Elting Morison, 1909-1995

Memorials ELTING MORISON, 1909-1995 Editor s note.—On the first of December, 1995, the Program in Science, Technology and Society and the School of Humanities and Social Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosted a one-day colloquium honoring Elting Morison. The day brought many of Elting’s friends and family back to MIT, where he had spent much of his career as a teacher and scholar. Thomas Parke Hughes, long a close friend, suggested that Technology and Culturewould best serve Professor Morison’s memory by sharing several of the day’s presentations with our readership. Here then, by way of memorial, are three short essays, the remarks that day of Leo Marx, Kenan Pro­ fessor of American Cultural History emeritus at MIT; Joel Moses, Provost and Dugald C. Jackson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT; and Hughes himself, Mellon Professor of the History of Technology emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with the presentations of other participants in the colloquium they have been collected in “From Know-How to History: Sympo­ sium in Honor of Elting Morison” (Working Paper No. 22, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995), and are reprinted here with permission. Marx, another longtime friend and colleague, interprets Mori­ son’s career primarily in terms ofhis blend ofNew England tradition with midwestern sensibility, and in terms of his dual ancestral roots in the clergy and in engineering. This long view of Morison’s intel­ lectual and moral commitments situates the question which Hughes and Moses address as central. Morison understood the seductive at­ traction of the often-noted cultural chasm between engineering and science, on the one hand, and the humanities on the other. Hughes and Moses build on Morison’s lifelong commitment to a style ofedu­ cation that would integrate these two powerful intellectual tradi­ tions. Both address the matter in terms that will be of interest to many T&C readers: how might engineering education change its internal structures to prepare a more culturally supple engineer for the requirements of the coming century? Permission to quote from or reprint any part of this memorial may be obtained only from the author(s). 864 Elting Monson, 1909-1995 865 Elting Monson We are here this afternoon to remember our colleague and friend, Elting Morison, the founding spirit and intellectual guide of the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and to talk about the special meaning, for us, of his life and work. Even before Jerome Wiesner assumed the presidency of MIT, he and Walter Rosenblith, his provost-in-waiting, had begun to talk about the creation of a new entity within the Institute. Its aim would be to develop an innovative educational program based on what Wiesner liked to call a new “curriculum for the twenty-first century.” The curriculum would be designed to turn out a new sort of broadgauged scientist and engineer. These men and women, like most MIT students, would graduate with high technical competence. But Wiesner and Rosenblith believed that such competence, in itself, no longer sufficed. They wanted to develop a mode of education that would complement MIT’s traditional training in science and engi­ neering with an historically-informed, sophisticated understanding of the surrounding society and culture. That aspiration, to be sure, hardly was a novelty in 1971. Anyone who examines the historical record will find that prominent people at MIT had been expressing similar aspirations for a long time. This had been, probably still is, one of the Institute’s oldest, fondest dreams, a fact that Elting half-facetiously acknowledged when he called the objective of the Wiesner-Rosenblith project “the NewJe­ rusalem.” It is easy to imagine how excited they became as they fan­ tasized about the new program, but also how their exhilaration turned to gloom when they got around to selecting a leader. At that point, I imagine, they must have fallen into a miserable funk, not because they could not think of a qualified candidate, but rather because they could. In fact, they thought of exactly the right person. What dismayed them was the knowledge that, after having been un­ der their noses—right here at

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