Balancing Act

When Winston Churchill accepted an invitation to speak at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949, a Harvardman asked John Ely Burchard, now M.I.T.'s dean of humanities and social studies: "How did you persuade Winston to speak to those steam fitters of yours?" As Burchard well knew, there was a mite of truth in the joke, in spite of mighty efforts already made to broaden the humanities curriculum. Was the nation's top technical school still giving its students too narrow an education? Last week the M.I.T. faculty formally approved a new experiment that may eventually answer the question.

Once in gear, the plan will have selected M.I.T. students, no matter what their specialty, spend at least 40% of their time in the humanities and social sciences. If the student wishes to become a professional engineer or scientist, he may take an additional year and get a second bachelor's degree in his specialty, or an additional two years and get his master's. For those interested in such a subject as economics. M.I.T will expand its broad social science Course XIV, but the new Humanities Course XXI will rotate around two major themes: American Industrial Society and Philosophy & Literature. Since science and engineering will still be the center of the plan, M.I.T. students will in effect be taking a "double major," will find themselves gulping down bigger doses than ever before of everything from Plato to Dante, Sophocles to Aquinas, Hobbes and Kant and Dewey, laced with Locke, Marx and Dickens.

The fact is, says Dean Burchard. that schools like M.I.T. have long faced a dilemma. The traditional four years is simply no longer enough to give the nation's future engineers and scientists a proper technical training as well as a balanced education. Last week, M.I.T. had high hopes that it may at last be getting near a solution.

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