“M.I.T., rah, rah, rah. Technology!”

In January 1874, the newest graduates of MIT assembled at the Parker House hotel in Boston for the first annual meeting of the Class Association of 1873. Their class was the Institute’s sixth and its largest yet, having added 26 names to MIT’s grand tally of 84 degree-holding alumni. Confident that their ranks would continue to swell, George W. Blodgett, who’d earned his degree in civil engineering, proposed creating an association for all alumni of the Institute.

The idea was put to a vote (perhaps over fresh Parker House rolls), and a committee of Blodgett, William A. Kimball, and Webster Wells was assigned to explore the prospect. That October, Kimball sent a printed circular to all living MIT graduates with a known address, asking if they thought it would be “desirable” to form an Alumni Association. Interest was affirmed, and on the afternoon of January 29, 1875, 27 alumni convened in the Rogers Building for the inaugural meeting of the MIT Alumni Association.

At the meeting, Kimball explained that while graduates of colleges like Harvard and Yale typically pursued additional education to become doctors or lawyers, MIT alumni were immediately seeking jobs as engineers. The new association’s primary mission, therefore, was to help new graduates get jobs. This would be good for the graduates, and good for MIT and the emerging profession of engineering. 

“The elder alumni can also directly benefit the Institute by doing what lies in their power to furnish graduates with work; by recommending them for vacancies where they have influence, and by informing them, through the secretary of the Association, of such openings as they know of in different parts of the country,” said Kimball shortly after he was elected the first secretary.

Robert H. Richards, Class of 1868, became the association’s first president. As one of the 14 original graduates of MIT and a highly respected faculty member, he was an inspired choice. Immediately upon graduating, he’d been hired as MIT’s assistant in general chemistry and had since been promoted to professor of mining engineering. (He was also about to marry Ellen Henrietta Swallow, Class of 1873, the first woman to graduate from MIT and the first to teach at the Institute.) 

Next, the association voted to appoint a committee of Richards, Kimball, and Charles R. Cross, Class of 1870 (who was both class secretary and assistant professor of physics), to write a constitution. The resulting 257-word document stated that the association’s “object shall be to further the well-being of the Institute and its graduates by increasing the interest of members in the school and in each other.” Annual dues were set at one dollar.

While most early MIT graduates left the Institute to seek their fortune, the Alumni Association was dominated at the outset by people we would now call lifers. Deeply committed to the Institute’s success, they were not only active alumni but frequently MIT employees and certainly its promoters. For them, the association was “a useful, noncontroversial way to move the Institute’s prospects forward, to generate fellowship, [and] to build school spirit,” observed the MIT historian Philip N. Alexander in his book A Widening Sphere. 

Two years in, the association created a permanent Committee on the School to “keep itself informed as to the courses of instruction, management and policy of the school.” And at the 1877 annual meeting, Howard A. Carson, Class of 1869 (who would later serve as Alumni Association president and design Boston’s sewer system and some of the city’s early subway lines), gave a report on that committee’s behalf. He told alumni that “the instruction in engineering at the Institute is in many respects admirable and is admirably supplemented by the practice in the Physical Laboratory.” He also called it a “grave defect” to use “the old-­fashioned method of teaching chemistry”—focused on lectures and texts—instead of “the modern method,” in which students “make many experiments” before delving into reading. Indeed, William Barton Rogers had founded the Institute in part to teach physics in a laboratory setting. But the space and equipment required for lab classes made them far more expensive than lectures.

In 1877 those expenses were jeopardizing MIT’s existence. Students couldn’t afford to pay enough to cover the cost, and enrollment was dropping. (The Class of 1876 had 43 graduates, 1877 had 32, and 1878 would have just 19.) Three full professorships were eliminated, all the professors’ salaries were reduced, and there was serious thought of closing the school, according to a 1920 account in Technology Review. MIT’s second president, John Daniel Runkle, stepped down in 1878 after failing to solve the financial woes, leaving Rogers in charge again. MIT’s 233 graduates weren’t established enough to provide financial support, so Rogers contacted his friends and saved the Institute by establishing what Technology Review described as “a considerable endowment fund.” In 1881, he hired MIT’s third president, Francis Amasa Walker, who breathed new life into the school. By 1888 the graduating class was up to 77 and the number of alumni had increased to 579.

Meanwhile, the Technology Alumni Association carried on, and as its members advanced in their fields, some became Institute benefactors, contributing to the Rogers Scholarship Fund to support needy students. The association continued to grow, holding annual meetings at Young’s Hotel, which boasted one of the city’s preeminent banquet halls. Soon it was important enough for details of its meetings to appear in the city’s newspapers. In 1894 the Boston Globe noted that eight women had attended a meeting, including “Miss Marion L. Mahoney of the class of 94.”

The association also presented “smoke talks.” At one, held in the drawing room of MIT’s architectural building in November 1894, President Walker spoke on the history of the tariff, followed by lunch and a tour of the mechanical laboratories. A smoke talk the following October drew 250 alumni. “They talked over old times and renewed old acquaintances,” the Boston Globe reported. “Graybeards of 68 sat side by side with new men of 95 and swapped stories of good times they used to have in lecture halls, rushes and drills.”   

