Education: More Than a Referee

In a quietly impressive ceremony last week, Julius Adams Stratton, 58, was formally installed as eleventh president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The meaning of the event was hinted at by one of the several important inaugural guests, President Lee A. DuBridge of California Institute of Technology, who warmly called rival M.I.T. “the leading college of science and engineering in the world.”

This high praise from famed Caltech was no polite gesture. M.I.T. began in 1861 as a land-grant professional school for engineers. When Seattle-born “J” Stratton took his electrical engineering degree there in 1923, its aims were still basically the same. Last year, under Acting President Stratton—who stepped up from chancellor when President James R. Killian Jr. became President Eisenhower’s science adviser—M.I.T. spent an estimated $22 million for operating costs, another $56 million for sponsored research projects. It produces some of the country’s ablest pure physicists; it has grown from the nation’s main wartime radar laboratory to the leading center of electronics and computer development. Out of its orbit have spun a dozen graduate-launched electronics companies (e.g., Raytheon) in the golden brain center of surrounding Cambridge. It attracts more foreign professors (198 last year) and has a higher proportion of foreign students (12.4%) than any other U.S. institution. Above all, M.I.T. has led in broadening scientists by trying to ground them as thoroughly in the liberal arts as in the arts of technology. For such achievements, Julius Stratton can claim major credit. No narrow specialist—he left Cambridge in 1923 to study French literature at the universities of Grenoble and Toulouse, still refreshes himself by reading French and German history in the original—Stratton is humanist as well as scientist. Under President (1930-48) Karl Compton, who first aimed M.I.T. toward real scientific eminence, Stratton taught electrical engineering and physics, won wide respect for his wartime radar research and later for his administrative abilities in organizing the institute’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. Under President (now Board Chairman) Killian, who made him right-hand man, Stratton engineered an important reform: raising the departments of humanities and social sciences to equal rank with the institute’s other professional schools. Today M.I.T.’s curriculum spans the whole range of man’s “technology,” from politics to psychology, from international relations to interstellar space. “M.I.T. must adapt itself to the needs of a changing epoch,” Stratton said last week in his inaugural address. “It must assume new roles and accept new responsibilities.” But not at the expense of education, he vowed, and laid out three guidelines for his administration:¶”We must strive to develop more effectively the creative, imaginative, constructive powers of the student. University research serves but half its purpose if it becomes remote and isolated from the students themselves.”¶”We must bring about a more productive integration of the humanities and social sciences with the physical sciences and engineering.”

¶”We have an obligation to impart to our students an understanding of both the privileges and responsibilities inherent in the professional estate. The truly professional man must be imbued with a sense of responsibility to employer and client, a high code of personal ethics and a feeling of obligation to contribute to the public good … By precept and example, we must convey to [students] a respect for moral values, a sense of the duties of citizenship, a feeling for taste and style, and the capacity to recognize and enjoy the first-rate.”

As for the president himself, said President Stratton, “he must be more than a referee. He must be prepared to take positions on matters of educational import. Above all, he must be able to formulate his aims and make clear what he proposes to achieve … To this charge I pledge my whole endeavor.”