MIT narrowly escaped being swallowed by Harvard, then an anonymous donor saved it
Cash-strapped and cramped in Boston's Back Bay, MIT's governing corporation once agreed to merge with Harvard. Only a 1905 court ruling that it could not sell its land killed the deal. Its new Cambridge campus was then bankrolled by a mysterious Mr. Smith, finally unmasked in 1920 as Kodak founder George Eastman.
Geologist William Barton Rogers, newly arrived from the University of Virginia, won a charter signed by Governor John Albion Andrew on 10 April 1861. Two days later the Civil War began, so classes did not start until 1865, in Boston's Mercantile Building. Rogers wanted neither a trade school nor a purely liberal college, but teaching of the scientific principles behind industrial processes, organised around laboratories on the German model. It was also a land-grant school, funded under the Morrill Act.
Known informally as Boston Tech, it grew under president Francis Amasa Walker to over a thousand students, yet money was always short. Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, a former MIT teacher, pushed repeatedly to fold it into Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School, in at least six attempts. Faculty, students and alumni fiercely opposed the final plan to move to Allston, and the state's top court ended it. In 1912 MIT bought a mile of filled land on the Cambridge bank of the Charles, and in 1916 its administration and charter crossed the river on a ceremonial barge named Bucentaur.
In the 1920s industry contracts kept the lights on, and elite rivals dismissed it as a mere engineering school serving business. Executives from General Electric and Bell Labs, arguing that engineers needed deeper science, recruited physicist Karl Compton as president in 1930. He created a graduate school, appointed Vannevar Bush dean of engineering, and curtailed faculty consulting.
War transformed everything. Bush persuaded Roosevelt in June 1940 to mobilise civilian science, and the secret Radiation Laboratory opened at MIT to develop microwave radar, growing from 30 staff to about 4,000. By 1945 MIT had received $117 million in federal contracts, more than any industrial firm. By 1957 research made up 72% of its operating budget, and Alvin Weinberg quipped that it was hard to tell whether MIT was a university with labs attached or labs with a university attached. As of 2024, 105 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with it.
Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
