Merritt Roe Smith

INTERVIEWER: Today is September 22, 2010. I am Karen Arenson.

We are speaking today with Merritt Roe Smith, the Leverett and William Cutten professor of the history of technology. He was one of the contributors to Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision, a history of the Institute published by the MIT Press this month to mark MIT's 150th anniversary. He wrote the first chapter, chronicling MIT's founding, and its early years. He is a former director of MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society and was one of the architects of MIT's doctoral program in the history and social study of science and technology, which he also directed for many years.

He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar in Sweden. He is also a past president of the Society for the History of Technology, and received its Leonardo da Vinci medal, the Society's highest honor. He is also a housemaster at Burton Connor, one of the largest MIT dormitories, where he walks the halls at 1:00 am to make sure all is well.

Roe, thank you for speaking with us today.

You wrote about the founding of MIT, tell us about how it started.

SMITH: Well, it was in the making for a long time. William Barton Rogers and his brothers as early as the late 1820s began to talk about a polytechnic institute somewhere. I don't know that they ever knew exactly where. But it was an idea that grew over a 30 year period. It really began to take shape in the late 1850s when, by that time, William Barton Rogers had moved to Boston, had married a woman here and set up shop. It was at that point that he joined forces with a number of interested people in Boston to try to establish a number of institutions, one of which turned out to be MIT.

INTERVIEWER: Were there any other institutions like MIT that started around the same time?

SMITH: There were some earlier institutions that were -- they were not exactly like MIT, but they were predecessors. One, for example, was the US Military Academy at West Point which was influenced by French ideas, as was MIT, and that was established in the early 1800s. It was basically an engineering school that was producing people ostensibly for the Army, but in fact, many of these young men left the Army quickly and became civil engineers primarily -- big time railroad builders, canal builders, people in that area. A lot of them are from West Point.

The other school, of course, is Rensselaer, which was founded in 1824. I would say that those are the two that preceded MIT. But MIT had its own unique qualities, too, when it was established.

INTERVIEWER: In what ways was the new MIT different from these predecessors?

SMITH: Well, I think the main thing was that Rogers put a lot of emphasis on laboratory training and laboratory education. Not just replicating famous experiments, but introducing students to research. Actually getting them in a lab to do new work under the supervision of their professors, and that was quite new for its time. I think that was one of the defining features of the Institute during its early years.

INTERVIEWER: Was that more science than engineering, or more science than the other two institutions?

SMITH: The earliest labs were primarily science labs. The first one was a chemistry lab, then hot on its heels came a physics lab. Both of which were wellknown for they're doing not just replications, but really new work.

INTERVIEWER: And what was driving William Barton Rogers? Why was he so consumed by this idea?

SMITH: That's a good question. I think that part of it was just he was a person who was, in his own right, interested in education, improving education, and tried to blend -- I mean the thing that he did was really make the mind and hand come together. MIT's Coat of Arms, its symbol is really appropriate because mind and hand were really defining features of what the Institute was then and is today I think. That's the amazing thing to me is that so much that was original with William Barton Rogers has been carried into the present. I mean in different ways, but the philosophy is pretty much the same.

INTERVIEWER: Was he a man who exhibited both the mind and hand himself? Did this come out of I want to replicate me, or I wish I had more of this, and therefore, let's do it?

SMITH: Yeah, I think it did. Because when he was a younger professor at the University of Virginia he headed the geological survey of that state which was very much a "useful" enterprise, though he saw science projects in it. He and his brother were working on a theory of mountain formations, and they saw their work as doing something more than simply doing a survey that would be useful to industrialists, but rather something that was going to get them and build their scientific reputations.

He basically was a geologist and it was that Virginia experience, I think, was one of those real important moments in his life and which he began to really see the direction of the future and where he wanted to go, both as a person and as an educator.

INTERVIEWER: The other higher ed institutions at that point, many of them had started as religiously oriented universities or colleges at that point. So then here came this engineering beast. Were there other models at that point, or are those the main two?

SMITH: The main two really were the classical liberal arts college, which many of them were religious in nature, founded by religious groups. They emphasized the classical Latin literature history education with some science, but not anything like what Rogers wanted to do at MIT or what was being done at West Point or RPI for that matter.

INTERVIEWER: And how much of that did Rogers feel a need to put into the MIT curriculum? Did he feel we've got to do some of that or nobody will see this degree as being worth anything, or did he just say how do I train an engineer who knows how to do some science in the lab?

