Fortunately, Killian had friends within the MIT administration. He had been appointed to The Tech’s editorial board in March 1924 and then named editor in March 1925. His editorials lambasting the administration frequently resulted in invitations to speak with Harold Lobdell ’17, the assistant dean of students, who was eager to set Killian straight on what was really happening behind the scenes. “‘Lobby’ has mastered an amiably stern adroitness in handling student discipline, and without resorting to discipline, he usually left me fully aware that my diatribes were jejune, revealing an obvious ignorance of academic administration and the amenities of a company of scholars,” Killian related in his book The Education of a College President.
Perhaps Lobdell took interest in the quality of student journalism at MIT because he himself had been The Tech’s managing editor in 1916. In 1920, after training at the National Army’s Officer Candidate School in Plattsburg, New York, and serving as a second lieutenant in the 10th Company 3d Battalion, Depot Brigade, Lobdell had returned to MIT to become assistant to the director of the Division of Industrial Cooperation, and in 1921 he assumed the assistant dean position. In the summer of 1922 he also dived back into journalism when he was named editor of the newly revitalized Technology Review. See “How Technology Review got its start,” January/February 2024.)
As for Killian, in 1925 he not only took the top position at The Tech but was also inducted into Osiris, a secret senior society at MIT—the Institute’s equivalent of Yale’s Skull and Bones club. Intended to bring together student leaders, faculty, and administrators to discuss issues relevant to the Institute, the club had included among its honorary members every MIT president since its founding in 1904, when President Henry Pritchett was inducted. This gave Killian an opportunity to engage in “free-for-all discussion of Institute affairs” (as he described them) after the society’s dinners, during which club rules required that members address each other on a first-name basis.
MIT MUSEUM
Aware that Killian would not be able to graduate with his classmates, Lobdell offered him the job of assistant managing editor of Tech Review so he could stay at the Institute and finish his required courses. Killian, who remained affiliated with the Class of 1926, also became its secretary, making him responsible for chronicling the lives of his classmates as they set off into the world. He was promoted to managing editor of the Review in 1927 and finally graduated in 1929, the year he married a fellow North Carolina native named Elizabeth Parks, whom he had dated during her four years at Wellesley. Lobdell was the best man at the wedding.
When Lobdell became Technology Review’s publisher, in July 1930, Killian became its seventh editor. “However, this change may not be perceptible, for Killian, as Managing Editor of The Review since 1927, has been responsible for the editorial content and make-up for the last three Volumes,” wrote Lobdell in the issue.
Killian also played a role in the creation of the MIT Press. After Die Wasserbaulaboratorien Europas (The Hydraulic Laboratories of Europe) was published in 1926, John R. Freeman, Class of 1876, sponsored its translation into English and its publication in the US. Freeman, a nationally recognized hydraulic engineer who had designed the Charles River Dam, then persuaded MIT president Samuel W. Stratton to pay for the translation and publication of several other important German texts on hydraulic engineering. Stratton put Killian in charge of the project, which eventually grew into the Technology Press in 1932. Renamed the MIT Press in 1961, it became a freestanding publisher in 1962.
Karl Compton became president of MIT in July of 1930. Shortly thereafter, he asked Killian to edit a series of brochures that would promote MIT to high school seniors and potential graduate students. This gave Killian a chance to meet many more people throughout the Institute. Compton also put him in charge of the Alumni Association’s annual fund—a logical choice, given that Killian was also the association’s treasurer.
Two years later, an instructor in electrical engineering came to Killian with stunning photographs that he had made with a new technique. The photographs seemed to stop time, revealing details not otherwise visible to the human eye. That instructor, of course, was Harold E. Edgerton, SM 1927, ScD ’31, who became well known for his work developing and popularizing the electronic flash and high-speed photography.
