From the literature

The Literature faculty at MIT is all about balance. Along with our other humanities colleagues at the Institute, we are here to ensure that MIT’s superlative students have the opportunity for a fully balanced education by complementing the subjects in science or engineering in which many of those students will major. We conduct mainly small, seminar-style classes and afford undergraduates direct and continual interaction with full faculty members–an approach one might expect to find at leading liberal arts colleges such as Williams or Amherst. At the same time, we are committed to hiring and promoting faculty whose scholarly work can compete with that carried out in nationally prominent departments of English, such as those at Berkeley, Stanford, or Harvard, where graduate-level teaching tends to take precedence over undergraduate.