SMITH: One of the interesting things he did once he was in Boston was to surround himself with people who were out in the world of engineering and science. I'm trying to remember the name of -- James B. Francis was a very famous hydraulic engineer who was situated in Lowell, Massachusetts, but he became one of Rogers' advisors, as did a number of others. I think it was through those influences that he began to see and really become committed to this mind and hand vision that he had.

INTERVIEWER: And if you looked at the existing engineers in society, say the hydraulic one, where did they get their training, was it mostly on the job?

SMITH: Much of it. Yeah, much of it was on the job. Many of the early engineers, people -- there's a whole story about how people came to call themselves engineers. Some were school educated -- West Pointers, RPI people, they were school educated. But there were many others that were either apprenticed on, say, canal projects or railroads or various factory operations. So eventually come to call themselves engineers.

I was working in the papers of a fellow named Joseph Harrison. He was born and raised in Philadelphia. His father was a well-known merchant who went broke during one of the depressions in the United States, I think it was around late 1820s, thereabouts. In any case, the family lost everything and the son had nothing to inherit. There was no mercantile business to go in to. So he was apprenticed to a machine shop. Later in life he became one of the builders of the Moscow and Saint Petersburg Railroad in Russia -- at that time the longest railroad in the world.

The chief engineer of that project was George Washington Whistler, Whistler's father, the artist's father. But at one point in Saint Petersburg where they both lived, Harrison was not getting his mail and so he wrote to his father-in-law in Philadelphia saying, "Please address me as Joseph Harrison, Civil Engineer." That's the first reference I've ever seen to his calling himself an engineer. But he had no degree or anything like that. That happened a lot.

INTERVIEWER: You open your chapter by talking about the benefactors who helped MIT get off the ground. Who were they and how much fundraising did MIT do after it got off the ground?

SMITH: They were hard to find, especially during the Civil War. But there were a few really important ones. I'm trying to remember the man's name who was one of the big contributors, but I start my essay with him. He, in his letter he says, long live the Institute, or something like that, and he contributed a fair amount of money. He was a surgeon, he was a doctor. He had made a lot of money in local industrial -- he bought stocks in local industrial ventures and he made a lot of money in that area. Then when he saw that Rogers was doing this at MIT, he decided to support him. He was one of the first big supporters of the Institute, and others came, others followed, but he was the first.

I think the thing that's important, though, that I sort of I think have pointed to where others have not is the role of the state was important in all of this. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts really stepped up to the plate. It used the distributions from the famous Morrill Land Grant Act, which was a piece of legislation signed by the US Congress and Abraham Lincoln that was aimed at building what were called agricultural mechanical colleges.

But it was Rogers that lobbied for some of that money and got a piece of it, even though the governor didn't really want to do it. He wanted to try to meld MIT and what later became the University of Massachusetts into one big tripartite operation headed by Harvard. That was one of the early attempts to bring MIT into the Harvard fold -- even before the Institute was started they were talking about things like that.

INTERVIEWER: Did Harvard have political might by then?

SMITH: Oh yeah. Most of these people were Harvard graduates. So, there were institutional loyalties I'm sure. Most of MIT's early faculty were Harvard graduates.

INTERVIEWER: You mention that Massachusetts went along -- what was it about the State, do you think, that helped make it look with favor? Was it that there was a lot of industry here or mills or for--

SMITH: Very much. Yeah, very much.

INTERVIEWER: --the right type of business?

SMITH: Massachusetts was the leading industrial state in the union in 1861. I forget exactly what the statistics are, but it was overwhelmingly larger producer than Pennsylvania or New York or any of the other eastern states at that time. That would change, but at that time Massachusetts was the leading industrial state. As a result, there were a number of people around here who wanted to see an institution built that would produce students that could go into the industries that were here and contribute. So, Rogers saw this.

He also, when he arrived in Boston from Virginia, one of the things that attracted him here, other than his wife who was a Bostonian, but one of the things that attracted him here was the commercial spirit of the place and its knowledge -- I think he uses these terms: the knowledge seeking spirit of Boston. He really was taken with this and knew that if he was ever going to succeed in building a new type of school, this would be the place.

INTERVIEWER: The people, the students that MIT was training in its early years then sound like they were aimed at staff type jobs, if you get back to the training leaders or staff people. It sounds like the early roots were definitely to think out people who could work for other people?

