The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing is a college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Announced in 2018 to address the growing applications of computing technology, the college is an Institute-wide academic unit that works alongside MIT's five Schools of Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Science, and Management. The college emphasizes artificial intelligence research, interdisciplinary applications of computing, and social and ethical responsibilities of computing. It aims to be an interdisciplinary hub for work in artificial intelligence, computer science, data science, and related fields. Its creation was the first significant change to MIT's academic structure since the early 1950s.
The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing is named after The Blackstone Group chairman Stephen A. Schwarzman, who donated $350 million of the college's $1.1 billion funding commitment. The college's funding sources were met with criticism, with students and staff contrasting MIT's stated emphasis on ethics against Schwarzman's controversial business practices and support for Donald Trump.
Headquarters
The 2018 announcement of the college's creation included a new building to provide enough room on campus for 65 faculty members, plus graduate students and staff (most of which would be funded by the college). The new headquarters was designated as Building 45, reflecting the campus-wide number system and the chosen location on the site of Building 44. Building 44 had been home to MIT's cyclotron and a giant "J" sign celebrating the discovery of the J/psi meson. The Edgerton Student Shop, approximately six members of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, and two physics classes were relocated to other buildings by summer 2019, and Building 44 was demolished starting in September 2019. The new building at 51 Vassar Street is being designed by the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and is expected to be complete in 2023. Plans were released in January, 2021.
History
On October 15, 2018, MIT president L. Rafael Reif announced the creation of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. MIT described the initiative as its response to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and computing technology. The main part of the college's funding consisted of a $350 million gift from businessman Stephen A. Schwarzman, characterized by Forbes as one of the largest donations made to a single academic institution.
The college was shaped by a several-year-long conversation between Reif and Schwarzman prior to the donation, where the two raised questions on the potential of AI and its future impacts on society. Schwarzman emphasized the global effects of AI and believed that America needed to invest further into developing the technology, and Reif desired a university-wide initiative that funds and promotes collaboration between departments. The resulting college sets a goal of educating "the bilinguals of the future", referring to students skilled in both computing and its applications to other fields. MIT also stated that the college would emphasize the ethics of AI and computing.
On February 21, 2019, MIT announced Daniel P. Huttenlocher as the inaugural dean of the college. Huttenlocher was praised for his "educational creativity, instinctive collegiality, intellectual depth and breadth, institutional savvy, and industry experience".
On February 26–28, 2019, MIT launched a three-day celebration of the college in an event named "Hello World, Hello MIT". The celebration featured panel discussions, an academic symposium, and talks from several notable figures. The speakers included Reif, Schwarzman, Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, author Thomas Friedman, and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The celebration received heavy criticism from several MIT students, faculty, and alumni, who protested the event and questioned the ethics of past actions by Schwarzman and Kissinger.
Academics and research
The Schwarzman College of Computing has one academic department and several research enterprises which also have degree programs: