A Brief History on the 150^th Anniversary of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (April 7, 2011)

Associate Professor David Kaiser is a physicist and historian in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Science, Technology and Society Program. He has contributed a thumbnail history of his institution to this week's Nature.

According to Professor Kaiser MIT has been an innovator of university funding models, and its 150-year history holds lessons for today:

Perhaps the most influential of MIT's many innovations lay not in curricula or textbooks but in patronage. Time and again over its history, the institute has experimented with new ways to fund its research and teaching. While preparing a book on MIT, Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision (MIT Press, 2010), I learned just how vigorously the funding pendulum has swung between government and private funds. Every few decades, a decision inspired impassioned charges about whose money seemed appropriate or tainted, eliciting much hand-wringing from faculty members, administrators and alumni about what consequences might befall the scholarly community should the wrong choice be made. Each new scheme unleashed a battle for the soul of MIT. Yet proposals that had struck observers as bizarre or brash on first hearing were quickly absorbed into daily operations, and promptly emulated elsewhere.

MIT was founded just days before the outbreak of the American Civil War and the 1862 signing of the act that brought about the erecting of the nation's "land-grant colleges" MIT's founder, William Barton Rogers, convinced the Massachusetts state legislature to donate a significant portion of its land grant funds to MIT despite it being a private institution, which in turn made MIT an attractive investment for the private sector.

The whole of Professor Kaiser's "The search for clean cash" is available online (requires subscription or $32 for one off), and he is featured as the final item 17'23" into this week's podcast:

http://media.nature.com/download/nature/nature/podcast/v472/n7341/nature-2011-04-07.mp3