SMITH: Yeah. Many of the early students at MIT were called special students. That is they were not full-time students, they were sort of taking night classes and had jobs in Boston. So they were coming from a job to school to try to develop and get a degree eventually. They outnumbered the so-called regular students well into the 1880s. I think it was around 1886 that you begin to see regular students, four year, full-time students, begin to become a majority at MIT. But before that these so-called specials were sort of the dominant group.

INTERVIEWER: As a historian, you've paid a lot of attention to the Civil War and that whole era, do you find it remarkable that MIT was able to get off the ground in the midst of a bitter Civil War, and did anything about the war contribute to the belief that an institution like MIT might be useful?

SMITH: I think there were great doubts. I mean as a historian I marvel at the fact that, indeed, it did get off the ground, because it really had to scratch for funds to support itself. There's no question about that. Even with the support of the State, that wasn't enough. MIT was running in the red well into the early 1900s, if not later. So it was one of those institutions that really had to work at supporting itself, always in debt, but at the same time trying to build a tradition, an educational tradition, that was different and attractive.

I remember that at one point MIT started classes not in 1861 but 1865, and it quickly acquired a reputation as being one of these rising places that people went to if they really wanted to engage in the useful arts -- engineering, science. MIT was the place to go. So, even though it was not well-off, in fact quite the opposite, it was building a reputation at the same time and attracting some very strong faculty.

INTERVIEWER: Was it hard to get into? Did students have to meet some kind of requirements to become a student?

SMITH: Not like today. I'll tell you that, it's not like today. But they did have to demonstrate certain skills in order to be admitted. But the rigor of the admissions process is nothing like what it is today. Of course, over the years as the Institute acquired a reputation, then it became more difficult to pass the screening to get into school and matriculate.

INTERVIEWER: You mention that it kept running in the red, that was kind of operating deficit, the difference between, what, tuition and their expenses and then the gap was filled by benefactors?

SMITH: Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. The thing that was interesting to me and the research that I did on the Institute, which was relatively new to me, indicated that people like Rogers and his successor, Walker -- Francis Amasa Walker who was a very important person this early history -- were well aware of the financial difficulties they were facing and were out constantly trying to raise money.

But the thing that happened that was so important was that they constantly had to turn to the State of Massachusetts for support to kind of the tip off the bucket so that they could continue to run. I think that State support was sufficient and important because it persuaded private donors that MIT had a future that was worth investing in. So there was always a financial shortfall, but often it was made up by the State, and then that would attract more private contributions, so the Institute would go on.

One of the problems with a school like MIT in those days, of course, was laboratory equipment was very expensive. You see in the correspondence of Rogers and Runkle and even Walker, trying to equip labs--.

INTERVIEWER: Just like today.

SMITH: It is. Yeah, it is. There's something that's very much a continuity from past to present.

INTERVIEWER: Did you come across any kind of opposition among these Harvard educated political leaders saying don't give that money to MIT because they wanted to see Harvard--.

SMITH: Yeah. There was a lot of tension from day one when MIT approached the State Legislature about getting support. There were people at Harvard and elsewhere that wanted to get more than their fair share.

One of the leading, I would say, antagonists of Rogers was a very famous scientist at Harvard named Louis Agassiz. He and Rogers tilted, not just about funding the Institute, but about intellectual questions. I mean Rogers was a supporter of Charles Darwin's theory that appeared in 1859. Agassiz was a deadly opponent. They just had these differences all the way down. But Agassiz whenever he could tried to throw a spanner in the works of MIT. At times he succeeded, but not enough to destroy the place.

INTERVIEWER: Much of MIT's success was clearly attributable to its leaders and the choices that they made. They seem to have been practical problem-solvers, but also men of broad vision and with some political skills. Can you talk some more about these early leaders, and was MIT just lucky to have them, or was there something about the succession that--.

SMITH: Well, there's no question that Rogers himself was a politically astute person. I think he learned a lot from his Virginia experience, which was a very bitter one. He was charged with conducting a geological survey in Virginia in the late '30s and '40s, and it turned out that there were all sorts of political forces and interests there that were vying for his attention. He seemed to be in trouble all the time with either one group or the other. It was a very bitter experience to him. He writes in his letters and things about all of that.

