The protests that erupted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1960s were an important part of the student unrest that shook the US in this period.
Noam Chomsky has talked sympathetically about these protests, which focused on MIT's development of both nuclear weapons and weapons used in the Vietnam war. However, Chomsky also has a strong loyalty to MIT – at one point describing the university as ‘the freest and the most honest and has the best relations between faculty and students than any other ... [with] a good record on civil liberties’ – and it seems this loyalty has prevented him from giving a full account of these events.
ACCOUNTS FROM MIT'S RADICAL STUDENTS
ACCOUNTS FROM MIT'S NEWSPAPER, 
This sit-in appears to be in, or near, MIT’s Center for International Studies where academics were working with the US military on torture and assassination programmes in Vietnam. (
Here's some more pictures from this period at MIT:
JEROME WIESNER: CHOMSKY'S BOSS
To give an idea of the kind of people who ran MIT in this period, here are some articles by, and about its Provost, Jerome Wiesner. (Wiesner was also the scientist who first employed Chomsky to work at MIT in 1955.)
'Electronics and the Missile', Astronautics, May 1958.
'Prof. Wiesner Explains', The Chicago Tribune, June 1969.
- In this article Wiesner says that he 'helped get the United States ballistic missile program established in the face of strong opposition from the civilian and military leaders of the Air Force and Department of Defense.' He goes on to say that he 'was also a proponent of the Polaris missile system, the ballistic missile early warning system, and the satellite reconnaissance systems.'
'A Secret Seminar', The New York Times, July 1971.
- This article exposed Wiesner's role in the Vietnam War.
'Interview with Jerome Wiesner', WGBH Media Library, March 1986.
- In this video, at 2mins., Wiesner states that he brought nuclear missile research to MIT in the 1950s.
The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War, D.Snead, 1999.
- This book (on page 118) shows how, when Wiesner was on President Eisenhower's 1957 Gaither panel, he made the disingenuous claim that the Soviets 'could produce thousands of ICBMs [Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles] in the next few years.' By also 'urging that the Gaither committee base its conclusions and recommendations on that fact', Wiesner made yet another contribution to the terrifying nuclear weapons build up of the period.
Jerome Wiesner (right) confronted by a student protesting against the Reserve Officer's Training Corps (ROTC) at MIT, 2/6/72:
I was never a huge fan of Chomsky, but I never realized actually how hypocritical, and weirdly naiive, the dude is.
White House cabinet meeting during the Cuba Missile Crisis. Jerome Wiesner is second from the right with a pipe. A few weeks later, in December 1962, Wiesner advised President Kennedy 'to sell Polaris missiles, excluding warheads, at a cost of about $1 million each to the UK.'