Social Sciences Hold Key to Control Of Technology, M.I.T. Professor Says

"Our modern universities have been too busy with new frontiers in technical knowledge and have not worried enough about the ends to which we will put this knowledge," Elting E. Morison '32, professor of Industrial History at M.I.T., charged at last night's first Lemann lecture.

Speaking on "The Challenge of Technology," Morison said "universities must seek an understanding of power and energy, but if we are to use power and energy wisely we must also seek an understanding of power and energy, but if we are to use power and energy wisely we must also seek an understanding of the user, man." Universities, he said, should spend at least as much time and money developing social sciences as they do developing physical sciences.

Morison compared modern technology to a Frankenstein which threatens to destroy its creator. He felt, however, that "man is not powerless against the process of advancing technology." Education, he said, offers the key to controlling the monster. "Of all the institutions in our society, the university will exert the determining influence on our culture."

Check Technology

Morison outlined three steps the university must take if it is to act as a check on technology. First, it must place more emphasis on humanities. "If one is to control technology, one's idea of what man is must be as clear as one's idea of what a machine is."

Second, he said the university must integrate its program and reduce specialization, particularly on the undergraduate level. He called the modern "multi-university" a collection of "bits and pieces" and said the pieces must be brought together. The fields of humanities and science, for example, must be more closely related.

The lecture was the first of a series of three on the topic "Can We Design the Future?" The series continues today at 4 p.m. with two movies in Holmes Hall and again at 8 p.m. at the Radclice Graduate Center, when Ruth H. Useem, research consultant of Sociology and Anthropology at Michigan State University, and John W. M. Whiting, professor of Social Anthropology, will discuss "The Family's Role."