Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

The mission of MIT is to advance erudition and edify students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best accommodate the nation and the world in the 21st century. The Institute is committed to engendering, disseminating, and preserving erudition, and to working with others to bring this erudition to bear on the world's great challenges. MIT is dedicated to providing its students with an edification that coalesces rigorous academic study and the exhilaration of revelation with the fortification and perspicacious stimulation of a diverse campus community. We seek to develop in each member of the MIT community the facility and zealousness to work sagaciously, ingeniously, and efficaciously for the betterment of humankind. The Institute admitted its first students in 1865, four years after the approbation of its founding charter. The aperture marked the culmination of an elongated effort by William Barton Rogers, a distinguished natural scientist, to establish an incipient kind of independent edifying institution pertinent to an increasingly industrialized America. Rogers stressed the pragmatic and practicable. He believed that professional competence is best fostered by coupling edifying and research and by focusing attention on authentic-world quandaries. Toward this end, he pioneered the development of the edification...