But the thing was that it was also a learning experience. He really learned how to become a politician. I think he put that to good use once he arrived here in Boston and had to lobby with the legislature. He kept his cool, always a person who was under control. I think that the reason why MIT succeeded in finding good leaders, at least during his lifetime and beyond, was that he knew what was needed and he could see them. He was, in effect, the person who hired Francis Amasa Walker, who I consider a very important president of MIT.

Walker came here from Yale. Now today we would describe him as a political economist or even an economist; he was not an engineer or scientist, but he had a great appreciation for what was happening at MIT and wanted to be a part of it. He was a leader who also had really good political skills. He came to MIT not from Yale directly but from the US Census of 1880. He had conducted that census, which in my view is the first great census that was conducted in the United States. It not only did population studies, it also did wonderful surveys of industrialization and the various types of areas of manufacturing and enterprise. Studies that today are still held up in the light of historical scrutiny.

He was the one who oversaw that and shows all the various people that were in charge of these various areas of reporting. It was very good. I think both Rogers and Runkle, who was Rogers' closest friend really -- a mathematician who was his successor for about eight years and then came Walker. The three of them were very important -- MIT was fortunate to have them. But it was Roger's vision and his energy and enterprise I think that sort of continued that tradition of knowing the politics of education, as well as the inner workings, curriculum, things like that.

INTERVIEWER: There are a number of other widely respected universities, nationally and globally, but most of them resemble each other more than they resemble MIT. There are also many technical institutes, but most of them don't rank among the top universities today. Why is MIT so distinctive? Why aren't there more great institutions like MIT with this emphasis on science and technology, but also the elite rankings?

SMITH: When I think of that question, I immediately think of the hundreds of schools that were established under Morrill Land Grant Act, and MIT was one of them, one of the first. But there were places like Ohio State University and University of California at Berkeley, Purdue University, even Cornell, but most of them were state controlled and supported schools much more directly than MIT ever was.

One of the things I've noticed is that state support is up and down and up and down. They play a numbers game that is different than MIT did, I think, even in those early days. Counting students was important but it wasn't the critical factor. I think that state universities suffered because so much depended on how much funding they got each year. Whereas MIT I think from day one had to go out and search for donors to support the Institute. That doesn't become something that's widely practiced in American higher education until after World War II really.

So, MIT was in that game early on. I think it was in that game mainly because Harvard had been doing it for centuries probably, but it was an important difference, and it really differentiated MIT academically from what could be done in a lot of these fine engineering and science institutions that always were facing these serious financial problems. They were at the sufferance of the legislatures, basically.

INTERVIEWER: Although the universities, many of the land grants, tuned into broader-based universities. Maybe with a few exceptions -- Purdue probably still has a science engineering tilt to it more than, say, a Michigan or a Wisconsin or Ohio. It's that they veered off into the broader trying to be a broad university as opposed to MIT, which somehow stayed on the science/technology path.

SMITH: They did. But early on, all of those land grant schools were agricultural, mechanical colleges that branched out, as you say, into other areas, whether it's business or law or humanities or whatever it might be. It wasn't that MIT didn't have a focus on other areas than science and technology. It was really this mind and hand vision that was always kept at the center of MIT's strategy.

I was surprised to find out that from day one MIT had literature professors here and history professors. People like that that you wouldn't have expected to have been here in the 1870s were actually here. They were not the dominant people or anything, but they were around. So even though the Lewis Report, which was so famous later after World War II, really brought that and it made it a more integral part of the Institute, those interest and the considerations are around for a long time.

INTERVIEWER: How did you become involved with this book? You don't usually study higher ed per se.

SMITH: No, I do not. I definitely do not. David Kaiser who is the editor is a colleague of mine in the STS Program. I don't know exactly how he got the idea of doing the book -- I'm glad he did -- but it may have been a part of the celebration of the 150th anniversary. But in any case, he asked me to do this essay. I remember when he sent me the email about it, I thought to myself, oh God, do I have to do that? I mean really it's not what I really am interested in. I'm interested in manufacturing and machine tools and things like that.

But David is a close colleague and I thought how can I say no. So I thought, well I don't know much about the history of MIT, this is a good opportunity so I'll do it. That's how I did it. I spent a lot of time reading various histories of the Institute that had been written over the years and trying to bone up on it and then write what I consider to be more of an interpretive essay -- trying to place an MIT in the larger context of its times. So, that's how it turned out.

