An Associated Press story about MIT’s president, Susan Hockfield, devotes a lot of space to her sex and the sex ratio among MIT faculty members. What is more interesting to me is Hockfield’s background as a life scientist. Her last research and teaching position was at Yale Medical School. She is not an engineer. She was never a computer programmer. MIT’s current president, Chuck Vest, was a mechanical engineer. His predecessor, Paul Gray, was an electrical engineer. His predecessor, Jerry Wiesner, was an electrical engineer. (See http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/mithistory/histories-offices/pres.html for more detail.)
Hockfield has a good opportunity to realign MIT with the national mood. Harvard University, for example, nearly a century ago was host to the world’s #1 department of civil engineering. The president of Harvard at the time looked around and decided that civil engineering wasn’t going to be important to the United States. He shut down the department and fired all the faculty members, including those with tenure. There are plenty of things that folks at MIT do that (a) attract reasonable research funding, (b) are among the best projects of their kind worldwide, and (c) are things that nobody cares about anymore or that are done just as well by Industry.
After she has cleared out some space on campus what new initiatives might she push? How about a medical school? MIT has one of the world’s best biology departments but, except for some ties to Harvard Medical School, very little in the practical side of medicine. MIT could probably do better work in biology if there were medical colleagues close at hand with whom to collaborate. MIT’s engineering research would take on new relevance if it were tied to challenges in patient care.
Starting a medical school will be a huge challenge, of course. Despite the growth in the U.S. population the American Medical Association has generally opposed new med schools due to the fact that more doctors might lead to lower average salaries. But if there is to be a new medical school in the United States where better than at MIT, where a random door in the bio department might very well open into the office of a winner of the Nobel prize for “physiology or medicine”?
I’ve wondered why MIT doesn’t have a Medical School. The answer? Take a look at the sensitivity of most engineers. While supposedly smart, they have terribl social skills. Might not matter in certain medical fields like pathology or even heart surgery, but otherwise it matters.
Yeah, like most medical doctors are sensitive. Riiiight.
Philip, did you ever meet Chuck Vest? This must be a big change of pace for you. According to that website, he’s only the third president to be in there since you joined MIT as a student, and he’s been there for 14 years.
If any university was to start a medical school, MIT has as much a chance at success out of the gate as any private university, perhaps only Princeton being close. The Boston area produces a lot of researchers and clinicians who, with the right incentives, might make a good pool of candidates to draw from, and cross-town rivalries–which Boston already has–can be stimulating. There are hospitals around that might welcome affiliation, and the availability of the existing university resources would make for an attractive collaborative environment. It is expensive, though.
If I were at MIT or the vicinity, I’d be more interested in them opening up a nursing school.
PG: I met Chuck Vest once or twice. His first year in office he came to address our department (EECS) and talked about the challenges facing engineers at the time (mid-1980s) but didn’t seem to have anything to offer in the way of solutions or inspiration. I can’t clearly remember anything that Vest ever said or did. Harvard is the school that has presidents who capture the public interest with ideas and actions. MIT tends to have presidents who spend their time in back rooms in Washington securing more funding. A Web search for “Charles M. Vest” turns up seriously boring stuff. The same search for “Larry Summers” reveals that the man is hated by Palestinians (http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story.php?sid=20040821051932500), the black intellectual Cornel West (http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/4/15/210332.shtml and http://hcs.harvard.edu/~salient/issues/10172002/10172002_cover_story_levine.html), English poets (http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-gross111202.asp), et al. His statements are collected by quotation sites, e.g., http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/larry_summers.html. MIT presidents have at times ended up being science advisors to U.S. presidents but still they remain out of the public eye.
Gee,
Maybe MIT could realign themselves as a vocational school or some sort of on-line diploma mill like the University of Phoenix (bet that you all could come up with some killer pop-up ads).
Hell, uop thinks that they’ll have a million online students soon, I bet that a billion dollars a year would keep your new president out of dc beggin for funding.
Really Philip you’re killing me here, “things that nobody cares about anymore or that are done just as well by Industry”. Pretty funny stuff as long as you want to believe that research should be limited to things that will turn a buck in a business plan.
