Following World War II, the MIT faculty convened a committee to assess the Institute’s principles of education and their relevance “in a new era emerging from social upheaval and the disasters of war.” One of the outcomes of this pivotal report was the establishment of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). MIT News convened a discussion with three SHASS faculty — David Kaiser, Heather Paxson, and Jonathan Gruber — about what makes the school special and why it’s a core part of the MIT experience. Listen to the conversation or read the transcript below.
Peter Dizikes: Welcome to MIT, everybody. My name is Peter Dizikes and I’m a writer for MIT News. Every year, over 1,000 undergraduates enroll at MIT. Once they’re here, they’ll spend at least a quarter of their time studying a set of core subjects such as music and theater arts, history, anthropology, and economics, linguistics and philosophy, literature, political science. These are all offered within MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, known on campus as SHASS and a core piece of the university.
MIT is 165 years old. This month, SHASS turns 75 and is celebrating its anniversary with a two-day conference, September 24th and 25th. For this MIT News Roundtable, we’re delighted to have three distinguished faculty members from SHASS with us, historian and physicist David Kaiser, anthropologist Heather Paxson, and economist Jonathan Gruber, who are all here to talk about what makes SHASS a special place. Thank you all for joining us.
David Kaiser: Thanks for having us.
Peter Dizikes: If it’s all right, I’d like to just jump in and start by asking each of you a different question about SHASS. Perhaps we could start with you, David. David Kaiser, for our audience, is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at MIT. He’s written numerous books about the history of physics and done scientific research focused on inflationary cosmology, the very rapid, very early expansion of our universe. He’s also edited a volume about the history of MIT and is, I think, the lead organizer of the SHASS 75 Conference.
David Kaiser: It has taken a village, but I’ve been lucky to work with a whole group.
Peter Dizikes: Very good. Well, on that note, the note being MIT history, right after World War II, MIT decided that it wanted to form SHASS. Why was that and how has that worked out for us?
David Kaiser: That’s right. So they didn’t decide very rapidly. And again, as people might know, there were some departments that we would now associate with SHASS that preexisted this. Economics, for example, had been taught at MIT as its own department from well before them. But there was this famous — famous for us, famous on campus — something called the “Lewis Report,” which you’ll hear about over and over again this year, I’m sure. And it was actually, I think, a three-year effort. So the group was put together very soon after the end of the second World War, starting in 1946, very soon. And they got together and studied almost everything you can imagine about life and the future at MIT. I mean, like parking lots and how far do the faculty commute, which is on my mind, as well as things like the undergraduate curriculum, dormitories, really every aspect, intellectual, residential, social, and beyond. It’s a really remarkable report and it’s easy to download from the web. It’s really worth reading even, I think, to this day.
But as you rightly know, when they completed the report in 1949, among their most significant recommendations was that MIT should not just have a few departments in humanities and social sciences, but have a concerted effort in what we would now call SHASS. Originally, it was the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. And of course, about 25 or so years ago, 50 years since the founding, we also very proudly added arts to our name.
So the point is the Lewis Committee said, in essence, there are so many striking, dramatic, literally world-changing developments that we can associate with what we might now call STEM, or science and technology, and they had in mind things like the Manhattan Project and nuclear weapons, which have been used as a dramatic effect just not long before they wrote the report. And they were concerned that changes that could be that rapid and that far-reaching simply require an informed leadership, an informed citizenry, more generally, of people who can try to think critically and carefully and kind of contextually and not only understand neutron diffusion, but also understand the flow of people and ideas and cultures and politics and beyond.
They argued not that SHASS should be founded, it should be, as they said, “A co-equal school to the existing schools.” The report was very clear: This needs to be as central to MIT’s existence and experience as School of Science, School of Engineering, and of course there are other great schools as well. And it really was, there’s too much at stake, changing too rapidly with too far-ranging implications for our students and our faculty and staff and the broader community not to have the toolkit to think about history, governance, economics, culture, identity, human expression — that these were inescapable parts of being an educated member and a responsible member of the new nuclear age.
Peter Dizikes: Surely we still have enough challenges today that that rationale would hold up, we think?
