WILLIAM BARTON ROGERS

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Founder

WHO IS WILLIAM BARTON

ROGERS

December 7, 1804 – May 30, 1882) was a geologist, physicist and

educator. He is best known for setting down the founding principles

for, advocating for, and finally obtaining the incorporation of the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1861.The university

opened in 1865 after the American Civil War. Mount Rogers, the

highest peak in Virginia, is named after him.

PROFESSOR WILLIAM

BARTON ROGERS

In 1828 Patrick Kerr Rogers died and William Barton Rogers

succeeded him at the College of William and Mary as Professor of

Chemistry and Natural Philosophy. In 1835 Rogers was appointed

geologist of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and headed the state's

geological survey (as his brother Henry did in New Jersey and

Pennsylvania).

PROFESSOR WILLIAM

BARTON ROGERS

CONTINUED

Also in 1835 he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy at

the University of Virginia and moved to Charlottesville. He served as

Chairman of the Faculty from 1844 to 1845, and in 1845 he was

elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

ROGERS IN BOSTON

While William held his faculty position at the University of Virginia in the 1840s he

frequently traveled north to the New England area. In New England he found an

intellectual and social culture more to his liking: people who valued education and

hard work along with financial enterprise.

Fast growing urban centers filling with immigrants from Europe and

Canada, new railroads and mill towns,

flourishing literary circles,

a center of anti-slavery and other reform movements

THE MOVEMENT CLOSER

TO MIT

After speaking to Boston philanthropist John Lowell in

1846, Henry Rogers asked his brother William, who was still in

Virginia, to draft a plan for a scientific school. William outlined his

plan in a March 1846 letter to Henry.

LETTER FROM WILLIAM

―The true and only practicable object of a

polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not

of the minute details and manipulations of the

arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but

the inculcation of those scientific principles which

form the basis and explanation of them, their

leading processes and operations in connection with

physical laws.‖

- Life and Letters of William Barton Rogers 1:420

SETTING THE SCENE

In Boston during those years the marshy lands in Back Bay were

gradually being filled in as a state project, and the governor of

Massachusetts proposed in 1859 that some of the new ground be set

aside for public educational improvements

ASSOCIATED

INSTITUTIONS OF SCIENCE

AND ART

―Associated Institutions of Science and the Art‖ prepared a

―memorial‖ seeking some of that land for various educational

purposes, but their request was not successful—at least not at first.

The next year the same group enlisted William Barton Rogers to

spearhead a new land grant proposal, and as part of that campaign

Rogers produced a 30-page pamphlet titled Objects and Plan of an

Institute of Technology which was distributed widely.

ROGERS PROPOSAL OF MIT

The plan was introduced to the state legislature in 1860. And a

year of support and defense of the plan ensued.

This letter from Massachusetts Governor John Andrew urges

Rogers to speak before the Board of Education in defense of the

establishment of the Institute. "Be thou the advocate," states

Governor Andrew, as he extols Rogers's virtues as a persuasive

speaker. And persuasive he was…

MIT WAS BORN

In April 1861, by an act of the Massachusetts legislature (chapter

183, acts of 1861), MIT was formally established. Governor Andrew

signed the act on April 10, 1861, just two days before Fort Sumter

was fired upon, marking the start of the Civil War.

RETIREMENT

While president of MIT, Rogers also taught classes including

physics. Years of strenuous effort and resulting debilitating health

forced William Barton Rogers to relinquish his duties in 1868 and to

retire from the presidency of MIT in 1870. He spent the ensuing

decade recuperating.

DEATH

During the 1870s, the Institute began to have financial difficulties and

enrollment decreased (partially due to outside influences such as the Great Boston

Fire and the Panic of 1873). In 1878 Rogers was asked to resume the presidency of

MIT. He agreed on the condition that he would only do so until a successor could

be found. Francis Amasa Walker was chosen to be the new president in 1880;

however, due to obligations regarding his work overseeing the U.S. Census, he could

not take office until the fall of 1881. Rogers continued his involvement, and

ultimately died while on the podium at commencement in 1882.

THE END

VIDEO

You will need internet connection to watch!