*sigh*
Gary, I think that you completely missed the point of my posting. “things that are just as well done in Industry” are in fact those things that will, as you say, “turn a buck in a business plan”. MIT does not need to do things that Microsoft, IBM, and GE could do in their corporate research labs. For example, computer language design. The world clearly doesn’t care about this because people tend to use 30-year-old languages such as C or languages with 40-year-old ideas such as Java. There are only two significant companies in the world left supplying computer software, Microsoft and IBM. When MSFT wanted a new language it did not look to academia but instead built C# in-house. If there were 1000 software vendors, all equally small, it might make sense for universities to do research that none of these companies could individually afford. But that is not how the market looks. It looks a lot more like the old phone service market. There was one company and it had a research lab (Bell Labs) and it felt confident that it would be able to recover most of the return from whatever it developed in its lab.
MIT can concentrate on science that won’t pay off for 20-30 years, mathematics, and preparing young people for careers in areas that society considers vital to its interests.
In early ’90s I went to a WELL attended seminar on re-aligning the defense industy post Cold War. At 45 years-old I was one of the youngest in the packed lecture hall. There were folks from all the big New England defense contractors… Electric Boat, Raytheon, etc.
One of the speakers put up a slide showing how the British airplane industry had shrunk from 40+ players just after WWII to the “sort of” one today.
He then jumped to (then) current affairs & noted that Grumman had just announced it was exiting the Naval airframe business. Someone in the audience objected & said that the announcement had been “misread.” He emphasized that Grumman was still “fully committed” to that market. The speaker paused… a look of “How can I tell this guy to open his brain?” passed over his face & he said “Forget it. That market is G-O-N-E. There will be no more F-14s.”
This was all relevant to MIT since it was heavily dependant upon DoD spending.
I haven’t tried to follow if MIT is learning to get its research dollars from elsewhere yet.
I’m equally unclear if DoD research spending has in fact shrunk… I rather doubt it.
David: http://web.mit.edu/facts/research.shtml should answer your question (DoD funding is about 18 percent of the total research funding at MIT right now). The highest profile scientific research at MIT is and has been for many years funded by National Science Foundation.
If you click on the Lincoln Lab link, you get another $478.7 million in DoD research dollars. I’ve met many MIT PhDs thru LL over the past 20 years, maybe the DoD bucks are just compartmentalized.
Well, Lincoln Lab is a military research lab that happens to be owned by MIT and is physically separate from the main campus. I’m not too surprised that the military funds a military research lab. But in any case what happens at Lincoln is not very relevant for the success or failure of on-campus research. If Lincoln were to be spun off or suffered a decline it would not affect the Nobel prize winners in their labs in the biology buildings.
Philip,
I thought that you were suggesting that research done at MIT was irrelevant (and ought to be eliminated) because they
”
(c) are things that nobody cares about anymore or that are done just as well by Industry.”
I took this to mean that the only reasons for MIT to carry on research was if it was in fields that people cared about or Industry thought was worth funding.
Furthermore, I took it that you were suggesting that the new focus may be (because of the new president’s background) as a medical school training doctors.
Admittedly, I went over the top with the online MBA crowd. But… MIT does have a lot of ‘good will’ behind its name. If an administration was looking to turn a dime on the name, then increasing their (paying) audience from those that can fit on a little piece of land in Mass to everybody that can attend an online class may seem to be, um , attractive.
Whether the funding comes from nsf, nist, dod, or even Industry. I believe that places like MIT are the US’s best chance to remain a world leader in intellectual property. Once that everything else has been outsourced it would be nice to think that the rest of the world will still look to the US in that area.
Besides, somebody in one of your dusty little physics labs still has to work out that whole warp drive thing
MIT, like other universities, should do research on things that aren’t likely to happen in corporate R&D labs, which have much larger budgets and staffs than any university will ever have. That said it is important to look at the reason that the research isn’t happening in Industry. An example of something “nobody cares about anymore” is audio sound quality, e.g., loudspeaker design. Bell Labs built electrostatic speakers in the 1920s out of stretched pig intenstine pressed with gold leaf and figured out how to do it right. Reproducing sound faithfully was an unsolved problem in those days but today is not a matter of interest to society, which would rather have a cure for cancer (while listening to crummy compressed MP3s playing through lightweight dynamic speakers with a one-note bumped up mid-bass resonance).
Gary: I think your confusion stems from fact that you read my words “plenty of things” as “everything currently done at MIT”. There are research projects and perhaps whole sections of departments that work on challenging problems that soon enough will fall into the “how can we make a better loudspeaker” category. In fact these are usually fairly practical things, like the civil engineering department that Harvard killed, rather than theoretical physics projects as you posit. Starting a med school does not mean that the whole institution’s focus changes. Nor does it mean that the goal is to train more doctors. The goal of having a med school is to enhance biology research. We have Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. We have Physics and Electrical Engineering. We have Biology and … nothing. Having the engineers around changes the kind of science that gets done.