David Kaiser: I think we’re done! No, we haven’t nailed it. There’s a few more things to worry about. And so I think when I say I return to that Lewis Report, I really do because some parts will seem quaint — what were the concerns in 1949 might not always resonate today — but a lot of the concerns sound actually quite contemporary. And with only a little bit of keyword swapping, I think we’ll get to it, I’m sure, in our discussion, no shortage of topics today that are filling a kind of intellectual role that the disruptions of the second World War had played for that earlier generation.
Peter Dizikes: Right. Thank you. Heather, I’d like to toss a question to you as well. Heather Paxson, for our audience, is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Anthropology at MIT, a former head of the MIT program in anthropology, and she is currently associate dean for faculty in SHASS. You’ve written multiple books, including “The Life of Cheese,” which I can vouch goes very deep into the American psyche. Heather, given that you are dean and I think have a lot of visibility into what’s going on SHASS-wide, in a sense, could you just say a little bit more for us about the breadth of everything that happens in SHASS?
Heather Paxson: Thank you, Peter. So putting the humanities and the arts and the social sciences together in a school is actually quite unusual among our peer institutions and does make for some really fun collaborations and convenings.
So just to give you a little taste of that breadth, just this week yesterday, our colleagues in political science, Adam Berinsky and Charles Stewart, and research that they’re doing in collaboration with Chara Podimata, who is an operations research specialist in the Sloan School of Management. They are using AI to study AI. They did a huge study or are in the midst of a huge study of looking at how AI chatbots are providing information to citizens about elections that may or may not be biased and tailored to the asker and what the effects that will have on our midterms coming up. So very timely, amazing work. That’s social sciences.
In the arts, yesterday I saw our colleague Jay Scheib, who’s the head of Music and Theater Arts. He’s a stage director and he’s just back from Germany where he’s been staging a production of Wagner in Germany. So, really, just a lot of fun stuff.
Peter Dizikes: It is actually amazing the breadth of people circulating around here. Jon, I have a question for you as well on a slightly different note. So Jon Gruber is Ford Professor of Economics at MIT, a former head of the Department of Economics, he’s published over 200 research papers, I think I can say is one of the most influential figures in the expansion of health care access in the U.S. You’re also the only person here right now who’s been an MIT student. You were an undergrad here. Could you just say a few words about what was significant about your student experience, what you took with you from being a student?
Jonathan Gruber: One thing that’s sort of embarrassing is when I started as undergrad here, I was closer to the Lewis Report than we are today. And the Lewis Report was still, in many ways, being implemented when I was undergraduate. I would say SHASS was much more of a second-class citizen then than it is now. It was sort of embarrassing to say one was a SHASS major without saying a double major, but it was really viewed as a service organization, something kids took so they could get on with their courses that mattered.
I really think that’s changed. I think the MIT student body’s changed from when I was here. We’re a much more well-rounded student body. We’re now competing with these Ivy League institutions that were very separate from when I was a student, and that wouldn’t be possible without SHASS. But I think what’s important to recognize is MIT is no longer a school that just competes with engineering schools. We’re a school that competes with all universities. And the only way to do that is a well-rounded education. Folks aren’t going to come here if they can’t have a well-rounded education, if it’s just a science education. So SHASS has developed to become so much more integral into the life of MIT. The respect level of SHASS, everything has just really improved.
Peter Dizikes: Were there particular classes or courses that jump out in retrospect?
Jonathan Gruber: Well, I think I’m a great story for SHASS in the sense that I came to MIT as someone who’s good at math, but didn’t like math. I was just good at it, but I wasn’t someone who’s doing proofs in my basement. I just didn’t find it appealing. But I came to MIT because it was a math-y school and it was the best school I got into and I was good at math. And then I took 14.01, which is our Intro to Economics class, and I was like, “Oh my God, I can use math for something interesting. I can actually take this math I love to answer questions I really want to answer and on topics I really care about in the real world.” And that was just eye-opening to me. I literally can picture standing at the crosswalk at 77 Mass Ave with my then girlfriend telling her how excited I was. I can picture that moment, what 14.01 had opened up for me. So you can imagine it’s incredibly thrilling for me now to get to teach 14.01 and hopefully inspire some of those students the way that I was inspired.