INTERVIEWER: Tell us some more about some of the sources you consulted. Was there a huge library of all this stuff in one neat place, or did you roam around the country?

SMITH: I thought there was, but it turned out that the library on the history of MIT is not very big and it's surely not very good. I was surprised at how weak the literature is on the history of MIT. There are some books that have lots of factual information, but as a historian that's not what's important. The important part of it is interpreting information and pulling things out to try to look at the Institute from some sort of perspective. For me it was not just trying to write an essay about one damn thing after another because for me that's just not history, and a lot of the early works on MIT tended to be that way.

Good sources of information for me, but and maybe great that they weren't highly interpretive in nature because it allowed me to do it. So I felt pretty good about that. There's a lot published about MIT but it's spread all over the place. MIT needs a good history, and the starting point is this little book that we put together for the 150th. But it's very selective. If you look at it you'll see--.

INTERVIEWER: It's about certain decisions.

SMITH: Absolutely, moments of decision. But there's a lot that gets left out of that. It's highly selective, and someone needs to come along and write the big history.

INTERVIEWER: That's not your next project?

SMITH: No. I'm writing a book about the Civil War, actually, and MIT will be part of that, but it's just a part and not the whole.

INTERVIEWER: Were you particularly fascinated by any of the sources you consulted for this project, or did you find any that were especially useful?

SMITH: Yes. I would say there were three moments that were especially useful to me. One was discovering the correspondence that William Rogers had. It was a two volume set, edited by his wife after he died, of his correspondence. That was very, very interesting and valuable because it was sort of the first hand look at what he was thinking about, what people were saying and things like that. I liked that a lot.

Then the other things were the annual reports. Once I started reading certain books, they were referencing annual reports. I thought well this is something I need to look at. Actually, I wrote the essay before I started to read the annual reports. But I went back and read a number of them. One of the most interesting was, I think it was the 1894 report of Francis Amasa Walker in which he says, "The battle of the new education is won."

Well the new education was William Barton Rogers' vision of the new education, which he says MIT is now recognized, the MIT model is now being followed. There was a point in the 1890s that MIT really crossed a barrier and was recognized. So that was important.

Then after I had drafted a part of my essay, there was a biography that appeared about William Barton Rogers by a young person, I've not met him, named Angulo and it's very good. It was very good and it backed up a lot of the things I had been thinking about. That was very helpful in sort of solidifying what I had written. It gave me some confidence that I wasn't off in left field writing an essay about MIT. So that was a very nice piece too.

INTERVIEWER: Where was the correspondence that you came across?

SMITH: Mainly in the printed literature. This was a project that I did not have time to go into the archives. This is not an archival essay. So for me it was meant to be a popular essay for a large audience based on mainly on the work of others, and not on my original research and archives. Usually when I do research, I get myself to the National Archives or the Library of Congress or wherever and do -- I love to work in archival material. But this was one of those things--.

INTERVIEWER: But you found a book of the letters--

SMITH: I did, yeah.

INTERVIEWER: --in MIT's library or in the Boston Public?

SMITH: I bought that. I bought that on Amazon. I saw the citation, I thought I'm going to look this up on Amazon and there it was. For something like $10.00--

INTERVIEWER: It was a used copy.

SMITH: --I got. Yeah, In almost new condition. It was amazing. I loved it. It was one of the great coups of the whole process was buying these books. Yeah, it was wonderful.

INTERVIEWER: So you have a whole shelf full now?

SMITH: I do. Yes, I do.

INTERVIEWER: And the MIT annual reports, were they neatly findable on a shelf somewhere?

SMITH: They're usually available at the archives and the library.

INTERVIEWER: People kept pretty good track from the beginning.

SMITH: They did. The annual reports are very valuable because it's the opportunity for the presidents to tell the Corporation what has been done during the past year, what are the problems, what are the triumphs.

INTERVIEWER: What evidence did Walker point to in '94 to say the battle had been won. Was he citing anything in particular to say, see, you've really done it or was he just declaring it?

SMITH: Yeah. I don't recollect that he actually points to specifics. He may have, I'm not sure. But he surely is indicating that other schools are paying attention to what's happening here and using MIT as a model, and that's why this new education is being won. He goes so far as to say I think at one point that even these old classical, liberal arts colleges that were so opposed to what Barton Rogers wanted to do in the 1860s were now coming around and establishing their science programs. Not at the same degree of intensity as MIT but nonetheless, the new education had made a dent in a way that I don't know that Rogers ever expected that it would ever go that far. So this was like, what, at least eight or nine years after his death I would say that Walker makes this recognition.

