Living Meritocracy at MIT: That's Diversity!

Compare MIT’s entering class in 1868 and 2009. The 19th century class was all male, Caucasian, and U.S. born. The 21st century class was 55 percent male, 36 percent Causasian, and 8 percent international. Those snapshots, offered on a new diversity Web site called Inventing Our Future, illustrate MIT’s commitment to the core value of meritocracy.

Inventing Our Future is a repository of valuable data ranging from reports on diversity, gender equity, and faculty composition to diversity statistics of students, faculty, and staff and a growing blog.

Video profiles introduce campus leaders describing challenges and opportunities of living in a diverse community. “This is a place that values you for what you do, not who you are,” says Professor Tom Kochan, faculty chair. In another profile, Alex Hamilton Chan, president of the Graduate Student Council, which has established a task force on diversity, says he hopes this group can “give the community a better concept of how we can harness the value of diversity.”

You can also watch the Web cast of the Diversity Leadership Congress, convened by President Susan Hockfield in November 2008. She introduced the congress with this aspiration: “And while there are a myriad of ways in which we differ, we come together today to engage in a deep conversation about what we share, about what we value, and about how we create a community that reaches out to and welcomes and rewards the very best talent wherever that talent may come from. We are here to explore how we can cultivate a culture where everyone feels valued, included, and at ease; a culture that brings out the best in each of us."