The author introduces William Barton Rogers, conceptual founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who pursued two interrelated careers in nineteenth-century America: one centered on his activities in science and the other on his higher educational reform efforts. This essay explores one theme in Rogers' scientific and educational career, his tenure in the Old South, and situates this career within a context described by this study as the Southern Sieve. After twenty-five years in southern higher education as a professor, researcher, and administrator, Rogers resigned from a distinguished professorship in Virginia. He left for Massachusetts without any prospects for academic employment, exchanging "certainty for uncertainty," as one observer put it. His reflections on the South provide a case with which to understand a broader pattern of migration in which prominent academics left the region for other locales. This pattern, this notion of a Southern Sieve, intersects with long-standing debates in the historiography about the impact of slavery on science and higher learning in the Old South. (Contains 37 footnotes.)