INTERVIEWER: Will anything that you learned about MIT's history changed the way you think about the Institute now or anything you do here?

SMITH: Well, it doesn't change anything. I wouldn't say it changes anything, but it surely gives me a good perspective on why MIT is MIT. What I mean by that is that I think one of the great things about MIT is the great pride that the faculty have in place. You can see that, you clearly see that from the early days of Rogers, Runkle, Walker, and all the people that they hired to come on the faculty here.

There's a tremendous pride in the place, and I think it makes it a great place because people work hard here, work very hard here. Whether you're in the humanities or in the biology labs or wherever, you work very hard at MIT. I think that that coupled with this intensity of looking at new materials and searching for new solutions is something that has been around a long time, but it's really part of the greatness of the place, from my perspective anyway.

INTERVIEWER: How do you think about MIT's role in the world now and how that role has changed over the years?

SMITH: Oh boy. I think it has changed. I've been here since 1979, and even in that relatively short period of time, I've seen just the campus change in the sense that nearly 50 percent of our students are now women. In 1979 that just wasn't the case. If I had a class and if there were two women out of a class of 15 or 20, that was an acceptable number. Today, oftentimes, more than half of my class are women, and I think that's -- I like that.

I think that's been a very good thing for MIT because it has brought another dimension to the Institute and another degree of seriousness, if you want to put it that way. Because I think that some of the women that live in our dorm are just amazing. I think MIT was losing out on a lot of talent by not having focused on that problem sooner. It has, and I think it has, again, if Rogers declared winning the new education, I think that battle of gender has been won at MIT, too, because it's now very balanced and it just is better. The general environment of the place, in my view, is better.

INTERVIEWER: In one of the early annual reports that you were referring to, I was struck by the fact that they talked about the number of women who were there, and that there seemed to be larger numbers of women among their special students in the days when they had a lot of them than I would have expected. It wasn't just one or two.

SMITH: I was surprised at that too. They were not huge numbers, but there were always a representation of women. Rogers was actually in favor of that. It wasn't that he said keep women out. I never detected that in any of the early correspondence, and at one point he's very explicit about his desire to see women in the Institute. But the problem was, of course, getting people to pay the way for them, too. I suspect parents, the cultural mores of the time. Most women in those days would have been sent off to state teachers colleges, if at all. Or would just say look, find a husband, it's your time to raise a family. The educational process was just not as available to women in the 1860s or '70s as it became.

INTERVIEWER:Did you come across anything that referred to where they were put in the laboratories? I vaguely remember some story about Ellen Swallow Richards who I think was the first women student--

SMITH: One of the first.

INTERVIEWER: --being in a separate lab somewhere. I don't know where you might have found something like that.

SMITH: Yeah, there was a separate lab that was built for women fairly early. I didn't see a lot about that, but I have seen references to it. I don't know exactly what the implications of that were. That would be an interesting thing to really delve into the archives and look for. There may or may not be material there. MIT's archives is one of the best university archives in the world. But like all early periods, people were not collecting materials like they do today. If you want stuff on MIT for World War II, we're loaded, but go back to 1865 and it's a little sparse.

INTERVIEWER: At least there was something.

SMITH: There is something. Absolutely there's something.

INTERVIEWER: So when MIT started originally, it sounds like its role was partly to educate engineers for local businesses and for local industry. MIT's role now, how do you think about that? Clearly broader than that.

SMITH: Oh, it's very international. All the international programs that exist. As a housemaster, one of the great things about being a housemaster is you get to talk to students in the fall term, like I have in the last month, what did you do last summer? They tell me about all these really exotic places that they've--. One young woman was in Kenya working on projects in Kenya that are engineering projects primarily aimed at helping people living in that country.

Others were in Italy. Others are in Spain and France. Just all over the place. Many, of course, work in the United States at summer jobs and that's the way they eventually find jobs in certain firms. But they're all over the place. Then there are all of these other enterprises today, the Alliance of Singapore, and others that are taking place that has made MIT a very international place. It's quite remarkable.

