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Carnegie Mellon University, Tufts University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Northeastern University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Purdue University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Quaid-e-Azam University.
More than one third of the United States' manned spaceflights have included MIT-educated astronauts (among them Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin), more than any university excluding the United States service academies.
Noted alumni in non-scientific fields include author Hugh Lofting, sculptor Daniel Chester French, Boston guitarist Tom Scholz, ''The New York Times'' columnist and Nobel Prize Winning economist Paul Krugman, ''The Bell Curve'' author Charles Murray, United States Supreme Court building architect Cass Gilbert, Pritzker Prize-winning architects I.M. Pei and Gordon Bunshaft.
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ar:معهد ماساتشوستس للتقنية az:Massaçusets Texnologiya İnstitutu bn:ম্যাসাচুসেট্স ইনস্টিটিউট অফ টেকনোলজি be:Масачусецкі тэхналагічны інстытут bs:Massachusetts Institute of Technology bg:Масачузетски технологичен институт ca:Massachusetts Institute of Technology cs:Massachusetts Institute of Technology da:Massachusetts Institute of Technology de:Massachusetts Institute of Technology et:Massachusettsi Tehnoloogiainstituut el:Τεχνολογικό Ινστιτούτο Μασαχουσέτης es:Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts eo:Masaĉuseca Instituto de Teknologio eu:Massachusetts Institute of Technology fa:مؤسسه فناوری ماساچوست fr:Massachusetts Institute of Technology ga:Massachusetts Institute of Technology gl:Massachusetts Institute of Technology ko:매사추세츠 공과대학교 hi:मैसाचुसेट्स प्रौद्योगिकी संस्थान hr:Massachusetts Institute of Technology id:Institut Teknologi Massachusetts is:Massachusetts Institute of Technology it:Massachusetts Institute of Technology he:המכון הטכנולוגי של מסצ'וסטס kn:ಮ್ಯಾಸಚೂಸೆಟ್ಸ್ ಇನ್ಸ್ಟಿಟ್ಯೂಟ್ ಆಫ್ ಟೆಕ್ನಾಲಜಿ ka:მასაჩუსეტსის ტექნოლოგიის ინსტიტუტი sw:Chuo cha Teknolojia cha Massachusetts la:Massachusettense Institutum Technologiae lv:Masačūsetsas Tehnoloģiju institūts lt:Masačusetso technologijos institutas hu:Massachusetts Institute of Technology ml:മസ്സാചുസെറ്റ്സ് ഇൻസ്റ്റിറ്റ്യൂട്ട് ഓഫ് ടെക്നോളജി mr:मॅसेच्युसेट्स इन्स्टिट्यूट ऑफ टेक्नॉलॉजी ms:Institut Teknologi Massachusetts my:မက်ဆာချူးဆက် စက်မှုတက္ကသိုလ် nl:Massachusetts Institute of Technology ja:マサチューセッツ工科大学 no:Massachusetts Institute of Technology nn:Massachusetts Institute of Technology pnb:میساچیوسٹس انسٹیٹیوٹ آف ٹیکنالوجی pl:Massachusetts Institute of Technology pt:Instituto de Tecnologia de Massachusetts ro:Massachusetts Institute of Technology ru:Массачусетский технологический институт sq:Instituti i Teknologjisë Massachusetts scn:MIT simple:Massachusetts Institute of Technology sk:Massachusettský technologický inštitút sl:Tehnološki inštitut Massachusettsa sr:Масачусетски технолошки институт sh:Massachusetts Institute of Technology fi:Massachusetts Institute of Technology sv:Massachusetts Institute of Technology ta:மாசாச்சூசெட்சு தொழில்நுட்பக் கல்வி நிலையம் te:మసాచుసెట్స్ ఇన్సిట్యూట్ ఆఫ్ టెక్నాలజీ th:สถาบันเทคโนโลยีแมสซาชูเซตส์ tr:Massachusetts Teknoloji Enstitüsü uk:Массачусетський технологічний інститут vi:Học viện Công nghệ Massachusetts yi:מאסאטשוסעטס אינסטיטוט פון טעכנאלאגיע diq:Massachusetts Institute of Technology zh:麻省理工学院This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
name | Walter H.G. Lewin |
---|---|
birth date | January 31, 1936 |
birth place | Netherlands |
residence | 20px Netherlands, |
nationality | |
field | Astrophysics |
work institution | MIT |
alma mater | Delft University of Technology |
societies | Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences,American Physical Society |
prizes | NASA Award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement (1978) Alexander von Humboldt Award (1984 and 1991) Guggenheim Fellowship (1984) MIT Science Council Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1984), W. Buechner Teaching Prize (1988) Evertt Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2003) |
footnotes | }} |
Walter H. G. Lewin (born January 31, 1936) is a Professor Emeritus of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Walter Lewin went to MIT in January 1966 as a post-doctoral associate, and became an assistant professor later that year. He joined an x-ray astronomy group at MIT and conducted all-sky balloon surveys with George W. Clark. Through the late seventies, there were about twenty successful balloon flights. These balloon surveys led to the discovery of five new x-ray sources, which doubled the number known at the time. Furthermore, some of these x-ray sources were found to be varying, and some were x-ray flares. The rockets used by other researchers could not have discovered that the x-ray sources varied because they were only in the air for a few minutes, whereas the balloons could be in the air for many hours. The surveys also resulted in the discovery of GX 1+4, which was the first slowly rotating X-ray pulsar found.
Walter Lewin received the "2003 Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching" award. Some of his lectures are available online in video format.
Lewin is also an art enthusiast and collector. He has given one lecture in art history for MIT World.
Category:Living people Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Category:American astronomers Category:Dutch astronomers Category:Delft University of Technology alumni Category:1936 births
de:Walter Lewin es:Walter Lewin ht:Walter Lewin nl:Walter Lewin pt:Walter Lewin sk:Walter LewinThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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