Peter Dizikes: What’s interesting is many people here have slightly indirect paths to what they ended up doing, right? So you didn’t come here expecting for that to happen, but it happened.
Jonathan Gruber: That’s exactly right. I think one thing that’s very important at part of the university education is to open yourself up to learning new things and heading in new directions. One concern I always have about MIT is that students come here too predetermined to do X. I think that’s almost more of a problem here than other universities. I think that’s why SHASS is so important. Because we want to open their minds to the fact that even if they move from science major X to science major Y, along the way they’re exposed to a range of things that allow them to choose what’s going to give them the most fulfilling future, not just what they thought was interesting in high school.
Peter Dizikes: And when I said at the outset that a quarter of the time they’ll be spending on some of these subjects is this is one of the MIT requirements, is that people need eight classes from SHASS during their four years here. So hopefully they do get that kind of exposure.
Jonathan Gruber: That is why we have that requirement and hopefully they take those classes seriously and are open-eyed and can really… I’ll tell you, Peter, one of the things that distresses me most is the number of juniors and seniors I have taking 14.01 saying, “God, I wish I took this freshman year. I would’ve studied more economics.” Which makes me feel good about my class, but a little disappointed that it’s taken that long to find it.
Heather Paxson: Oh, we thought that was just anthropology! They don’t even know how to find econ?
Jonathan Gruber: Exactly.
Peter Dizikes: Well, stepping back for one second. In daily life, what is special about being at SHASS? Teaching and learning is one of those things, but if you had to cite a couple of things about the qualities and characteristics of being here, the students, your colleagues, what would you say?
Jonathan Gruber: I mean, I would say that what’s special and unique about SHASS at MIT is the fact that we are at MIT and that we are the place that can bring together the science and the social sciences and humanities and arts in a productive way, which is so important right now. The conversation cannot go on without talking about AI, but basically the fundamental central issue in AI right now is how do we think about it ethically? How do we regulate it? And there’s no place better to think about that than MIT, where you’ve got the people developing the frontier AI models, next, the people who can help you think about how to regulate and think ethically about those models. And so I think this world is increasingly becoming STEM-based, and I think, as a result, the most productive place to learn about topics from anthropology to history to economics is a place where you’ll learn about that alongside STEM.
Peter Dizikes: Since you mentioned that everything is affected by AI, I’m interested in what everybody’s favorite teaching experiences have been here, but you’re also probably having to be a little bit mindful of how to make sure that everybody is doing their own work and putting in the hard work and the hard thinking that it takes to really get what you want out of MIT. So those are two questions. From pre-AI days, do you have a particular favorite kind of teaching experience? What made it great? And then how are we adapting now?
David Kaiser: One of the courses I really love teaching here, I’ve been teaching it on and off, really, for 20 plus years, is cross-listed in our program in Science, Technology, and Society, my home department, also in Physics, and it counts as another one of these, I think, very important requirements that all the undergraduates must take. It’s a communications-intensive course in the major for the physics major. So they have to learn to write essays and express themselves coherently as part of their physics education, as well as, of course, throughout their SHASS coursework.
And so it’s predominantly students who are, like Jon had been, very interested in math and math-y things and physics and all those things, but they also have to come in there and not just rely on their, frankly, fabulous calculating skills. They have to practice reading stuff that might look a little unfamiliar or unexpected to them and they have to practice really composing coherent arguments about that. And the arguments sometimes are about the intellectual work, what was Einstein’s thinking in 1905 and how do we know and why does it matter?
A lot of it in this class turns to the things like I think we’re on the minds of those authors of the Lewis Report. What are educated people’s responsibilities under very complicated disruptive times like wartime, like the escalation of fighting of Vietnam? The list is long, just within recent history. What does it mean to take a remarkable education in a variety of fields and do something with that that is consistent with what you think you want to do as a person and as a member of a larger group? And to watch our physics majors wrestle with this creatively, and there’s no single answer that they’re racing toward, I think that’s just incredibly rewarding.
