Provost's letter to the faculty about the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing
Dear colleagues,
As I trust you have seen, this morning Rafael wrote to the community to announce the creation of the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. This is an historic day for the Institute.
The idea for the College emerged from a process of consultation the administration conducted over the past year. In that time, we consulted with many faculty members, both on School Councils and in some departments with significant computing activities. How to handle the explosive growth in student interest in computing, on its own and across other disciplines, has been an administrative concern for some time. As we’ve seen in the sharp rise in majors “with CS,” individual departments have worked hard to respond. But through more than a year’s worth of thoughtful input from many stakeholders, we came to see that if MIT could take a single bold step at scale, we could create important new opportunities for our community.
A central idea behind the College is that a new, shared structure can help deliver the power of computing, and especially AI, to all disciplines at MIT, lead to the development of new disciplines, and provide every discipline with an active channel to help shape the work of computing itself. Among those we have consulted so far, I sense a deep excitement for the power of this idea.
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