You probably have experienced this like I have. When you go to a foreign country and you say you're from MIT, it's amazing the sort of, ah, MIT. It's this international recognition that is there that is quite remarkable.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think William Barton Rogers would make of MIT today? In what ways has it continued along trajectories that he established, and has it departed in any significant ways do you think?

SMITH: I think he'd be enormously pleased. Really pleased. It has adhered to the basic vision. I think he would marvel at what has happened in terms of how his vision has been worked out to encompass so many different areas of inquiry and enterprise. I think he would marvel at the number of business institutions that have grown out of MIT's graduates, basically. So that has been very, I think very positive, and I can't imagine him being anything other than enormously pleased. Remarkable.

INTERVIEWER: I wonder if the science research was something he could conceptualize?

SMITH: Well, he was a person who had a grasp of physics, and then he gravitated toward geology. For his day he was well educated. I'm sure he would shake his head and say, computers? Or the Human Genome Project? Mind boggling to him. But I think that he would surely bring himself up to snuff pretty quickly once he heard about all these new and interesting developments and say, oh my God, why didn't I live in the 20th century or something, or 21st century.

INTERVIEWER: Was there a component of the early MIT it was really focused on expanding knowledge?

SMITH: Well, as I said earlier, one of the things that surely had something to do with expanding knowledge is the emphasis MIT placed on laboratory education. I think that was the critical, novel part of what MIT did in terms of trying to fashion a new way of educating students in science, engineering, bringing the mind and the hand together. I think that was really the important thing. So, yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Was there anything you found particularly interesting in your research that you weren't able to include in your book chapter?

SMITH: Well, I think the thing that I would have liked to have done more with would have been to have even broaden the story out more to encompass MIT's place in American history. I'm an author for an American history textbook, so I like to look at big projects, big stories, how they relate to the larger history of the United States. I would have liked to have done more of that.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think you might come back to that some day?

SMITH: I might. Yeah. That could be. I'm not going to write the whole history but I'd like to look at that theory.

INTERVIEWER: Maybe a couple of partners. Do occasions like MIT's 150th anniversary matter? What purposes do celebrations like the sesquicentennial serve, if any?

SMITH: I think they serve a purpose. I think they help to reinforce the vision of the institution. It's not just to reflect on the past, obviously. MIT doesn't look over its shoulders much. But it's always good to pause, look over the shoulder and say hey, where are we going, how does it relate to where we've been, and how does it help us think about the future? I think those are MIT type questions. So I think the 150th is a good moment to do this.

The other moment that appears to have been that type of time would have been in 1916 when President Maclaurin inaugurated the move from Boston to Cambridge and the festivities that took place then sound pretty interesting to me. I think there was some interesting reflection going on there. It was a moment of shift to be sure in which Maclaurin was taking the Institute more toward an applied industrial focus and more away from the pure science ideal type. That would shift again under Compton in the 1930s. But those are important moments, and I think this is an important moment, too, for MIT.

INTERVIEWER: Do you see a particular shift occurring now that you've been thinking about in terms of what the moment represents, other than 150 years?

SMITH: I'd like to preface this by saying first of all, that my world ends in 1918, OK. But having said that, as someone who is here living in the 21st century and looking around the Institute, the thing that impresses me most is the tremendous growth of the life sciences. And not just reflecting in new buildings, but reflected in the number of students I encounter who are majoring either in biology or biological engineering. I think it's the first department in the country. So it's things like that. I think that's the area that really is fascinating to me.

The other thing that's fascinating to me, I don't know if this it's happening elsewhere, I suspect that it is, it's just here I am at MIT, but the amount of boundary crossing that takes place here is amazing to me. Just amazing. Mechanical engineers working in biology. Chemists working in electrical -- you know, whatever it might be. There are all sorts of these combinations of various disciplinary backgrounds that I don't remember being there 40 years ago or before that. I think that the academic world was more bounded by narrow disciplinary blinders so to speak, and those blinders I think have been removed.

INTERVIEWER: I've heard people say that boundary crossing is easier at MIT than at other places.

SMITH: It probably is.

INTERVIEWER: The schools are more tightly bound to each other.

SMITH: Yeah. There's truth to that I think. Because MIT has always been a place -- the key word to use around here, if you want to get support for something say, I want to conduct an experiment, and everyone gets excited. That's an MIT way of thinking about things. Experiment, new, innovation. These are things that really attract people. Not just at MIT, but I think those who are around MIT and have graduated from MIT, they're all part of that culture and it's a very interesting one.

