MIT Head To Retire

MIT President Charles M. Vest announced last week that he will step down after 13 years at the helm, bringing to a close an administration that was widely praised for its achievements in bringing diversity to the faculty and defending academic freedom.

Vest’s resignation also came at the conclusion of a successful $2 billion dollar capital campaign, although an almost $1 billion drop in the endowment since 2000 has forced the university to cut costs and to partially shut down over the holiday break this winter.

Vest, who is the university’s 15th president, announced his decision at the quarterly meeting of the board of trustees, saying he will remain until the end of the academic year or until his successor is appointed.

Vest said in a press release that he was leaving because “the time is fast approaching when MIT should benefit from the renewal that comes with selecting a new president and developing the next stage of its vision and programs.”

In the same press release, Dana Mead, chair of MIT’s board of trustees, praised Vest’s presidency as one of “vision, courage, integrity and an extraordinary sense of service to MIT and to the nation.”

Vest’s work on improving faculty diversity—and in particular appointing more women to senior positions within both the faculty and the administration—has garnered approbation from within the university and across the nation, according to Nancy H. Hopkins ’64, a professor of biology at MIT and one of the school’s foremost advocates for gender equality in research.

Hopkins said that Vest’s work in this area helped to catalyze a national debate on the inequalities faced by women in higher education, especially in the sciences.

“He became a kind of hero of women scientists across the country,” she said.

After Hopkins and other female faculty published a report charting gender inequities in MIT’s faculty newsletter, she said Vest endorsed the report and helped lead the push to disseminate its conclusions to other universities.

The report “changed the whole discussion of the topic,” said Hopkins. “It was a courageous thing [for Vest] to do.”

Hopkins said MIT has seen a 50 percent increase in the number of female engineering faculty in the years since the report’s publication, and in January 2001 Vest held a meeting of the presidents and female faculty of nine top research institutions, including Harvard, in an effort to ameliorate issues of gender equity.

MIT’s endowment grew from $1.4 billion to $5.1 billion during Vest’s tenure, and The New York Times reported that Vest’s stepping-down coincided with the successful conclusion of the multi-billion dollar capital campaign.

“Eighteen of the 25 largest gifts from individuals in MIT’s history have been received during the Vest presidency,” according to the press release.

But the last several years have witnessed a nearly $1 billion endowment decline, spurring tight economic times at MIT.

An MIT spokesperson declined to comment about the relationship between the drop in the endowment, recent budget cutbacks and the timing of Vest’s announcement.

Vest has also earned a reputation as a defender of academic freedom in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“Knowledge creation thrives in openness and suffers in isolation,” Vest wrote in MIT’s 2001-2002 MIT annual report.

Vest said at a February 2003 forum at the Institute of Politics that he was concerned not only that more research will become classified, but that new designations of “sensitive but unclassified” will expand, creating confusion over what can be published and what cannot.

Vest’s administration also oversaw the creation of MIT’s recent OpenCourseWare initiative, which places the teaching materials for over 2,000 of its courses—including science classes that address potentially sensitive subject areas—freely available online.

Inspired in part by the 1997 death of an undergraduate during a fraternity hazing ritual, Vest also undertook a revitalization of MIT’s undergraduate housing resources and in 2001 instituted a requirement that all MIT first-years live on campus.