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The following feature story appeared in the campus publication Mosaic in March, 1996.
Philip Khoury '71
Making an impact on a technological world
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a reputation as the world's leading center of technological and scientific education, with a fast paced, workaholic, and extremely competitive institutional culture. But MIT has many aspects, and it is also the site of a blossoming conversation between technologists and humanists.
"We are fighting the good fight for greater undergraduate awareness of humanistic studies-so that when our undergraduates leave, they do so with something that begins to approach an education rather than a professional certificate in bridge-building or fiber optics," said Philip S. Khoury '71, dean of MIT's School of Humanities and Social Science and a professor of history.
"When I came here, the world of science and technology was totally foreign to me," said Khoury, who joined MIT's faculty in 1981 and is now responsible for all instruction in the humanities and social sciences. "But this is a place with low barriers between disciplines, and people are increasingly willing to cross those barriers to work together," Khoury said.
Khoury is a leading historian of the modern Middle East, whose most recent book, Syria and the French Mandate, won the American Historical Association's prestigious George Louis Beer Prize. A specialist in urban politics and Arab nationalism, Khoury's work now explores the impact of war on society in the 20th century Middle East.
He found his vocation as an undergraduate at Trinity. "I'd always been interested in history and political science-my mother served for many years as a Lebanese diplomat in Washington-and history was well taught at my school." But it was his encounter with historian McKim Steele that made the difference. "Those were turbulent days in American colleges, and he was just about the only faculty member talking and teaching about subjects like imperialism and places like the Middle East and North Africa. More than anyone else, he taught me the value of interdisciplinary studies.
"Because of Kim, I also began to take more of an intellectual interest in my own background and then I got very interested in the history and politics of the Middle East." Steele encouraged him to study abroad - a junior year in Beirut - and helped him to design an individualized major in Arab studies.
During his doctoral studies at Harvard, he spent a Watson Fellowship year traveling in the Middle East and two years as a fellow and tutor at Oxford University. After receiving his Ph.D. in history, he moved two stops down Boston's Red Line to MIT.
"Some humanists never feel comfortable here - they seem to want to be in a big department surrounded by people like themselves - but MIT has always been exciting to me because of the mix of humanists, social scientists, natural scientists and engineers," Khoury said.
"Humanists tend to think in contextual, synthetic, and qualitative terms, while the engineers and scientists tend to be quantitative, reductionist, and analytic in their problem-solving," he said. "But especially among the engineers there's a growing interest in understanding the larger social and cultural context for their work and in synthesis. We don't have a perfect model here yet, but we're on the way to a real integration of technological and humanistic approaches to education."
MIT attracts very few history majors and many of his division's students are fulfilling distribution requirements. "They get excited in our courses because classes are small and we give them more attention than they get in their enormous engineering and basic science classes," Khoury said.
The challenge of erasing the barriers dividing the humanities, social and natural sciences eventually drew Khoury into administration. He became dean in 1991. "As a result, I'm not able to practice my trade at the same level that I was used to. I didn't go into academic life to be an administrator, but this is pretty interesting."
This is a particularly demanding moment, Khoury noted, because American higher education is poised at the brink of enormous changes, pressed by high costs and by technological innovations that some believe could replace campuses and classrooms with electronic networks. "I can't imagine a campus without students, but we must rethink the ways in which we provide funding, labs, classrooms, and instruction."
The pressure to innovate and to integrate disciplines is substantial and exciting, he said. And despite its reputation as a seedbed of high technology, MIT has work to do. "We're good at the cutting edge stuff," Khoury said, "but not necessarily at practical applications. We're not the most most 'wired' and up-to-date place."
- Andrew Walsh