William Barton Rogers: MIT's Visionary Founder: Exhibits: Institute Archives & Special Collections:MIT Libraries:
“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"
This idea worked very well for MIT and industry.
Now that MOOCs and online videos are used to re-invent education,
it is important to leverage sound principles.
And this is harder today than it was in the years past, because "quick money" is often an objective for both investors and entrepreneurs.
MIT remained supportive of entrepreneurship, but did little to actively foster it. Stanford, on the other hand, did. It created a licensing office that was a marketer, not just a straight patent office. The office actively pursued discoveries, then marketed them to interested companies and collected royalties."
