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.