Changing Partners: The Mellon Institute, Private Industry, and the Federal Patron

Abstract

In 1966, when plans were announced for the merger of the Mellon Institute and Carnegie Institute of Technology, architects of the merger forecast that plus two would equal five. By joining the Mellon Institute's facilities, endowment, and traditions of postdoctoral research the faculty, plant, and graduate programs of neighboring Carnegie Tech, an institution would be created that would make Pittsburgh as famous for science as for steel and thereby restore that city the forefront of technological innovation. Federal research dollars, attracted by powerful science departments, would underwrite this renaissance. Predictably, publicists looked east and west define the new Carnegie-Mellon University; it would soon be ready, wrote one editor, to move into the Olympics of technical education with schools like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology.' The official rhetoric exemplified two assumptions shared by many scientists and science administrators in the postwar era: new technologies often flow from scientific research that is free of practical goals, and federal money is instrumental scientific, institutional, and civic development. These assumptions were not shared by the founders of the Mellon Institute. Conceived on the eve of World War I, the Mellon Institute had, during its first forty years, embodied many of the values of the generation that had made Pittsburgh a 20th-century workshop of the world. Although housed in a magnificently appointed and manycolumned temple, the Mellon Institute had been built, not celebrate