MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

MIT's Building 20: The Magical Incubator Story, Anecdote, or Reminiscence

The Concourse Program

R. Keith Sawyer
ksawyer@artsci.wustl.edu

As a Freshman, I joined the Concourse program, which was housed in Building 20. MIT created Concourse as an alternative to large, impersonal lectures. Each year, around 40 students were admitted to Concourse, and took all of their classes together, in the same classroom, with the same core set of professors. To help us build a sense of community and camaraderie, MIT gave us a nice lounge in Building 20, and we all got the door combination so that we had a home on campus. For Concourse students, Building 20 was our earliest image of MIT, and perhaps the friendliest image, too.

When I heard that the building was coming down, my first thought was "Building 20 was where everything 'interesting' was located." I started with Concourse, but later I got involved with Course 24, and the philosophers and linguists were in Building 20. As Cognitive Science was starting up on campus, that program was located in Building 20. UROP was in Building 20. Anthropology was there, too.

There's a pattern here, of course. By the time I got to MIT in 1978, MIT had put everything that was small, on the margins, and had no political power in Building 20, the oldest, least prestigious building. More established programs with more grant moneys got other, newer, nicer buildings. There's a lesson in here somewhere--something like the story about the ugly duckling. If MIT really believes that building 20 was the "magical incubator"--and I believe that it was--then that has implications for how MIT will deal with marginal, small programs in the future.