And a lot of them, I hear over and over again from seniors who are about to go to very fancy PhD programs in physics, “I never really paused to think about time dilation until I had write an essay about it. Oh, yeah, there’s kind of a reason for that.” Or, “I never really got my head around quantum theory, I could solve my problem sets, but there’s something really strange happening in the universe and it’s not only captured by these very, very complicated mathematical expressions, so that’s essential too.” So I have this collection of favorite moments of these kinds of “aha” where the eyes light up and the jaw drops at least a little bit and you say, “I didn’t even know that was a thing I didn’t know.” And it’s really fun to see that.
Peter Dizikes: And that comes out of having them write about things.
David Kaiser: It has them reading text, and not only a textbook, and then really having to make their own argument based on their own selection of primary and secondary sources, the way we would teach to do in our other courses.
Peter Dizikes: We like to say that writing is thinking.
David Kaiser: Yeah. They have to clarify and make a case. Yeah.
Peter Dizikes: Heather, do you have?
Heather Paxson: I’ve been teaching here for quite a few years now, but before I got here, I probably taught at five other colleges and universities, so lots of different teaching experience in different sorts of institutions. And for many years I would say, MIT students, it’s just different. It is just so much more fun to teach anthropology with MIT students because they came to class having approached the texts, reading them, not to decide whether they agreed with the text or not, they were needed to be persuaded by the argument, and it really made for a very rich conversation in the classroom.
I think it’s interesting because the moments in the classroom that I can think about or the assignments or the engagements that I can think about are actually things that I think we are all trying to steer more towards today. So the things that I’m doing in class or trying to do in class today, more experience-based projects, more hands-on, are the things that actually, thinking back, I’ve done for a long time and are the most memorable.
So just one example, a class I haven’t taught in a very long time, but a colleague is teaching it now, a class called Art Craft Science, which is really fun to teach here. The assignment was to make mozzarella cheese. So I gave them instructions straight from the box of this mozzarella making kit and the instructions were not very well written. They were predicated on a knowledge of cooking and so forth. That was the point. So they had to go home, I gave them the ingredients, they made cheese, and then they write it up as a lab. I figured they knew how to do that, write it up as a lab. And the discussion of the lab was to reflect on the skills that they relied on to be able to enact these really poorly written instructions. So it was all about tacit knowledge. And so that was the lesson.
And that’s the kind of thing I think we’re all trying to reinvent now in the age of AI, but I’m sure we’ve all been doing it, we just didn’t have as much sense of attention to it. But that is MIT, the “mens et manus” thing. It’s all over our curriculum. It always has been, but now it does have this new, I think, shiny coin value to it. So that’s what’s fun.
Peter Dizikes: Our motto “mens et manus” is “mind and hand,” and I’m sure there is going to have to be a lot of continual reinventing of these kinds of exercises going forward. Do you have?
Jonathan Gruber: I would say there are two things that make me happiest as a teacher. One is when I illustrate the power of economics through counterintuitive lessons, when I can see the kids are like, “Wow, that’s really cool. I didn’t think of it that way till I took this class.” That’s really great. When it just can change the way that they think, they can think about things somewhat differently. And that’s what I hope the kids take from the class. I always say, “I don’t care if you remember certain terms, I just want you to think like an economist.” And when I see that happening, it’s wonderful. But most enjoyable is when they laugh at my jokes. My wife can tell if I’ve had a good lecture day, a bad lecture day, what percent of my jokes they laugh at, which is always below 10%, by the way. But the question is, is it 10% or 1%? And that’s really the most important thing to me.
David Kaiser: Jon, quick question. Does the proportion rise closer to midterms? Are they gaming the system?
Jonathan Gruber: No. No, not at all.
David Kaiser: No time series?
Jonathan Gruber: No time series.
David Kaiser: Just checking. All right, good to know.
Peter Dizikes: You haven’t had anyone come in and really study that empirically, though?
Jonathan Gruber: No, but the best review I ever got, now this was many years before he got famous for a different reason, was that I was viewed as a “well-dressed Pee-wee Herman.”
Peter Dizikes: Students will say if a professor makes them laugh, they’ll take that class when they’re shopping around, right?
Jonathan Gruber: Yeah, hopefully so.
