Charles M. Vest, who as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology oversaw an expansion in research and online education and increased the number of women and minority group members in leadership positions, died on Thursday at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 72.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, the university said in a statement.
Dr. Vest was M.I.T.'s 15th president, and his tenure, from 1990 to 2004, was the third-longest in the university's 152-year history.
During those years the university put more research money and effort into fields like life sciences, nanotechnology and new media as its endowment ballooned to $5.1 billion from $1.4 billion. The growth was largely a result of Dr. Vest's success in securing large gifts as M.I.T. sought to reduce the university's dependence on federal largess.
After Dr. Vest asked faculty members to find new ways to use the Internet to extend M.I.T.'s reach, he oversaw the beginning, in 2002 of the OpenCourseWare project. Through its website, the project offers free exams, syllabuses and other materials for more than 2,000 M.I.T. courses and invites users to earn certificates for coursework.
The project was a model for other universities in developing so-called massive open online courses. Last year, M.I.T. began an online-learning partnership with Harvard called edX.
L. Rafael Reif, the president of M.I.T., said of Dr. Vest in a statement that "there was no better example of his vision and values than the creation of M.I.T. OpenCourseWare — the simple, elegant, unprecedented idea that M.I.T. should make all of its course materials available online to anyone in the world, for free."
Dr. Vest won praise for his efforts to improve the lot of women in the sciences at M.I.T. In a 1999 report they said they felt "marginalized and excluded" from senior roles in their departments while male colleagues enjoyed better salaries, resources and opportunities.
"I have always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception," Dr. Vest wrote in the report's introduction. "True, but now I understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance."
Nancy Hopkins, an M.I.T. biologist who led the panel of 16 scientists, all women, who wrote the report, said of Dr. Vest in an interview that instead of defending the university, "he said, 'I see it. I get it. And we're going to take it on.'"
In response to the report, Dr. Vest appointed almost a dozen women and members of racial minorities to leadership positions — including five women as vice presidents and the first African-American chancellor. And by the end of his tenure, minority-group members made up 20 percent of undergraduates, up from 14 percent, and women constituted 42 percent of undergraduates, up from 34 percent.
In 2001, eight other elite universities, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford, joined with M.I.T. in agreeing to work to end discrimination against female faculty members in the fields of science and engineering. "I couldn't imagine in my life that any president would understand it and take it on, and he did it so gracefully," Professor Hopkins said. "And the world changed."
Charles Marstiller Vest was born on Sept. 9, 1941, in Morgantown, W. Va. He earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from West Virginia University and master's and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan.
He joined the faculty at Michigan as an associate professor in 1968 and was the provost and vice president of academic affairs before departing for M.I.T. in 1990.
While president of M.I.T., Dr. Vest served on an advisory committee appointed by President Bill Clinton concerning the redesign of the International Space Station. He was appointed by President George W. Bush to a commission that concluded in a report released in 2005 that federal intelligence agencies had been "dead wrong" in reporting the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the United States invaded in 2003.
Dr. Vest moved to Arlington after stepping down as M.I.T. president and was the president of the National Academy of Engineering from 2007 until early this year. In 2004 he published a book of essays about his time at M.I.T., "Pursuing the Endless Frontier."
He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Rebecca; a daughter, Kemper Vest Gay; a son, John; and four grandchildren.
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