In 1955, Chomsky obtained a job as an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), spending half his time on a mechanical translation project and the other half teaching linguistics and philosophy.[69] He later described MIT as "a pretty free and open place, open to experimentation and without rigid requirements. It was just perfect for someone of my idiosyncratic interests and work."[70] In 1957 MIT promoted him to the position of associate professor, while from 1957–58 he was also employed by New York City's Columbia University as a visiting professor.[71] That same year, the Chomskys' first child was born,[72] and he published his first work on linguistics, Syntactic Structures, a book that radically opposed the dominant Harris-Bloomfield trend in the field. The response to Chomsky's ideas ranged from indifference to hostility, and his work proved divisive and caused "significant upheaval" in the discipline.[73] Linguist John Lyons later asserted that it "revolutionized the scientific study of language."[74] From 1958–59 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study.[75] In 1959 he attracted further attention for his review of B.F. Skinner's 1957 book Verbal Behavior in the journal Language,[76] in which he argued that Skinner ignored the role of human creativity in linguistics.[77] Becoming an "established intellectual",[78] with his colleague Morris Halle, he founded the MIT's Graduate Program in linguistics, and in 1961 he was made professor of foreign language and linguistics, thereby gaining academic tenure.[79] He was appointed plenary speaker at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, held in 1962 at Cambridge, Massachusetts; the event established him as the de facto spokesperson of American linguistics.[80] He continued to publish his linguistic ideas throughout the decade, as Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1966), Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar (1966), and Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Linguistic Thought (1966).[81] Along with Halle, he also edited the Studies in Language Series of books for Harper and Row.[82] He continued to receive academic recognition and honors for his work, in 1966 visiting a variety of Californian institutions, first as the Linguistics Society of America Professor at the University of California, and then as the Beckman Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.[83] His Beckman lectures would be assembled and published as Language and Mind in 1968.[84] 1967 marked Chomsky's entry into the public debate on the United States' foreign policy.[86] In February he published an influential essay in The New York Review of Books titled The Responsibility of Intellectuals, in which he criticized the country's involvement in the Vietnam War.[84][87] He expanded on his argument to produce his first political book, American Power and the New Mandarins, which was published in 1969 and soon established him at the forefront of American dissent.[88] In 1971 he gave the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lectures in Cambridge, which were published as Problems of Knowledge and Freedom later that year, while other political books at the time included At War with Asia (1970) and For Reasons of State (1973).[89] Coming to be associated with the American New Left movement,[90] he nevertheless thought little of prominent New Left intellectuals Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, and preferred the company of activists to intellectuals.[91] Although he had initially arisen to attention for his political views in The New York Review of Books, throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was virtually ignored by the mainstream press.[92] Along with his writings, Chomsky also became actively involved in left-wing activism. Refusing to pay half his taxes, in 1967 he publicly supported students who refused the draft, and was arrested for being part of an anti-war teach-in outside the Pentagon.[93] During this time Chomsky founded the anti-war collective RESIST along with Mitchell Goodman, Denise Levertov, William Sloane Coffin, and Dwight Macdonald.[93] Supporting the student protest movement, he gave many lectures to student activist groups, though questioned the objectives of the 1968 student protests.[94] Along with colleague Louis Kampf, he also began running undergraduate courses on politics at MIT, independent of the conservative-dominated political science department.[95] His public talks often generated considerable controversy, particularly when he criticized actions of the Israeli government and military. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky Image By Kelly Maeshiro (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

• published: 07 Apr 2015
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