Jerry Wiesner HM
Remembering the Life of an MIT Stalwart
The MIT Press has published a collection of memories and memoirs about former MIT professor, dean, provost, and president Jerry Wiesner HM titled Jerry Wiesner, Scientist, Statesman, Humanist (2003). Wiesner, who passed away in 1994, had long planned an autobiographical book that would combine personal experience and historical interpretation, covering the wide range of interests that he compared to "the many parts of a giant jigsaw puzzle," but the commitments of his post-retirement life and a serious stroke in 1989 kept him from completing it.
A leading voice for decades in international efforts to control and limit nuclear arms, he was a key figure in the Kennedy administration in the establishment of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, in achieving a partial nuclear test ban treaty, and in the successful effort to restrict the deployment of antiballistic missile systems. At MIT, as dean of science, provost, and ultimately as president from 1971 to 1980, Wiesner played a major role as the Institute expanded and strengthened its teaching and research programs in the health sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the creative arts.
The book features a foreword by Senator Edward Kennedy and was edited by Wiesner's longtime colleague and friend Walter Rosenblith HM. Contributors include Alan Lomax, Theodore C. Sorensen, and John Kenneth Galbraith and writings by Wiesner himself, including the autobiographical pieces that would have been the basis of his own book.
Images of Jerry Wiesner HM. Photos courtesy MIT Museum.
Published 2003
