A New Ingredient

Besides playing host to Winston Churchill and other visiting notables last week, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology attended to some personal business: it inaugurated a new president, James Rhyne Killian Jr.

At 44, Killian, an old M.I.T. man himself, was taking over one of the foremost technical institutions in the world. It consisted of a student body of 4,500, a faculty of 1,000, and a compact, impressive campus of Roman revival and modern buildings across the Charles River from Boston. M.I.T. had come a long way since its opening classes in 1865.

"A Memorable Day." One day in that year, Founder William Barton Rogers scribbled in his diary: "Organized the School! Fifteen students entered. May not this prove a memorable day!" Rogers, a former professor of natural philosophy at the University of Virginia, began his school in one room of Boston's shabby Mercantile Building. By the following fall, he had a faculty of ten (including Harvard's future president Charles W. Eliot); by the time he died 17 years later, in the middle of a commencement speech, M.I.T. was well on its way.

It soon became what Rogers' stern successor, Francis A. Walker, had stamped it, "a place for men to work, not for boys to play." M.I.T. experimented with a football team for a while, gave it up 45 years ago. In the years after the Civil War, when the U.S. needed engineers and mechanics more than ever before, M.I.T. had no time for the cultural preoccupations of the liberal-arts colleges. While neighbor Harvard was enjoying the Golden Age of William James and Santayana, M.I.T. was off on a tangent of its own. It was the first U.S. college to have a department of meteorology, .of chemical, architectural and electrical engineering. It was the first to require its students to have regular laboratory instructions in physics and chemistry.

M.I.T. has become a place for differential analyzers, spectro-photometers, oscillographs and thryatron tubes. Out of its laboratories it has managed to produce such unexpected specimens as Humorist Gelett Burgess and Author Stuart Chase. But M.I.T.'s alumni are more apt to be of another sort: Donald Douglas of Douglas Aircraft, Alfred P. Sloan Jr. of General Motors, Gerard Swope of General Electric, and at least ten Du Fonts.

A Fourth Estate. In a way, Killian will be an odd sort of president for M.I.T. He is neither a scientist nor an engineer, and he never earned a Ph.D. He is a quiet, competent man, who got his bachelor's degree in business and engineering administration. To support himself as a student, he went to work for the Technology Review, stayed until 1939 when President Karl T. Compton made him his executive assistant. A kindly and laconic man who likes hiking and the novels of George

Meredith, he has already begun to talk about the responsibility of future engineers, and M.I.T.'s "fourth estate"--the social sciences and the humanities. Last week, in his inaugural address, he spoke of these responsibilities again.

For the professional man, said Killian, "we must add [a new] ingredient--the new social mind called for by Henry Adams. The specialist must shun the view that lopsidedness is laudable; he must be politically and morally responsible; he must test his actions by their human impact . . ."

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