Secretary of Commerce (later President) Herbert Hoover had used the occasion of Stratton's departure from government service as an opportunity to bemoan the low salaries paid to government scientists. In January 1923 he became the eighth president of M.I.T. and served for seven years. In his inaugural address he said: "The terms pure and applied science have not the same distinction as formerly. The same men, methods and equipment are involved in getting at the facts, whether they are needed in solving problems in industry or in extending our knowledge of principles. There are few cases of the latter that do not find immediate application." Tying education to industry, he said that industry that had once been slow to seize upon scientific advances was now demanding them. As recounted by Time magazine, "he demonstrated the economic wisdom of generous support for research in pure science. He said that the automotive industry must find a substitute for gasoline, on which the elder Edison commented that the electric storage battery has already filled the bill. Edison looks for all transportation and industry to be electrified." In 1927, he served as one of three members as an Advisory Committee to Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller, along with President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard and Probate Judge Robert Grant. They were tasked with reviewing the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti to determine whether the trial had been fair. Stratton, the one member who was not a Boston Brahmin, maintained the lowest public profile of the three committee members and hardly spoke during its hearings. Upon his retirement in 1930 he became the first chairman of the MIT Corporation under a new plan of organization that he had devised. A lifelong bachelor, Stratton belonged to numerous private clubs. The carpentry he learned in his youth remained a lifelong hobby. France made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1909, and he received honorary degrees from the University of Cambridge and Yale University among others. On October 18, 1931, he died of heart disease at his home in Boston's Back Bay while dictating a tribute to his friend Thomas Edison, who died earlier in the day. He is buried at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena, California. The Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology, formerly the National Bureau of Standards, has presented the Samuel Wesley Stratton Award annually since 1962 for