Peter Dizikes: Slightly different kind of question here, which is:How has being at SHASS perhaps influenced your careers? You’re all people who’ve done different things in the same career. Heather, you’ve written about some very different topics. Jon, you’ve been very involved in research and also public policy. And Dave, you’ve had two careers in one as a physicist and a historian. So what is it about this place that maybe encourages you to try different things and follow through with them?
Jonathan Gruber: Well, Dave, you’re the two-in-one. You should start.
David Kaiser: Oh, okay. It’s buy one, get one free, I think. So one example comes to mind, Peter. I think many will eventually. But a number of years ago I wrote a book as an historian that I just loved immersing myself in all the things historians do, finding dusty old papers and interviewing people around. And it was called “How the Hippies Saved Physics.” It was a kind of an obnoxious title or funny title. And it was really who cared about certain obscure sounding questions in quantum physics before the whole field knew we had to care about them. It was really, I think, to me, at least an engaging and fun story about people on the margins who made contributions there.
Where I’m going with this is because I’m here and very lucky to live in more than one department and interact with all kinds of folks, one of the extremely gifted postdocs in physics who had just come to MIT to work with me on the physics side, read the book “On a Lark” because it had a funny cover, I think is why I probably picked it up. And the upshot is that got us thinking more about our own physics projects because the historical study said, “Oh, I never thought that’s where these ideas came from, and I see what they did then and we’ve learned a lot more about these things in the interim. Let’s try this something new.” So we put a little group together and that became a five-year, really, adventure for me on the physics side that grew entirely, at least for me, from the fact that I’d spent several years writing this kind of deep-dive historical study.
The ability to have one lead to the other, to have these conversations happening close in time and close on campus to each other, I mean, that’s extraordinary and I’m very lucky, and I don’t know that I would have that at many other places where I could have been or where our friends are. So I think that the boundaries are not actually that high between our various parts of campus. They can feel high at times, but there really is the kind of cross-campus traffic, and we’re trying to get more of that going with recent initiatives. I think we really can just bring questions together without saying, “Oh, but you’re in that department, I’m in this department.”
Peter Dizikes: Having read “How the Hippies Saved Physics,” which came out in 2011, I would say you were writing about figures who, even at the time, were semi-overlooked, but since then have gone on to win major awards, and in a way the whole area of study there has been elevated.
David Kaiser: Well, that’s right. One of what I like to call “my hippies,” shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2022. And in fact, one of the colleagues that got to do the physics work as a follow-on with and shared that same Nobel Prize, I think it’s, frankly, because he began working with me. Anton hasn’t got a record, but I think the record speaks for itself. Anyway, the point is it’s now sort of extraordinarily exciting work that came from just 50+ years earlier from really being on the margin and being denigrated. And that kind of arc in the span of a single human lifetime or a career is really rapid change. Anyway, to be able to sit and watch that from many facets, it was a great adventure.
Peter Dizikes: And that joke landed, so you’re batting over 10% in this.
David Kaiser: I mean, look, I’m not keeping score, Peter, but I know where it’s going to be at the end.
Jonathan Gruber: I would say two things. So one is, going back to my undergrad days, I think many students here are head down, do the work, don’t necessarily engage with a lot of what’s going on in the world. I had a political science professor named Louis Menand who changed my life, who made me engage. He’d worked in the great society. He really was very opinionated, but in a way that he could defend it. It really opened my eyes and he began by getting involved in working on policy at MIT. So I was the first student representative to the committee on the undergraduate program when Margaret MacVicar set it up in 1985. I was the first student representative. And then it grew into my interest in just policy in general, so that was very exciting for me.
And then the other thing was the way I’ve been involved in policy is a particularly MIT way, which is that I’m the numbers guy when health care policy gets made. I develop computer models and mathematical models to help folks understand how their policies will affect people. But those models themselves don’t do any good unless they can explain what they’re doing in clear terms. So it’s really that crosswalk of why it’s great to be at MIT, which is I have the math skills to do it and I have the incredible students to help me, I mean, the work in this area has been helped by so many amazing students, but to have the SHASS skills and the communication skills to be able to explain what I’m doing and why it’s important, that is really kind of where SHASS is perfect for me.
