Harvard and MIT Face Off For Technology Funding

Just a few miles apart along the Charles River sit two heavyweights in computer science, campuses teeming with new facilities and field-expanding research.

But, in the struggle between archrivals Harvard and MIT to dominate this field, another "campus" has become important--this one in the rain-soaked Northwest.

Microsoft CEO William H. Gates III, Class of 1977, and President Steven A. Ballmer '77 have been very generous to their alma mater and to the trade school down the river in recent years.

In addition, the Microsoft Corp. has made sizable donations to MIT, making it one of many companies to give money for research or education in Cambridge.

With almost $70 million in technological donations floating around this side of the Charles, one might wonder why the two schools aren't pooling their resources.

Harvard and MIT seem to be in the same boat--both schools are constantly vying for funds. But while MIT leads the pack on funding from private industry, Harvard's fundraising focus for the past several years has been alumni.

Harvard seems to have succeeded in plumbing the depths of alumni bank accounts. But in computer science, like many other areas, the University lags behind MIT in donations from industry.

I-Campus

This month, Microsoft and MIT embarked on Microsoft's largest ever collaboration with a university--a five-year, $25 million project aimed at expanding information technology's role in higher education.

This project comes in the wake of two $20 million private donations given by Microsoft executives Gates and Ballmer, one to MIT and one to Harvard. The money is being used to build new labs for technology research at each school.

Last week, Harvard celebrated the dedication of its facility, the Maxwell Dworkin building. MIT's laboratory building is scheduled to be finished in 2004.

MIT's new joint venture with Microsoft, called "I-Campus," hopes to narrow the gap between educational facilities and major technological firms.

Harold Abelson, co-chair of I-Campus, said Microsoft's involvement in this area is different from Gates's and Ballmer's private gifts because it means MIT and Microsoft employees will continue to work together.

"Research contracts are a different thing--you're going into an agreement to develop stuff," Abelson says.

Projects on the I-Campus docket include expansion of the MIT Shakespeare Electronic archive and distance-learning projects.

Microsoft's decision to work with MIT on I-Campus is the first of five collaborative projects with universities that it hopes to fund, Abelson says.

"I believe that Harvard plans to make a relationship like the one MIT has over the next couple of years," Abelson says.

Despite Harvard's proximity to MIT, the two colleges have no current plans to work together on I-Campus. Abelson says this kind of inter-faculty cooperation is rare between universities.

According to Abelson, when collaboration happens among institutions, it is usually "spontaneous" and based upon "common interests."

"Universities are very complicated kinds of beasts," he says. "Both MIT and Harvard have very different kinds of faculty."

Still, already MIT and the National University of Singapore are cooperating to offer classes over the Internet.

"Why should an undergraduate be at only one university?" Abelson says.

In the future, he says, the technology of distance learning may make it possible for Harvard to share facilities and students with universities down the river and across the world.

But for now, facilities like Maxwell Dworkin and projects like I-Campus remain private.

Cornerstone of Choice

Although for the moment, MIT is the bride of choice in this academic-industrial marriage, Microsoft hints that it may find other academic partners in the future. The trade school down the river simply won the honor of being first.

"This alliance [I-Campus] will become the cornerstone for similar alliances which will seek to broadly improve higher education over the next 10 years in the United States," a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an e-mail message.

The spokesperson said Microsoft's experience with MIT should serve as a model for partnerships with other schools.

"Rather than working with many and be spread thin, Microsoft decided to work with one university at a much more engaged level than before," the spokesperson wrote.

This kind of corporate partnership is not confined to MIT's computer science work. It's also in a $30 million, 10-year alliance with biotechnology giant Amgen and a $20 million, five-year alliance with Ford Motor Company.

Other partners include pharmaceutical company Merck, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Merrill Lynch and DuPont.

Microsoft's gift is only the third largest on this list. The school leads the nation in the amount of research funding it receives from private industry, with 20 percent, according to the MIT News Office.

Harvard receives proportionally less research funding from corporate sponsors than MIT does, according to Harvard officials.

"We don't have anything comparable to the MIT alliance [I-Campus]," says Norma M. Allewell, associate vice president for sponsored programs and technology transfer at Harvard's Office of Sponsored Research.