INTERVIEWER: Together with you colleague, professor David Mindell, you've been teaching a course on MIT's history.

SMITH: Yup.

INTERVIEWER: What do you cover and who takes it and what have been trying to convey to the students?

SMITH: Well, we cover the entire span of the Institute's history starting with -- well, my talking about Rogers and the background to all of that. But the thing that's interesting is that even in that course, we've had to do a certain amount of selecting because there are not good materials for the entire span of the Institute's history. Hopefully that will get worked out, perhaps, because we are now teaching a course and there will be more papers written about the history of the Institute, and hopefully that'll work itself out. But it is aimed at giving students a good overview of the history of MIT from 1861 to the present.

INTERVIEWER: As your students last year conducted their own research about MIT, did any of them delve into areas that had not been previously studied or written about extensively?

SMITH: Yeah. One of the assignments we gave them last spring was to write a paper about some aspect of student life that interested them. MIT has a lot written about it in terms of what happened in mechanical engineering or the various disciplines that are here. It's very famous for that, and historians of science and technology continually use MIT as sort of a reference point. But when you look at the internal history of MIT, one of the things that is not well documented is the student life side of the Institute. In a way that's really too bad because there's more than one lifeblood at MIT.

One would be the professoriate, of course, and then there's the staff -- very important for the running of this place. But especially important are the students. They really bring life to this place. We know so little about what they do or who they are as people, how their lives on the other side of Mass Ave relate to what happens on the academic side of Mass Ave. So we've had them write papers about things that interest them. It could be as a member of the crew team, or one of the students last spring started a history of Burton Connor, because nothing is known about that house.

INTERVIEWER: The dormitory?

SMITH: Yeah.

Projects like that I think will eventually be posted on a website and, especially, not all papers are really good ones, but some of them were very good. I'd like to see them posted on a website in some form of electronic publication to contribute to this overall growing history of MIT. Have students participate in that because they know that part of the beast pretty well.

INTERVIEWER: Did any of the papers reveal things that surprised you or that you found particularly interesting?

SMITH: Yes. I'm trying to remember -- there were about 35 students in this class as I recollect -- 30, 35. It was not a huge class. It was just the right size, actually. But there were things in these papers that, yeah, did surprise me. I can't think of something right off the bat about what -- well, the history of Burton Connor was very interesting to hear about how that house sort of morphed into what it is today. That was interesting and different. I had no idea about that.

INTERVIEWER: How did that happen?

SMITH: Well, it happened very slowly, and sort of I think in an unplanned way. It's still not clear. There's a lot of work that's still being done. This student is still working on that paper, by the way. So it's continued beyond the semester into a project that will hopefully tell us more about what specifically, how did this house grow from being -- I think it was originally a hotel or something like that. Then it grew into a dorm and the different parts of it. Then it was redesigned and converted into a dorm that had suites rather than just individual rooms.

One of the things that surprised me in the early history is that early on when the house was first used for student housing, evidently, in order to get in your room you often had to walk through another student's room because they were oddly connected. It was either an apartment house or a hotel, but the rooming layout was totally not right for student life. So there were a lot of curious things like that that were happening around the house.

INTERVIEWER: What were some of the other topics that students wrote about?

SMITH: Well, a number of clubs, athletic clubs. Oh, someone wrote a history of the rifle team. MIT's rifle team is very famous, actually, and has won the NCAA championship, beating out West Point and the Naval Academy. So you encounter papers like that. There were papers written about certain fraternities. A variety of subjects that were--. Oh, and a wonderful paper about art at MIT. The placement of art at the Institute, and what it meant in a science and engineering institution. It was a fascinating piece, really good.

INTERVIEWER: So you don't have specific plans yet to post these, say, on the web during the sesquicentennial, but maybe?

SMITH: I spoke with David Mindell yesterday and we haven't actually begun to plan the course for the spring, but we're definitely going to do something like that because there's some very interesting papers here.

The other thing I should mention is this class attracted not just students, but members of the staff came to this class and they really added a nice dimension to it. Because they see the Institute from yet another direction. Many of them are very deeply involved in undergraduate education in big departments like electrical engineering and things like that.

INTERVIEWER: Let's talk about your own personal history. Tell us about where you were born and raised and about your family and your childhood.