Peter Dizikes: And also noteworthy that you had such an influential class that was not in econ, as important as you found those to be, but this is a political science class as well that helped feed into it.
Jonathan Gruber: Exactly.
Peter Dizikes: Heather, on maybe a slightly different note, how do you keep this healthy, productive culture going in all these different departments? We have this famous culture in the Department of Economics and in many other departments throughout SHASS where there’s this culture of openness to inquiry and elevating interest in students, but how does one, over 75 years, keep that going?
Heather Paxson: Well, thanks for asking the anthropologist about culture. I think we often think of culture in terms of ideas and values, a shared set of ideas and values, but my one word answer to that is actually “participation.” I love that, Jon, you were a student rep on an institute committee. I mean, it’s that kind of participation in the workings of our organizations and the workings of our departments, of our deciding what gets included in the curriculum, that participation is what creates a sense of belonging and certainly is the stuff of culture.
Peter Dizikes: So the things we study over 75 years are going to evolve and change, the things we believe are going to evolve and change.
Heather Paxson: So like an institution’s culture is what mediates between what changes and what stays constant.
Peter Dizikes: Do you find that to be broadly the case here?
Jonathan Gruber: That’s a great quote. I will be using that.
Peter Dizikes: Also, you’re now batting 100% on jokes as well. Dave, what can we expect from the conference which is coming up in the very near future?
David Kaiser: Very near future. I’m really excited about it. It’s been a lot of work from really, genuinely a very large, wonderful, hardworking committee. I’m most excited because we have 40 plus speakers, including Jon, and Heather’s going to share us a panel. We’re going to hear from early career scholars, from more experienced scholars, we’re going to hear from people representing every single unit in SHASS, from alumni, including Jon, more recent alumni, done different things with their SHASS and MIT educations out in the broader world. We’re going to have a session I’m especially excited about, a showcase put together by Music and Theater Arts, original musical compositions, a dance performance, the jazz ensemble play. I mean, this is just fantastic. For free, really? Plus really good food. It’s going to be great.
It’s going to be an exhausting, but, I think, very, very exciting two days. I think the goal really is to showcase how we’re thrilled to be doing things in our own fields, advancing knowledge in the way that we and our immediate colleagues are most excited about, and it’s not only limited to that. And I think part of the message will be, and has been, as we began the discussion with, practically every challenge we might tick off on our finger is the biggies that keep us up at night. None of those will be solved by a technical fix alone, or frankly, a little tweak on a humanistic side or social science either. We really, really have to continue getting even better at doing the kinds of collaborative work across fields and across departments.
None of these challenges has a single or simple answer. If they did, they wouldn’t be persistent challenges. So the more that we can share with ourselves across our departments with MIT and beyond, it’s open to the public, the symposium is, that this is really a place where we can enter together with humility and experience, both, and try to build teams that couldn’t do these things on their own. And I think we’ve been doing more and more of that with the presidential initiatives, MITHIC and the whole series of them. I think we just have to keep building that as a muscle we can flex and get used to using more often. And if the symposium can help recenter that emphasis for our own colleagues and beyond, I think that’d be a great, great success.
Jonathan Gruber: Peter, I think this raised a really important issue, which is in economics, we have the concept of the public good. What’s the public good? That’s a good where one person’s efforts benefit everyone. In this world of incredibly intense academic pressure and pressure on a good living, it’s hard to come to university and focus on the public good as opposed to private good. SHASS is the place at MIT that focuses students on the public good.
You have people like David and Heather who spend so much time dedicated to so many different committees and making MIT function, and that’s led by SHASS. Not that there aren’t great participants all around the university, but SHASS is really the participation leader. And universities need that. That’s the life below this university, is that kind of volunteerism and participation. I hope that students by me exposed to our courses get the value of the public good, that they realize that maybe it’s not as valuable to them, per se, but that there’s a value to the institution and the world of them doing the kind of volunteering that Heather and David do.
Peter Dizikes: It’s very well said.
Jonathan Gruber: Thank you.
Peter Dizikes: Thank you all so much for joining us.
Jonathan Gruber: Thank you.
David Kaiser: Thank you.
Heather Paxson: Thank you, Peter.
Peter Dizikes: It’s much appreciated.
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