 Still , as late as 1949 , the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at MIT that " the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school " , a " partly unjustified " perception the committee sought to change . The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum , recommended offering a broader education , and warned against letting engineering and government @-@ sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities . The School of Humanities , Arts , and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering . Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics , management , political science , and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs . The School of Humanities , Arts , and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980 . 
