MIT -- Spreading the Wealth

Four years after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled a plan to make all its course materials available online for all the world to use, Anne H. Margulies still gets asked one question more than any other: “Why would MIT give this all away?”
“I got that very question from my cab driver on the way over here,” Margulies, executive director of OpenCourseWare, said at a luncheon this week sponsored by the National Academies Forum on Information Technology and Research Universities. She spent the session both answering that question and explaining to the government officials and technology administrators in the room why MIT officials, in the face of a countervailing movement to “lock information and knowledge down,” continue to believe so passionately in what they call “intellectual philanthropy.”
First and foremost, says Margulies, “this advances our core institutional mission of disseminating knowledge and education.” But it has benefited MIT in other ways, buffing its public image, building collaboration even among its own professors, even (unexpectedly) attracting students: One in seven of MIT freshmen surveyed last year said the existence of the OpenSourceWare effort had influenced their decision to enroll.

Full Story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/04/07/mit