during Walker's first Commencement exercises, Rogers died mid-speech where his last words were famously "bituminous coal". MIT's inability to secure a more stable financial footing during this era can largely be attributed to the existence of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. Given the choice between funding technological research at the oldest university in the nation, or at an independent and adolescent institution, potential benefactors were indifferent or even hostile to funding MIT's competing mission. Earlier overtures from Harvard President Charles William Eliot towards consolidation of the two schools were rejected or disrupted by Rogers in 1870 and 1878. Despite his tenure at the analogous Sheffield School of Yale University, Walker remained committed to MIT's independence from a larger institution. Walker also repeatedly received overtures from Leland Stanford to become the first president of his new university in Palo Alto, California, but Walker remained committed to MIT owing to his Boston upbringing. Aid and expansion In light of the difficulties in raising capital for these expansions and despite MIT's privately endowed status, Walker and other members of the Corporation lobbied the Massachusetts legislature for a $200,000 grant to aid in the industrial development of the Commonwealth ($ in 2016 dollars). After intensive negotiations that called upon Walker's extensive connections and civic experience, in 1887 the legislature made a grant of $300,000 over two years to the Institute, which would lead to a total of $1.6 million in grants from the Commonwealth before the practice was discontinued in 1921. Walker sought to erect a new building to address the increasingly cramped conditions of the original Boylston Street campus located near Copley Square, in the increasingly fashionable and crowded Back Bay neighborhood of Boston. Because the stipulations of the original land grant prevented MIT from covering more than two-ninths of its current lot, Walker announced his intention to build the industrial expansion on a lot directly across from the Trinity Church fully intending that expected opposition would lead to favorable terms for selling the proposed land and funding construction elsewhere. With the financial health of the Institute only beginning to recover, Walker began construction on the partially-funded expansion, fully expecting the immediacy of the project to be a persuasive tool for raising its funds. The strategy was only partially successful, as the 1883 building had laboratory facilities that were second-to-none but also lacked the outward architectural grandeur of its sister building and