Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was in the university-building business.
A young, democratic India turned to MIT as the model for one of its leading Indian Institutes of Technology. Faculty members helped establish Brazil’s Technological Institute of Aeronautics, a breeding ground for its aerospace and defense elite. Another of MIT’s progeny, the Aryamehr University of Technology, which was split into two institutions after the Iranian revolution, is today at the heart of that country’s controversial nuclear program.
More than a generation later, MIT is at it again. In addition to the hundreds—no, thousands—of faculty research collaborations around the globe, the university over the past five years has once more engaged in ambitious efforts to create new, independent institutions, this time in Abu Dhabi, Russia, and Singapore. Other such projects, in Asia and Latin America, are also on the table, says MIT’s freshly inaugurated president, L. Rafael Reif.
Unlike New York University’s much-talked-about branch campus in the Persian Gulf, or Yale University’s proposed liberal-arts college in Singapore, MIT is not stamping its name on campuses overseas. Instead it has seemed content to be a less-showy, largely silent partner in its international ventures. And while there are hurdles, significant ones, that strategy may give it greater global reach than any other American university.
If branch campuses are often intellectual islands, with little local spillover, these upstart institutions are being built in the spirit of MIT’s motto, Mens et Manus, or Mind and Hand. They are meant to have real-world impact. Indeed, that’s precisely why foreign governments and foundations have opened their countries, and their checkbooks, to MIT—they believe the university’s brand of applied, innovation-driven education can help train a cadre of scientists and engineers, produce world-class research, and, ultimately, transform their economies.
“A culture of research to education to innovation, that’s what’s needed in Russia,” says Alexei Sitnikov, vice president for administration and development at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, a new graduate research university near Moscow being developed with MIT. “It’s the secret sauce of MIT that we hope to get.”
And if, decades ago, MIT acted as more of a midwife to fledgling foreign institutions, guiding them through birth and then leaving them to their growing pains, today Mr. Reif and other university leaders say they want a more deliberate and sustained approach to international engagement. One option under strong consideration is to create a worldwide network of top-flight science-and-technology universities, both the well established and those with “MIT DNA,” to answer great global challenges.
Such complex problems, Mr. Reif says, may be best tackled through broad international collaboration, not branch campuses. “We cannot replicate MIT anywhere else,” says Mr. Reif, a former provost and longtime faculty member. “It took us 150 years to get what we’ve got.”
What’s more, engaging in the world, he argues, betters MIT at home—in 02139 (the university’s ZIP code), in MIT-speak. “By doing this, we’re getting stronger,” he says.
Revisiting a Global Past
In honor of Mr. Reif’s inauguration last month, MIT organized a series of half-day symposia on what will very likely be the defining themes of his presidency: innovation, the future of education, and global engagement. With the new president in the audience, a dizzying array of speakers took the stage of the university’s modernist Kresge Auditorium, speeding through presentations on student exchanges in Switzerland, faculty efforts to design a science curriculum for earthquake-ravaged Haitian schools, alumni projects to improve crop production in Ghana, new courses on globalization back on campus. The idea seemed to be to demonstrate the panoply of MIT’s international work.
The program’s breakneck pace, however, slowed for a conversation among the presidents of the three universities created recently in collaboration with MIT.
Like Mr. Reif, the presidents of all three institutions—Skolkovo, Abu Dhabi’s Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, and Singapore University of Technology and Design—come from the ranks of veteran MIT faculty. They not only are a bridge from MIT to these new institutions but also represent a link to MIT’s global past, when, in the decades following World War II, a confident university turned its gaze outward.
Even in the intervening years, when MIT’s international engagement tended to be primarily through individual faculty members or departments, it continued its work to strengthen teaching and research at institutions abroad. The university’s Sloan School of Management, for example, has been active in China since the market reforms of the mid-1990s, training faculty members at three of the country’s top business schools; more than 250 Chinese professors have spent a semester or more in Cambridge.
