The Spotlight Dance

by Foggy Brume
Answer: MITER

At the start of the hunt, the MIT homepage looked like this:

And this image was added to the Spotlight gallery (http://www.mit.edu/site/gallery/index.html):

Each small cutout is taken from one of the past spotlights shown in this gallery. In order, from left to right:

• Wing Ngan (4th row, 4th image, part of the I)
• Ilavenil Subbiah (4th row, 1st image, part of the I)
• Wing Ngan (last row, 4th image, part of the I)
• Esponjiforme (last row, 1st image, part of the T)
• M. Chang/L. Lalla/H. Oh/Z. Perez (5th row, 4th image, part of the M)
• Ricarose Roque (1st row, 4th image, part of the M)
• Darren Clarke (6th row, 1st image, part of the T)
• B. Linder/M. Wall/J. Yang Pelaez (last row, 3rd image, part of the M)
• Anthony deFigio (5th row, 2nd image, part of the M)
• William Lee (3rd row, 4th image, part of the T)
• A. Hecht, A. Dauchy (4th row, 3rd image, part of the T)
• B. Maron/A. Rabinovich (5th row, 1st image, part of the I)

Each of these cutouts depict part of the M, I, or T in that logo, and lines up with one of the circles taken from the larger spotlight. The letters from those circles can be read (roughly) left to right, top to bottom so that a word is spelled left to right on top and right to left on bottom.

   H E A D
 M=- - - - 
   E R E H
 
   G E A R
 I=- - - -
   E K I L
 
   T Y P E
 T=- - - -
   E R O M

The clue reads HEAD GEAR TYPE MORE LIKE HERE. The answer is MITER (as in "MIT-er").

This image shows where the spotlights correspond to.