The day begins at MIT, as students, professors, and TA’s shuffle groggily through the doors of the Infinite Corridor. Our minds occupied with derivatives and electron transport chains, we pass underneath giant columns, supporting embossed concrete which reads

MASSACHVSETTS INSTITVTE OF TECHNOLOGY

WILLIAM BARTON ROGERS FOVNDER

¹

Most of us pass under this text without giving a second thought to “William Barton Rogers,” but every morning when I see his name, I get a little more curious. Who was this William Barton Rogers, and how and why did he found MIT? How does someone even begin going about creating an entire university? As I began to learn more about Rogers’ life, from his letters and the plethora of all things Rogers on the MIT Archives website², I discovered that Rogers had almost been bred to lead a life of scientific education. His brothers, James, Henry, and Robert, all grew up to be distinguished scientists of some form or another, and his father, an Irish immigrant who graduated from University of Pennsylvania, was Professor of Natural History and Chemistry at William and Mary. Once William came of age, he studied at William and Mary, though it’s unclear if he received a degree. When William was twenty-two, he and his brother Henry opened a school in Maryland, and William also was a lecturer at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. Two years later, their father died, and William took his place as the professor of Natural History and Chemistry at William and Mary. It was as if William’s ascendance into upper academia couldn’t have been smoother. So what accounts for Rogers’ turn towards a new form of education, as it would be embodied in MIT?

After a long search, I found that Rogers’ motives probably came from a half-lifetime of experiences, starting with the schooling imparted by his father and continued by later experiences. In 1835 when he had difficulty recruiting assistants for a geological survey of Virginia, he attributed it to a lack of well-educated young scientists, which, in turn, “illustrated to him the need for a new form of higher learning.”³ When reading the “Yale Report of 1828,” he scoffed at the publication’s assertion that the classics (dead languages, philosophy, etc.) provided the best foundation for all educations.⁴ William, who had been rigorously educated throughout his life, knew this statement to be untrue for scientific disciplines.

Based on his experiences, Rogers’ desire for a new education appears logical. He recognized that a scientific education too grounded in theory would leave students without knowledge of how to perform in their fields, and especially without knowledge of how important machines functioned. He also recognized that a scientific education too grounded in purely vocational studies would leave students without an understanding of scientific theory, and thus would leave students largely without a means for innovation. These ideas are outlined by Rogers in a proposal to the Pennsylvania legislature for a school of arts under Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute.⁵ In this proposal, Rogers actually used the phrase “mind and hand,” which would, of course, become MIT’s motto. Here is an excerpt of his proposal:

The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulation 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.

In a way, William Barton Rogers was outlining a new form of education. Prior to Rogers, education in the United States was segregated between liberal arts and vocational training. It’s almost as if Rogers was bridging the gap between them, save for the facets of a liberal arts education irrelevant to scientific disciplines. The mentality of a liberal arts education, focused on theory and deep understanding, was being fused with the substance of vocational studies. By proposing a closer and deeper fusion of practice and theory, Rogers was breaking new ground.

Unfortunately, the proposal did not yield a new school, and William stopped actively pursuing his plan—that is, until 1860, when a new opportunity arose. The Massachusetts government had been filling in the marshes of the Back Bay, and Governor John Andrew was advocating for the development of public educational facilities on the new land. Rogers was enlisted to advocate building a scientific educational facility. He wrote a long pamphlet, detailing his ideas for the school, and spoke in front of the assembly to persuade Massachusetts legislators. Once again, he emphasized that the school would not be a traditional learning environment; it would facilitate a departure from lecturing to focus on in-depth exploration into technological topics. Rogers was successful in convincing the Massachusetts legislature; the bill passed and MIT was created in 1861. But the story of William Barton Rogers does not stop here.

After MIT’s creation, Rogers seems to have devoted his remaining life to the Institute. Immediately after the commencement of the Institute, he became its first president. His first task was to acquire sufficient funds to start the school, which under normal circumstances would have been extremely difficult. To make matters worse, the Civil War broke out two days after MIT’s charter was signed. Collecting funds in the middle of a civil war must have been close to impossible, but Rogers managed to do it.

As the first president, he oversaw countless details of the practical creation of MIT, including many aspects that remain to this day. Most notably, he carried out plans to fulfill his vision of MIT as a hands-on, intensive learning environment. This vision of his (which dates back to the 1840’s when he articulated it in his letters) is quite arguably the most central part of MIT and always has been. The physical existence of this vision was evidenced by his oversight of the creation of a chemical laboratory on campus, which due to its cost was a rare feature of educational institutions at the time. A physics laboratory was also in the works.

He held the position of President until his health no longer permitted in 1870. John Daniel Runkle stepped in as President of MIT for nine years before resigning in 1879. When MIT was left without a president, William Barton Rogers, still in poor health, assumed the role once more. Suffering through three years at this intensive job, he finally died during commencement practice in 1882. It was quite fitting with his life; he literally gave his all to the Institute.

Now, when I walk into the Infinite, I have a new appreciation for this Institute, and the man who created it. As many students pass under

MASSACHVSETTS INSTITVTE OF TECHNOLOGY

WILLIAM BARTON ROGERS FOVNDER

I look up and realize what William Barton Rogers gave to us and how lucky we are to have him as our Fovnder.

 

Notes