page_title: History of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
section_title: Boston Tech (1865–1916)
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology / Boston Tech (1865–1916)
caption_attribution_description: English: Rogers Building. MIT's first building; Back Bay, Boston, MA. 1889.
context_page_description: The history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology can be traced back to the 1861 incorporation of the "Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston Society of Natural History" led primarily by William Barton Rogers.
context_section_description: Construction of the first MIT building was completed in Boston's Back Bay in 1866 and would be known as "Boston Tech" until the campus moved across the Charles River to Cambridge in 1916. 
  At the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1875, Runkle was impressed by the work of the Russian Victor Della-Vos, who had introduced a pedagogical approach combining manual and theoretical instruction at the Moscow Imperial Technical Academy. Runkle became an advocate of this approach, introducing it at MIT.
  MIT's financial position was severely undermined following the Panic of 1873 and subsequent Long Depression.  Enrollments decreased sharply after 1875 and by 1878, the university had abolished three professorships, reduced faculty salaries, and there was talk among members of the Corporation of closing the Institute. In 1879, Runkle retired from a nine-year tenure as the MIT's second president trying to weather these challenges, but the board of trustees (the "MIT Corporation") was unable to secure a new successor and elected the seventy-five-year-old founder William Barton Rogers back to the post in the interim under his stipulated conditions that he be allowed to resign upon the discovery of a successor and $100,000 ($2,303,000 in 2009) be raised to fund the Institute's obligations.
  Rogers wrote Francis Amasa Walker in June 1880 to offer him the Presidency. Because no alumni of MIT were of sufficient age to fill the position, most scientific leaders lacked executive experience, and few leaders shared the founder's, faculty's, or Corporation's vision for the young technical institute, Walker's previous experience and reputation made him uniquely qualified for the position. Walker ultimately accepted in early May and was formally elected President by the MIT Corporation on May 25, 1881; however, the assassination attempt on President Garfield in July 1881 and the ensuing illness before Garfield's 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".
  Walker established a new general course of study (Course IX) emphasizing economics, history, law, English, and modern languages. Walker also set out to reform and expand the Institute's organization by creating an Executive Committee, apart from the fifty-member Corporation, to handle regular administrative issues. He also emphasized the importance of faculty governance by regularly attending their meetings and seeking their advice on major decisions.
  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 nearby 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 founding MIT faculty member and now Harvard President Charles William Eliot towards consolidation of the two schools had been rejected or disrupted by Rogers in 1870 and 1878. Also, despite his previous tenure at the analogous Sheffield School, Walker now remained committed to MIT's independence from the larger institution.
  In light of the difficulties in raising capital for these expansions and despite MIT's privately endowed status, Walker and other members of the Corporation lobbied the Massachusetts legislature for a $200,000 grant to aid in the industrial development of the Commonwealth. After intensive negotiations that called upon his extensive connections and civic experience, in 1887 the legislature made a grant of $300,000 over two years to the Institute, and would lead to a total of $1.6 million in grants from the Commonwealth to the Institute before the practice was abolished in 1921.
  Walker sought to erect a new building on to address the increasingly cramped conditions of the original Boylston Str
caption: An 1889 photogravure of the 1865 "Rogers" Building in the foreground with the 1883 "Walker" Building in the background
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