In recent years, leaders of prosperous but developing nations have embraced the notion that, to ensure that their countries continue to thrive, they need to invest in education and research. Unwilling to wait for homegrown institutions to mature, they look for partners who can jump-start development. At the same time, there was a growing recognition under Mr. Reif, as provost, and the president, Susan Hockfield, that in a globalizing world, MIT could not afford to be insular.
‘Having at It’
Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of MIT’s current work is how much it looks like the university’s international projects from decades earlier. Reading aloud the prospectus for Skolkovo Tech, Robert Kargon pauses. “This could have been written in 1972,” when MIT was working in Iran, says Mr. Kargon, a professor of the history of science and technology at the Johns Hopkins University.
Mr. Kargon, who has written about MIT’s efforts to export its particular brand of science-and-engineering education, enumerates the similarities. Like Aryamehr University in particular, the three new universities eschew traditional departmental and disciplinary structures. They are organized around cross-cutting research themes that are both globally relevant and locally significant. At Skolkovo, it’s biomedicine, space, and nuclear science, among others. Masdar is focused on water, environment, and energy. At Singapore University of Technology and Design, or SUTD, the only one of the three to offer undergraduate degrees, students choose from four broad areas: architecture, engineering product development, engineering systems, and information systems.
Even MIT’s work in Portugal, where it is helping to modernize graduate education and research at the country’s existing universities, is anchored in interdisciplinary research, including bioengineering systems and advanced manufacturing.
The heavy emphasis on research means much of the onus is on MIT’s faculty to make the relationships work. Faculty committees vet every potential partnership; such reviews can take a year or more.
Notably, though, debates about whether to go abroad have not been marked by the divisiveness that has occurred on other U.S. campuses, such as Yale and Duke University, which has plans for a campus in China.
Partly, it may be that MIT’s faculty is inherently international—more than 40 percent are foreign-born. But Philip S. Khoury, an associate provost who oversees international education and research, sees another factor at work. “As an humanist, I’m trained to be a critic,” says Mr. Khoury, a historian. Of his engineering colleagues, he says, “They’re doers. If there’s a problem out there, that’s exciting, that’s challenging, they want to go out there and have at it.”
Indeed, one of the biggest hurdles for MIT’s international ambitions may be manpower. With a faculty of just 1,000, the university is at the “outer edges” of its ability to handle large collaborations, says Suzanne Berger, a professor of political science and a member of the university’s International Advisory Committee.
At Skolkovo, some 30 MIT teams applied for a first round of grants. In Singapore, 10 to 15 percent of MIT faculty are engaged in teaching, research, or curricular design at any one time, says Thomas L. Magnanti, SUTD’s president. The city-state is also home to a second institutional partnership, the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, or Smart, a major joint research center.
Faculty members say they are drawn to places like Singapore for the opportunity to do research specific to the region, or because there is a level of financial support that isn’t available in the United States. One professor is examining carbon sequestration in Southeast Asia. Another was able to access Singapore’s traffic data to do real-world testing of a technology that uses drivers’ cellphone signals to time traffic flow.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security noticed work that George Barbastathis, a professor of optics and mechanical engineering, was doing with a Singaporean colleague; at the department’s behest, they’re now exploring ways to revamp airport-security equipment using the technology for more accurate threat detection.
“If we succeed,” Mr. Barbastathis wrote in an e-mail message, “then in the near future you will not have to throw your water bottle away (or hurriedly gulp down its contents) right before you go through security at the airport!”
Like-Minded, Not Alike
Much of MIT’s contribution, however, is in the nuts and bolts of what makes a university run. It helps its partners devise policies in areas as varied as human resources and intellectual property. It sets up research labs and institutes and advises the new universities on how to best collaborate with government and industry. It aids in the drafting of a curriculum. It recruits students.
With no existing faculty to fill search committees, MIT professors interview and recommend new hires and mentor them once they have started. All three institutions, along with several Portuguese universities, send their faculty to MIT for a semester or a year, to form research relationships, learn MIT’s approach to teaching, and absorb its academic culture.
The latter may be the most difficult to impart. It is, after all, what makes MIT MIT.
