MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory was reconstituted as the independent nonprofit Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc. in 1973

Draper Laboratory's own institutional history states that the separation from MIT happened in 1973 and describes the resulting entity as "an independent, not-for-profit corporation" named The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc. — after Charles Stark Draper, the Instrumentation Lab's founder and, as of the 1969 Pounds Panel report, its director for "more than 25 years." Wikipedia's Draper Laboratory article corroborates the same year and legal form. Both sources converge without contradiction, and this is consistent with — though it does not re-derive — the already quote-verified MIT Technology Review sentence in claim-mit-1973-divested-instrumentation-lab-as-draper-under-antiwar-protest: "In 1973, MIT severed its affiliation with the Instrumentation Lab (today it's the Draper Lab, a private entity)."

Draper.com was reached via WebFetch, a summarizing layer, so its wording above is paraphrase only, not an admissible source_quote under this vault's quote-provenance rule; the year and legal form are recorded as Tier-3/4-corroborated historical fact, which clears the sourcing floor for an uncontested date/legal-form claim.

A more precise day-level date circulates in secondary aggregators (some give "July 1, 1973") but was not confirmed against a Tier 1-2 source this session — no MIT Corporation minute or articles of incorporation was located or read. That specific day is [unverified-quant — needs primary] and should not be treated as settled; the year 1973 itself is not in doubt.

This is the outcome the 1969 Pounds Panel review anticipated as one of several possible paths, several years before it happened.