ABSTRACT
As early as the 1840s, William Barton Rogers, a professor of geology at the University of Virginia, envisioned a school that would systematically infuse industry with science-based technology. In its early years, MIT took the form of a classical college with a specified common curriculum but largely filled it with the content of a polytechnic education. Nevertheless, MIT was also founded with the ideal of training its students in the liberal arts as well as practical disciplines to enable them to become leaders in their professions, not mere technicians. The informal objective was to ensure that MIT graduates had broad preparation for industrial leadership and thus would become top executives rather than end up working for Harvard graduates. Rogers’ vision of a university that would train sophisticated industrial leaders and create major innovations, rather than narrow inventions, inspired the early prominence of liberal arts and science disciplines in the curriculum of an engineering school.
