MIT’s past and future
MIT’s unique campus is home to 4,500 undergraduate students, but its reach extends far beyond Cambridge. As the Institute celebrates its first 100 years in Cambridge and prepares for the future, one of many challenges it faces is how to best serve students on campus as well as the many students who learn from MIT’s online educational initiatives but never set foot on campus. “If online education is a first-class citizen in the educational landscape, the question is, what happens to the university, to the campus?” said Sanjay Sarma, MIT’s vice president for open learning and the Fred Fort Flowers and Daniel Fort Flowers Professor in Mechanical Engineering, at a symposium this week titled “The Campus — Then, Now, Next,” in Kresge Auditorium. That question was among many posed at the event, which also addressed key challenges such as updating and preserving historical buildings, making the campus more sustainable, and redeveloping the...