Shakespeare, Milton, and the Humanities at MIT in Its Foundational Period

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s foundational decision not to teach Latin and Greek opened a vast curricular space for the specialized study of scientific and technological subjects and also for what are now called humanities and social sciences. A printed document headed “English, 1868–69” sets forth MIT ’s plan for a required four-year curriculum in which the professor of English would lecture on a wide range of subjects in the vernacular, from political economy and law, to history and philosophy, to language and literature. This essay traces the effects of a residual hostility against the “dead languages” that informed the teaching of classic English literature, which evinces a steady diminishment of the place of the humanities over time. Climactically, the essay explores a countervailing English examination given by a junior instructor that shows how the scientific and humanities curricula might have been made to work in concert.