As to your idea of doing online MBA, first I never said anything about the new president trying to “turn a dime” or make more money. And second, the traditional schools such as Harvard and MIT typically don’t attract innovative administrators who do anything like online education. Innovation usually stems from pain. When you are sitting on $25 billion in assets (Harvard) or $6 billion+ (MIT) you aren’t feeling much pain.
Phil –
Thanks for that link to the MIT research pie.
I’d like to offer this observation of how MIT research works (and I’m sure not just confined to MIT).
#1 – Bright student is admited & attaches themselves to lead MIT professor… student helps with a few footnotes for Professor’s book/research grant.
#2 – Student takes footnote/idea to Masters or PhD level. [Student is now addicted to academic realm.]
#3 – Student “steps across the street” to some place like say Draper Labs & spends 10 years perfecting the footnote to a almost working prototype.
#4 – Student’s prototype is bulked up to functional prototype at Lincoln Labs.
#5 – DoD funds field production.
#6 – Student’s idea is manufactured in large scale in factories far away from Massachusetts.
#7 – Several decades after initial footnote, student’s idea is old hat for DoD & moves into civilian usage.
—————–
(Remember I’m just a civilian) I still remember the first time I touched the Arpanet at the AI lab in the late ’70s & played moonlander on a PDP/VAX.
Now think back just 10 years ago… see if you can find “civilians” who had heard of the Internet, but did not have access to it. Ask them if they’d have bet that in 10 years the ‘Net would be an everyday part of their lives.
——————
Conclusion… Lincoln Labs is directly connected to MIT research since it’s one of the necessary way stations on the way to practical, commercial use.
– David
David: Your theory is brilliant and comprehensive except that 99% of MIT students and graduates will never set foot inside Draper or Lincoln Lab. If the student happens to be interested in missile guidance, submarine navigation, satellite communications, or air traffic control he or she might end up at one of these specialized labs. But a student working in one of MIT’s flagship biology labs who wanted to commercialize something would go to a drug company. Compare http://www.ll.mit.edu/programs/programs.html and http://www.mit.edu/research/index.html and I think you’ll understand the picture a little better.
Phil –
Thanks for limiting the context to my ill-chosen example of Draper as how the PROCESS works… regardless of the industry.
I’d be just as willing to swap some bio lab (Whitehead Institute?) for Draper, but simply don’t know much about the bio world. If I did I’m sure it would be pretty easy to change the names of the players, but the process would be largely identical.
Assuming all the public talk about “chemical” weapons, I’d like to assume there is bleeding edge research happening right now at MIT… on the shoulders of to-be-giants-in-their-field current MIT undergrads.
Thanks for those wonderful links!
Granted that I’m not privy to MIT’s nomenclature, but it strikes me as odd that “Information management” (software?) doesn’t seem (at least at a first glance) to be on the MIT research list. Here’s a field that ALL industries (at least the ones that are going forward) are vitally dependant on… and we don’t even have any basic measurement standards yet.
Please to (1) prove me wrong about the basic measurements issue, and (2) point me at the MIT research professors peeling the layers of this onion.
FYI… I didn’t do the primary research myself, but this story comes from a trusted source… in the far simpler days at the dawn of the industrial revolution in England it took the Brits 75 years to agree on standard screw threads. When I was into nuts & bolts in the late ’70s there were still 5 “standards” for screws/nuts/bolts in the UK.
My point here is that if the subject is (MIT’s prowess in) PRIMARY research it’s a tad early to expect standards in the information management realm… but at least someone should be poking at it.
– David
This is a little off-topic, but you say the following as if it’s surprising:
“Despite the growth in the U.S. population the American Medical Association has generally opposed new med schools due to the fact that more doctors might lead to lower average salaries.”
The American Medical Association is basically a doctor’s union, except it’s less powerful than a real union because its members can’t go on strike. Of course they want to keep doctor’s salaries high! It’s their job! Why do people keep mentioning this as if it’s a giant conspiracy?
Konrad: The AMA is much more powerful than a real union! A real union cannot prevent new people from learning the skills that their employers require. The AMA, however, in most states has the ability to block the approval of new medical schools. There is no need to go on strike if you can exclude competitors. Microsoft doesn’t threaten to strike and cut off our supply of Windows XP and Office yet nobody would accuse them of lacking market power.