The Two Towers: Main

There were many things which changed--staff, curriculum, and campus. There were other things which changed not at all-- the work in the classrooms and the strength of the students. In the telescoping of time known as the premature advent of the twenty-fifth century, it was the serious student, in tune with his own times, who largely determined Institute policy.

The traditional bow tie and cap of the freshman became a symbol of the rigorous screening which had given him admission to the school, and his native intellectual curiosity thrived when exposed to the contagion of competition. He found that good marks automatically gave him prestige, that ambition could be reconciled with contribution. What good, he found himself asking now that he had the world in his hands, what good is power without purpose?

A faculty committee had been named in 1956 to study student motivation, scholarship, and morale. Meantime the students had posed a few questions themselves. For instance, "Are Tech students overworked?" they asked the older teachers. "No," chorused they all, except Hiram Phillips, the chemistry laboratory philosopher, who refused to be cornered: "I've been around too long (forty-four years) to still be answering loaded questions."

The students on Boynton Hill took a long look at the world in which they had grown up and realized that half of the jobs available to them at graduation had not even existed when they were born. The pace of technological change was almost frightening to the parent, the trustee, and to some of the teachers--but not to the brave young man of a contemporary world. The drum he heard was his own pulse. "Give us the basic knowledge," he virtually said to anyone who would listen, "and we'll figure out the know-how as we go along."

"This [1960] was a year of change at Tech," wrote Craig Rowley, '61, in a student-contributed article in The Journal, itself a precedent. "The Atwater Kent Laboratories of the Electrical Engineering Department were completely renovated over the summer, and work was begun on Salisbury Labs. Olin Hall of Physics was dedicated. The antiquated Washburn Shops now housed a 1 kw atomic reactor. There were changes in policy, too. Perhaps the most striking innovation was the initiation of a quality point system. Curricular changes were made to meet the constant advancement in engineering. Electives were now available to juniors and a broader selection of courses was offered in the senior year. A new B.S. degree program in mathematics was made available."

With indication of a trend in every sentence, and in the unsurpassable way of the young, he thus stripped down to a few