Rate My Professor Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is the Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Department of Linguistics at The University of Arizona, joining the faculty in fall 2017 following his retirement from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At MIT, he served since 1955, starting as an assistant professor, advancing to full professor in 1961, and eventually becoming Institute Professor Emeritus. He founded MIT's graduate program in linguistics alongside Morris Halle. Chomsky earned his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania; his honors BA thesis was "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew," and his PhD thesis, "Transformational Analysis," was completed in 1955 under advisor Zellig Harris. Widely regarded as the founder of modern linguistics, he introduced key concepts including generative grammar, universal grammar, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program, shifting the field from behaviorist approaches critiqued in his review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior.

Chomsky's academic interests center on linguistic theory, syntax, semantics, and philosophy of language, with profound influence extending to cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, computer science, mathematics, childhood education, and anthropology—his development of context-free grammar underpins programming languages and AI systems. He has authored over 100 books and numerous articles; seminal works include Syntactic Structures (1957), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Language and Mind (1968), The Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle, 1968), Lectures on Government and Binding (1981), and The Minimalist Program (1995). Among his major honors are the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences (1988), Helmholtz Medal (1996), and Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science (1999). At The University of Arizona, Chomsky teaches courses such as those on politics and linguistics, delivers public lectures, and mentors students, many of whom are former MIT colleagues or students in the department. He is one of the most cited scholars in modern history and is currently on leave from the university.