The proposal

Teach a common subject, 21.xxx, to all first-term freshman, titled “Great Scientific and Engineering Ideas.” One of many possible embodiments could be structured around the following desiderata:

• Two section meetings per week aimed at understanding a great paper and why it is great in the context of the state of the world when the paper was written.
• Section meetings limited to 10–15 students to promote intimacy and discussion, to ensure that no one can hide, to show freshmen that MIT cares about them, and to guarantee that every freshman has a small-class experience with a professor who knows the student's name.
• One great, original paper to be read for each section meeting.
• One written response, in diverse formats, for each paper.

Another embodiment could include famous-person talks. The structure would be same, except that there would be just one original paper per week, instead of two, to allow for one what-I-did and how-I-did-it presentation per week, going over work of great significance. Nobel laureates, Institute Professors, and MacArthur Fellows, and those on the way to such status would be particularly appropriate.

Prime motivator

Trends in advanced placement raise the distinct possibility that future MIT students will have no shared experience whatever, in contrast to a few decades ago, when there were four required shared subjects each in mathematics, physics, and the humanities and two in chemistry. Alumni tend to remember those shared experiences with great fondness because the experiences were universal and because they marked MIT graduates as people who understood the world in terms of universal principles inaccessible to liberal arts graduates.

Benefits to the students

21.xxx would have several other benefits beyond providing a shared introduction to great ideas:

• Emphasis on original sources. Teaching would take students back to the time of publication and expose the struggle, thrills, and controversy associated with progress.
• Opportunity to teach communication. Responses would take on the form of abstracts, reviews, talk slides with speaker's notes, tenure letters, press releases, book-chapter openings, and other formats designed to develop proficiency in important communication dimensions. See the website for 6.803, The Human Intelligence Enterprise, http://genesis.csail.mit.edu/HIE/, for examples.
• Perspective broadening. Freshman would sample great work from a variety of fields (and potential majors).
• Commitment testing. Those students with a scientific or engineering gene will be excited to think how their papers might be the stuff of future 21.xxx classes; those without such genes will discover the lack of it early.
• Exposure to famous people (if famous-people talks are included in the syllabus). MIT students relish the presence at MIT of famous people, find that presence motivating, brag about it to their friends at other institutions, and remember it as alumni. The subject could increase the exposure of freshman to such people by a large factor.

Benefits to the faculty and to MIT

• Fun and camaraderie. The faculty who would teach the subject—from all five MIT Schools—would develop new bonds with faculty outside their own areas of expertise.
• Unique character. The subject could only be taught universally at MIT and would set MIT apart from every other competing university.
• Recruiting. The small class size would be of use in recruiting admitted high-school students; some competing institutions make a big point of small classes in the freshman year.

Content

Content could vary from year to year, and after a common core of universal papers—such as Einstein on the photo-electric effect and Watson and Crick on the structure of DNA—individual sections could veer off toward biology, physics, computer science, civil engineering, and so on.

Alan Lightman's new book, The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th-Century Science, would be a good starting point for listing candidate papers, but when selecting papers, it is important to emphasize recently written works, lest students think they are studying only antique work (few of the papers in Lightman's book were written during the past 30 years).

Who would teach it

Some might think there would be few who could or would teach the subject, but that is surely a slur against the MIT faculty. Inspirational instructors could be drawn, for example, from the following:

• History of science faculty
• Writing program faculty
• McVicar faculty
• Faculty eager to promote excitement about majoring in their department
• Faculty who want to learn the material themselves
• Faculty who like the idea

In addition, the subject would likely require a flock of well-trained and thoroughly tested paper readers.

Concept development and faculty preparation

The first time through, the subject would be taught experimentally by one or a few faculty to a representative group of students. In subsequent offerings, all instructors would meet for an hour or so weekly to go over the technical and communications lessons.

Grading and skill certification

The following mechanisms would ensure that students read the papers and absorb the material:

• Written one-page responses
• Verbal questions, often asked of random students during class

To limit student use of work produced by earlier student generations, some of the papers would vary from year to year and the particular form of response—abstract, review, talk slides—associated with each of the permanent papers would vary from year to year.

Why this will not happen

• Students are said to insist on options
• Humanities faculty want get students started in their own disciplines

Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that all freshmen and sophomore MIT students once took the same four humanities subjects, which started with the Odyssey and concluded with the French revolution. Some sections met on Saturday mornings. Everybody considered it a great bonding experience.