These social gatherings celebrated not only Technology (as alumni called the Institute) but technology itself. At an 1895 smoke talk on aerial navigation, Samuel Cabot, Class of 1870, spoke of “the change the navigation of the air would make in the distribution of the populating of our cities,” according to the Globe, which noted that a small flying machine was also demonstrated. Harvard professor W.H. Pickering, Class of 1879, attended the meeting and predicted that a practical flying machine would be invented soon. (The Wright brothers’ first successful flight took off eight years later.) At the April 1896 meeting, Charles L. Norton, Class of 1893, discussed progress on x-ray photography and showed an image of President Walker’s hand taken with an x-ray tube invented at MIT. To the surprise of Walker himself, it showed a piece of metal that had been embedded in his bone since he’d survived a cannonball attack in the Civil War. The December 1896 smoke talk featured Professor Eleazer B. Homer’s account of his bicycle tour through Surrey, Normandy, and Touraine, which he illustrated with stereopticon images. 

In 1896 the popularity of the talks helped prompt alumni to found the Technology Club and secure a five-year lease on a four-story building at 71 Newbury Street (across from the Rogers Building), complete with a basement laundry, a kitchen and dining room, a drawing and smoking room, a library, and billiards and sleeping rooms on the top floor. The club opened in October 1896 with 300 members; two years later it had 581 resident members paying annual dues of $12 (nonresidents and undergraduates were charged $6). James P. Munroe, Class of 1882, who served as president of the Alumni Association from 1894 to 1897, would run the club from 1896 to 1904. “The aim of the new club to become a centre for the social life of the institute seems to be rapidly becoming realized,” the Boston Evening Transcript reported in December of 1896. 

The Boston contingent gamely shouted the “Institute yell” three times before their counterparts in Chicago were satisfied with their volume.  

Alumni socializing wasn’t confined to Boston; clubs had been springing up in cities across the country. The first issue of Technology Review, published in January 1899 by the newly formed Association of Class Secretaries (and with Munroe as its managing editor), included reports on the activities of the Technology Club of Boston, the Connecticut Valley Association (formed in 1893), the MIT Society of New York (founded in 1895), the Technology Society of Philadelphia, the Pittsburgh Association, and the “Tech” society of Western New York. And in 1900, the growing number of alumnae joined forces to found the MIT Women’s Association, now known as the Association of MIT Alumnae (AMITA); Ellen Swallow Richards was elected the group’s first president.

On February 3, 1899, MIT’s North­western Alumni Association held its annual banquet in Chicago with telephonic hookups to Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and the Technology Club of Boston. In Chicago, each of the 130 members of the association listened with an individual telephone instrument as they were addressed by Thomas A. Edison (from his home in Menlo Park, New Jersey), MIT president James M. Crafts, Boston mayor Josiah Quincy, and the other alumni clubs on the call. The event was orchestrated by E.L. Andrews, Class of 1894, division superintendent of American Bell Telephone and Telegraph and vice president–elect of the Northwestern Alumni Association.

“It is due in great measure to the efforts put forth in the telephone field by the graduates of the M. I. T. that I am able to talk tonight to you gentlemen 1,000 miles from my workshop,” Edison said in his telephone address, which was printed in the Chicago Tribune. “I have in my employment a large number of graduates of our colleges and institutes. Many of the advancements in electric research and many of the results that have been obtained are in great measure attributable to the men that have been sent forth by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I have not prepared any extensive greetings. Time being limited, I simply wish to pay my compliments to the alumni gathered in Chicago. Good night, gentlemen.”

Although the evening was a great success in Chicago, Technology Review noted that “the widespread storm of that evening prevented as good service as was hoped for,” and the Globe reported that the 150 alumni gathered in Boston could hear “but little from the other cities.” The Boston contingent gamely shouted the “Institute yell”—“M.I.T., rah, rah, rah, M.I.T., rah, rah, rah, M.I.T., rah, rah, rah. Technology!”—three times before their counterparts in Chicago were satisfied with their volume. When Crafts spoke, he joked that “the east cannot hope to match the west, for have you not this evening found a way of hearing what I say an hour before I say it.” But he also thanked alumni for supporting MIT: “I hope my feeble voice will reach you with a note of appreciation of your strong regard for your alma mater amid the hurry of your very active lives. The love and regard of her sons is the rock upon which the Technology builds.”

While alumni clubs were thriving around the country, MIT was once again facing existential financial woes. When word got out that President Henry S. Pritchett was talking with Harvard about a possible merger, the class secretaries sprang into action, mailing out an anti-merger petition, and the Alumni Association polled the alumni. Petition and poll both confirmed staunch alumni opposition to the idea: MIT’s unique focus on science, engineering, and technology set it apart from the Harvards of the world, and alumni were keen to preserve its independence. When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ultimately quashed the merger by blocking the sale of MIT’s land, alumni were thrilled.

When Pritchett’s successor, Richard Maclaurin, secured funding for construction of a new MIT campus in Cambridge, they returned in droves to celebrate the move, which would not only preserve the Institute but allow it to grow. On June 14, 1916, 1,500 alumni gathered in Boston’s Symphony Hall to mark the occasion, joined via telephone by alumni in 34 other locations from Philadelphia to San Francisco, thanks to Albert W. Drake, Class of 1895 (and Course VI, of course), assistant manager for “long lines” at American Telephone and Telegraph, who had been determined that this telephone banquet would go off without a hitch. Photos of 15 clubs, alumni holding receivers to their ears, ran in the July 1916 Technology Review, and the event, which included speeches from Alexander Graham Bell and Orville Wright, raised more than $3 million for the new campus. 

In the years since, the Alumni Association and class secretaries have continued their work of keeping alumni connected to each other and to the Institute, and alumni have remained a vital source of MIT support and funding. Today, more than 200 clubs and alumni groups bring graduates together in cities around the world, and thousands of alums return to campus each year, eager to reconnect with fellow alumni and celebrate their membership in the one-of-a-kind MIT community.