Friday, Nov. 04, 1966

Caltech & M.I.T.: Rivalry Between the Best

The two best institutes of technology in the U.S.--Caltech and M.I.T.--have reached new milestones, marking a time for them to reassess their roles and goals. Last week Caltech (enrollment 1,494) held a three-day scientific convocation to observe its 75th anniversary. A few weeks earlier, M.I.T. (enrollment 7,400) inaugurated a new president, Economist Howard Wesley Johnson, 44. As each school looks inward, it also stares across the 2,600 miles between Pasadena and Cambridge with what an M.I.T. professor terms "interested tension"--a polite phrase for one of academe's hottest and healthiest rivalries.

The presidents of the two schools play down the rivalry. Yet each is willing to take a velvety swipe at the other institution, and in the process they characterize the schools rather accurately. M.I.T.'s Johnson, who moved up from the deanship of its Sloan School of Management to replace the retiring Julius Stratton, calls Caltech a "helpful collaborator and competitor." He says that "over the years, M.I.T. has concentrated more on applications of science than pure science," rightly claims that "the range of work we do in engineering has no duplicate at Caltech--their whole school is smaller than our electrical-engineering department." Caltech's President Lee A. DuBridge, who headed M.I.T.'s radar-producing Radiation Laboratory in World War II, says that Caltech is now trying to strengthen its engineering and M.I.T. is building its science departments so that "we have steadily become more like one another." He is smoothly confident, however, that Caltech will be able "to maintain a nonindustrial, unhurried, even nonmetropolitan atmosphere of informality and intimacy."

Theory & Practice. In their specialties, the two schools have been world pacesetters. Caltech's astronomers use the telescopes at Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories, and with Maarten Schmidt have explored the unusual nature of quasi-stellar objects (TIME cover, March 11). Its biologists and chemists, including James Bonner and Linus Pauling, have advanced knowledge of the basic chemistry of human life. Physicist Richard Feynman is helping to unify the theories of gravitational and electrodynamic fields, and his colleague, Murray Gell-Mann, broke new ground in subatomic theory by correctly predicting the existence of new particles. Seismologist Charles F. Richter's scale for measuring earth tremors is an international standard.

The genius of M.I.T., on the other hand, has been devoted to serving the nation's more immediate needs. Its radar and antiaircraft gun sights shortened World War II. Its guidance system for the Polaris missile gives the U.S. a big military advantage today, and its SABRE guidance system, which controls a missile all the way to target, may make ballistic missiles obsolete tomorrow. Its SAGE and DEW line systems aid in defense against air attack. M.I.T. has contributed its Chairman James Killian, Economists Paul Samuelson and Walt Rostow and Provost Jerome Wiesner to high posts in recent federal administrations. At least 20% of M.I.T.'s graduates become company presidents or vice presidents.

Tsien Hsue-shen's Degrees. Yet any picture of Caltech solely as thinker and M.I.T. solely as doer is out of focus. While M.I.T. draws no less than $126 million of its annual operating budget of $178 million from work for the Defense Department and NASA, Caltech has 181 federal research contracts and operates NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which will spend $242 million this year. Caltech's practical knowledge made JPL a pioneer in tactical missiles, in launching the first U.S. satellite, in making a soft landing on the moon and in taking close-up pictures of the moon and Mars. At the same time, such speculative M.I.T. thinkers as Physicist Charles Townes, who worked out principles that led to thet maser and laser, and Cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, whose theories helped lay the foundations of automation, make M.I.T. much more than a producer of management specialists. Ironically, both schools have also contributed to Red China's nuclear missile capability by training its missile expert, Tsien Hsue-shen (see THE WORLD), who earned his M.A. at M.I.T. and his Ph.D. at Caltech, where he rose to be a professor of jet propulsion.

A recent assessment of U.S. graduate schools by the American Council on Education rates M.I.T.'s biochemistry and mathematics departments as more effective than Caltech's and considers its economics department the best in the country. Not surprisingly, it places M.I.T.'s engineering departments (chemical, civil, electrical and mechanical) above Caltech's. Caltech, on the other hand, is rated best in the U.S. in astronomy, and it tops M.I.T. in chemistry, physics and geology.

Student homogeneity is a problem at both schools. Precisely because they are all bright and scientifically inclined, they lack diversity and suffer psychological shocks when their high school A's suddenly turn to C's or worse. Caltech's Feynman tries to ease the pain by wryly reminding freshmen that inevitably "half of every one of Caltech's classes is below the class average." Yet M.I.T. English Professor Barry Spacks finds his students refreshing because they "exhibit none of the pretenses and gamesmanship of places like Harvard --if they don't know who T. S. Eliot is they say so."

Smart Dropouts. Both schools have belatedly become bothered by high dropout rates. About one-third of Caltech's and one-fifth of M.I.T.'s frosh do not stay for four years, which implies that if such smart kids do not make it, something must be wrong with the teaching. To help freshmen adjust to the competition, Caltech now issues only "pass" or "fail" grades the first year. M.I.T., tired of the student refrain that "Tech is hell," has similarly loosened its freshman and sophomore course load, broken up its long-standard curriculum. "In the past, if a fellow was too short we stretched him, and if he was too long we shrank him--now we try to mold the system around the class," says Physics Professor George Valley.

A result of the reappraisal at both schools is a growing emphasis on the humanities, to produce what M.I.T.'s Johnson calls "the true generalist capable of dealing with the great problems cutting across every area of our lives" and also what Caltech's DuBridge terms "literary people with a scientific point of view." Caltech offered a humanities major for the first time last year, already has more students majoring in humanities than in either geology or chemical engineering. M.I.T. now offers a humanities major, has three poets, two novelists, two composers and one expert in Old Testament history on its staff.

As their interests seem to merge, Caltech and M.I.T. are nevertheless likely to retain a distinctive difference in attitude. Caltech, content with its quiet 75-acre campus in Pasadena, is determined to remain small enough to retain what DuBridge calls "a feeling of family." M.I.T., pushed against the Charles River by crowded Cambridge, is ambitious to grow. "In the past, we have been grooming the student to run U.S. Steel," says M.I.T.'s Professor Valley. "Now we are grooming him to run the U.S."

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