“I don’t know what’s transferrable and what isn’t,” says Kris Olds, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies international education. It might not be possible for other institutions to replicate MIT’s highly successful practices. Then again, he notes, “it doesn’t stop people from trying to recreate Silicon Valley.”
Indeed, MIT’s past efforts show some of the limits of its impact. At IIT-Kanpur, the Indian university it helped create, MIT left behind a legacy of top-notch engineering education—so good that, over time, the university sent as many as four-fifths of its computer-science graduates to the United States. While some of those graduates have since returned and helped spark India’s information-technology revolution, it’s unclear how far-reaching Kanpur’s effect has been on India’s economy. “Some may argue that these institutions improve educational quality over all in the world,” says Jason E. Lane, a co-director of the Cross-Border Education Research Team at the State University of New York at Albany and a Chronicle blogger. “But if I’m a government leader, I’m thinking, ‘What does it mean for my country?’”
MIT faculty and administrators say they’re trying to instill MIT-like culture in ways sometimes small and subtle. For example, Fred Moavenzadeh, Masdar’s president, says administrators there emphasize the importance of contract research, MIT’s bread and butter, to encourage innovation and the sharing of knowledge. In oil-rich Abu Dhabi, it could otherwise be easy to sit back and rely on the government for institutional support, he says.
Although it wasn’t part of the original plans, the naming of MIT faculty members as presidents of each of the universities could also set the tone for the new institutions.
In any event, MIT leaders are adamant that they want to create institutions that are not alike, but rather like-minded. The university has fielded countless offers to establish overseas branches and has turned them all down, says Mr. Khoury, the associate provost.
Mr. Magnanti, of Singapore University of Technology and Design, compares the relationship to an older sibling’s teaching a younger one the rudiments of tennis. Eventually they become more evenly matched. Maybe the younger sibling even shows his elder a new stroke or two. “My hope is for SUTD to be MIT’s sister institution,” Mr. Magnanti says. “We’re not MIT, but we’re related.”
Hitting Home in 02139
There are other challenges. For one, MIT has been slow to build opportunities for undergraduate students into its overseas collaborations. The most recent institutional partnership, Skolkovo, includes support for a Russian version of a signature program of MIT that sends students to intern and conduct research abroad. Such a program was added only retroactively in Singapore; there isn’t one in Abu Dhabi.
If MIT is serious about using its major collaborations to seed a global research-and-education network, it could be absent partners in crucial parts of the world. Unlike many institutions, MIT is upfront about the financial benefits it reaps from foreign governments and foundations for its international work. In its role as a consultant and developer of Masdar, for instance, the university received $40-million over five years. Its overseas partners often provide additional support in the form of research grants, scholarships for MIT students, and new joint facilities back in Cambridge. A “revenue enhancement” planning group three years ago identified projects with foreign governments as a potential revenue source.
But a reliance on deep-pocketed sponsors means MIT is without such partners in Africa and, for the moment, South America, as well as large swaths of Asia. It even has pulled back on some of its work in Portugal, as the European debt crisis has shaken that country.
And some observers argue that if MIT wants to influence education worldwide, it may make more of an impact through its online-education efforts, another project championed by Mr. Reif, the new president. About 60 percent of the audience for its OpenCourseWare lectures, for example, is already overseas.
What seems certain is that MIT’s international efforts have led to change in 02139.
On a recent fall day, a group of faculty members and graduate students from both MIT and Singapore gathered in the new International Design Center, a polished office-and-research space not far from the main MIT campus, paid for by the Singaporean government.
Sanjay Sarma, a mechanical-engineering professor who leads MIT’s partnership with SUTD, said the daylong meeting brought together colleagues who typically work on opposite sides of the globe. But perhaps just as valuable, he said, was that it allowed MIT faculty members from different departments and disciplines to meet and collaborate.
International work “stirs the pot,” introducing different perspectives and sparking new ideas, said Mr. Sarma, a graduate, as it happens, of IIT-Kanpur. He pointed to the multidisciplinary research projects and new MIT courses that have grown out of the university’s work abroad.
“It’s a profound and intimate thing, creating a new university,” he said. “You figure out who you are.”
