01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 The Joint Services Electronics Program at MIT

Chomsky Arrives at MIT In 1955, Chomsky's friend Roman Jakobson arranged for him to work as a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky, in his own words, "had no identifiable field or credentials in anything" (13 Dec. 1994), but MIT, "a scientific university which didn't care much about credentials," was willing to overlook his lack of certifiable "professional competence" (23 June 1994). Chomsky was made an assistant professor and assigned, ironically, to a machine translation project of the type he had often criticized. The project was directed by Victor Yngve and was being conducted at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, which was subsidized by the U.S. military.

The Research Laboratory for Electronics today

While he was being interviewed by laboratory director Jerome Wiesner for the position, Chomsky stated that the project had "no intellectual interest and was also pointless." Perhaps due to his candor, but also because Wiesner thought that his ideas were intriguing, Chomsky was hired as a full-time faculty member, which meant that he was required to spend half his time working in the research lab and the other half teaching ­ "pretty standard," he says, "for MIT faculty" (27 June 1995). He actually "never touched the translation project," and still speaks of it dismissively: "It may have [had] some utility; it could be on the par with building a bigger bulldozer, which is a useful thing. It's nice to have big bulldozers if you have to dig holes" (23 June 1994). The immediate problem Chomsky faced was, as he puts it: "What was I going to do with my half-time teaching?" (27 June 1995). He started by giving "cram courses to graduate students offered by the Modern Languages Department as a service to help them fake their way through Ph.D. reading exams (now thankfully abandoned)" (31 Mar. 1995), even though he had never studied French and barely knew German. He was "also allowed to take over a course on language that had been in the undergraduate catalogue, and run it as I liked" (27 June 1995). Teaching this course was to be an extremely important experience for Chomsky; while doing so, he was able to elucidate some of his own ideas; it provided him with the opportunity to discuss with his students the idea of a generative grammar. The institute was a comfortable place for the twenty-seven-year-old Chomsky: "I also began to teach undergraduate philosophy courses there, and later was able to help establish what became a very distinguished philosophy department. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has always been a pretty free and open place, open to experimentation and without rigid requirements. It was just perfect for someone of my idiosyncratic interests and work" (27 June 1995).

A brief history of Buliding 20

This was a fruitful time for Chomsky. He writes that (machine translation project aside) "the Research Laboratory of Electronics . . . provided a most stimulating interdisciplinary environment for research of the sort that I wanted to pursue" (Logical Structure 2). Here, his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax was hatched. In the acknowledgments of that work, he describes the facility as "an interdepartmental laboratory in which faculty members and graduate students from numerous academic departments conduct research." The funding for the research published in Aspects was provided by "the Joint Services Electronics Programs (U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force), the Electronics Systems Division of the U.S. Air Force, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and NASA." The link between these organizations and the university, the role of the intellectual, and the relationship between scientific and nonscientific research are all issues that have been raised with regard to Chomsky's own connection to MIT and to the university environment as a whole. They take on a greater urgency at a later stage in his academic career.