Richard MacLaurin launched an industry funding model known as the "Technology Plan" in 1920. As MIT grew under the Tech Plan, it built new postgraduate programs that stressed laboratory work on industry problems, including a new program in electrical engineering. Gerard Swope, MIT's chairman and head of General Electric, believed talented engineers needed scientific research training. In 1930, he recruited Karl Taylor Compton to helm MIT's transformation as a "technological" research university and to build more autonomy from private industry.
=== Curricular reforms ===
... a special type of educational institution which can be defined as a university polarized around science, engineering, and the arts. We might call it a university limited in its objectives but unlimited in the breadth and the thoroughness with which it pursues these objectives.
In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry …
