Francis Amasa Walker - MIT Presidency

MIT Presidency

See also: History of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Established in 1861 and opened in 1865, the financial position of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was severely undermined following the Panic of 1873 and subsequent Long Depression. Seventy-five year-old founder William Barton Rogers was elected interim president in 1878 after John Daniel Runkle stepped down. Rogers wrote Walker in June 1880 to offer him the Presidency and Walker evidently debated the opportunity for some time as Rogers sent followup inquiries in January and February 1881 requesting his committed decision. Walker ultimately accepted in early May and was formally elected President by the MIT Corporation on May 25, 1881, resigning his Yale appointment in June and his Census directorship in November. However, the assassination attempt on President Garfield in July 1881 and the ensuing illness before his death in September upset Walker's transition and delayed his formal introduction to the faculty of MIT until November 5, 1881. On May 30, 1882, during Walker's first Commencement exercises, Rogers died mid-speech where his last words were famously "bituminous coal".

MIT's inability to secure a more stable financial footing during this era can largely be attributed to the existence of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. Given the choice between funding technological research at the oldest university in the nation or an independent and adolescent institution, potential benefactors were indifferent or even hostile to funding MIT's competing mission. Earlier overtures from Harvard President Charles William Eliot towards consolidation of the two schools were rejected or disrupted by Rogers in 1870 and 1878. Despite his tenure at the analogous Sheffield School, Walker remained committed to MIT's independence from the larger institution. Walker also repeatedly received overtures from Leland Stanford to become the first president of his new university in Palo Alto, California but Walker remained committed to MIT owing to his Boston upbringing.