James R. Killian Jr.

American education administrator and science-policy leader (1904–1988), president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the first Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology.

James Rhyne Killian Jr. led MIT as its tenth president (1948–1959) and later chaired the MIT Corporation. In the wake of the Soviet launch of Sputnik, President Dwight D. Eisenhower named him the nation's first full-time presidential science advisor in 1957, a post from which he helped shape federal science and technology policy during the early space age.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: contemporary. Killian was a contemporary of R. Buckminster Fuller who shared a lectern with him in the Franklin Lectures in the Sciences and Humanities at Auburn University, published as Approaching the Benign Environment. In that volume Fuller argued for "Education for Comprehensivity" while Killian contributed "Toward a Working Partnership of the Sciences and Humanities," a pairing that placed Fuller's comprehensive-design vision beside Killian's institutional case for bridging the sciences and humanities.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure
• Approaching the Benign Environment (Approaching the Benign Environment) — the Auburn Franklin Lectures volume they both contributed to

Sources

• Compiled from general knowledge and corpus mentions; no single work in this corpus anchors this figure.