M.I.T.: Beyond Technology

Dancers cavort before a student film crew while near by a gallery displays subtle canvas-on-canvas paintings. Elsewhere young men and women read their latest poetry and a symphony orchestra rehearses a new work, Metamorphoses. The title is appropriate, for the setting is not some artsy experimental college but the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where students traditionally have been more at home with scientific pursuits like laser technology, cancer research and hydroacoustics.

Just a few years ago, such goings on would have been rarely seen at M.I.T. For 112 years, it has dedicated itself to science and technology. Currently it is one of the largest defense contractors among U.S. universities, with the Pentagon supplying two-thirds of its $174 million annual research budget. Nevertheless, the Cambridge campus is the site of what M.I.T. President Jerome B. Wiesner hopes will be a "renaissance in which man will replace machine at the center of the stage."

Recalls Pianist John Buttrick, who heads the music department: "When I came here eight years ago, the attitude was that art and music were like drinking beer and feeling up girls--enjoyable but hardly creditable academically." Since then, his department's faculty has more than doubled to 13; music courses are so popular that two-thirds of the sophomore class is enrolled in them. M.I.T.'s student orchestra regularly sells out the 1,200-seat Kresge Auditorium, and next spring will perform in Philadelphia, Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. One orchestra and faculty member, Pianist Robert Freeman, has been chosen to head the prestigious Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. Other departments boast similar expertise in the arts.

Even though science and engineering remain M.I.T.'s basic educational pursuits, a growing number of its 4,000 undergraduates are opting for more than just the requisite 10% of their course credits in the humanities. Literature classes are swamped; creative writing courses have grown tenfold in five years. Says Poet Patricia Gumming of her students: "They make fascinating analogies to science. They have a way of rushing to the blackboard and covering it with equations: W equals world view, G equals God and so on. You can be teaching John Donne and end up with a board like a physics class."

In part, increased attention to the arts was M.I.T.'s response to criticism from students and faculty in the late 1960s about the institute's dependence on military research. But long after the critical voices fell silent, the arts continued to flourish, largely because of pipe-smoking, affable President Wiesner, 57. To him, "A person is much less of a human being if he thinks of himself only as a technocrat. Society needs the cognitive reaction of a poet as well as a technologist."

Though no artist himself, Wiesner is well suited to weld together C.P. Snow's two cultures. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1937, he became chief engineer of the record laboratory of the Library of Congress. For two years he helped collect folk songs, in the process forming friendships with Folk Singer Pete Seeger and Folklorist Alan Lomax. In 1946 Wiesner joined M.I.T. as a professor of electrical engineering, and, except for his years as President John F. Kennedy's science adviser, he has stayed there ever since. In 1966 he became M.I.T.'s provost, in 1971 its president. His inauguration amounted to a week-long happening. Playwright Lillian Hellman delivered a lyrical reminiscence of their friendship, Seeger sang and Archibald MacLeish composed a poem praising Wiesner as a man who "won't write off mankind."

As M.I.T.'s head man, Wiesner has organized the Council for the Arts, which so far has raised $100,000 for the creative arts at the school. In such an atmosphere, the arts have learned from the technologists. Hungarian-born designer Gyorgy Kepes works in light sculpture, most recently using gas flames that vary in size or hue according to sound patterns. He believes that "when artists find science so forbidding that they cannot enter, half the world slips through their fingers."

Music Professor Barry Vercoe, 36, is developing a way for composers to write music at a computer console, hear an electronic "orchestra" play it, then make changes in the score. Discovering new tools for artistic expression, however, is only one of the benefits these days for an artist at M.I.T. "What's most satisfying," says Music Chairman Buttrick, "is that you have a sense of tempering the social order, of acquainting those who will shape the future with a sensitivity they haven't known."

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