Turing's Cathedral Page 6
Some thought the Institute should be closely associated with an existing university; others thought it should be far removed. “It is the multiplicity of its purposes that makes an American University such an unhappy place for a scholar,” advised Veblen. “If you can resist all temptations to do the other good things that might be attempted, your adventure will be a success.”25
Was a paradise for scholars even possible? Historian Charles Beard predicted “death—intellectual death—the end of many a well-appointed monastery in the Middle Ages.” Future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who scrawled, “NEWS FROM PARADISE. Not my style,” across a letter from Flexner, pointed out that “for one thing, the natural history of paradise is none too encouraging as a precedent. Apparently it was an excellent place for one person, but it was fatal even for two.”26
Flexner, who had given away some $600 million over the course of his association with the Rockefeller Foundation, believed that most educational funding had too many strings attached. Now was his chance to try something else. “I should think of a circle, called the Institute for Advanced Study,” he envisioned in 1931. “Within this, I should, one by one, as men and funds are available—and only then—create a series of schools or groups—a school of mathematics, a school of economics, a school of history, a school of philosophy, etc. The ‘schools’ may change from time to time; in any event, the designations are so broad that they may readily cover one group of activities today, quite another group, as time goes on.”27
“The Institute is, from the standpoint of organization, the simplest and least formal thing imaginable,” he explained. “Each school is made up of a permanent group of professors and an annually changing group of members. Each school manages its own affairs as it pleases; within each group each individual disposes of his time and energy as he pleases … The results to the individual and to society are left to take care of themselves.”28 Flexner believed that knowledge, not profit, must be the goal of research. “As a matter of history, the scientific discoveries that have ultimately inured to the benefit of society either financially or socially have been made by men like Faraday and Clerk Maxwell who never gave a thought to the possible financial profit of their work,” he wrote to the editors of Science in 1933, protesting against universities that were beginning to file for patents on their research. This did not mean that benefits should not be expected from pure research. In a Harper’s Magazine essay titled “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” Flexner described the thinking behind the Institute for Advanced Study and argued that “the pursuit of these useless satisfactions proves unexpectedly the source from which undreamed-of utility is derived.”29
After considering a school of economics, both to accommodate the Bambergers and because “the plague is upon us, and one cannot well study plagues after they have run their course,” Flexner decided to start with mathematics. “Mathematics is singularly well suited to our beginning,” he explained to the trustees. “Mathematicians deal with intellectual concepts which they follow out for their own sake, but they stimulate scientists, philosophers, economists, poets, musicians, though without being at all conscious of any need or responsibility to do so.” There were practical advantages to the field as well: “It requires little—a few men, a few students, a few rooms, books, blackboard, chalk, paper, and pencils.”30
There were two other reasons to start with math. Flexner needed to make a strong first impression, and the ranking of talent across mathematics was less subjective than in other fields. He deferred to Veblen as to candidates, explaining to the trustees that “mathematicians, like cows in the dark, all look alike to me.” Second, Flexner knew that to satisfy the Bambergers, and secure the balance of their estate, he had to deliver immediate results. There was an existing mathematical utopia, Fine Hall, available off the shelf. Could Flexner sell this to the Bambergers? “Everybody who wants a teacher of mathematics comes shopping to Princeton,” he wrote to them in Arizona, “just as the people who know what they are after go to L. Bamberger & Company in Newark.”31
The Bambergers remained, as expressed in their original letter, “mindful of our obligations to the community of Newark” and still intended the Institute to be located “in the vicinity of such City.” South Orange was “in the vicinity of Newark,” but was Princeton? “Mr. Bamberger and Mrs. Fuld so clearly intended Newark and its immediate environment that I would hesitate to adopt any other view unless they first modified their letter,” stated Maass. “Enclosed is a current road map for the State of New Jersey,” added Edgar Bamberger, a nephew of Louis who had joined the board of trustees. “You will note that circles have been drawn at ten mile radii, with South Orange Village as a center. Princeton, you will notice, is roughly 35–40 miles by road from South Orange. Kindest personal regards.” Flexner, reluctant to confront the Bambergers directly, began to substitute “in the State of New Jersey” for “in the vicinity of Newark” in the documents being circulated in preparation for the Institute’s launch. The Bambergers, persuaded by his insistence that “it might be difficult to get able lecturers to come to Newark,” eventually acquiesced.32
On June 5, 1932, Oswald Veblen was appointed to the first professorship (effective October 1, 1932) followed by Albert Einstein (effective October 1, 1933). They were joined by John von Neumann, Hermann Weyl, and James Alexander in 1933, and Marston Morse in 1934. “I had to bear in mind the importance of getting together a group, all the members of which would not grow old at the same time,” Flexner explained to Veblen at the end of 1932. “You and Einstein are in the early 50’s, Weyl in the middle 40’s, Alexander in the early 40’s—so that we have protected ourselves against any such fate as befell the deacon’s one horse shay, which, as you remember, fell to pieces all at once without showing any signs of decay during one hundred years.”33 Von Neumann, when hired in January of 1933, had just turned twenty-nine. Princeton University agreed to provide a temporary home for the new institute in Fine Hall.
The Nazis launched their purge of German universities in April 1933, and the exodus of mathematicians from Europe—with Einstein leading the way to America—began just as the Institute for Advanced Study opened its doors. “The German developments are going bad and worse, the papers today wrote of the expulsion of 36 university professors, ½ of the Göttingen mathematics and physics faculty,” von Neumann reported to Flexner on April 26. “Where will this lead, if not to the ruin of science in Germany?”34
Flexner, the Bambergers, and Veblen had envisioned a refuge from the mind-numbing departmental bureaucracy of American universities, not the humanitarian disaster from which their sanctuary now offered an escape. “The Institute was a beacon in the descending darkness,” wrote Director Harry Woolf in 1980, reflecting on the first fifty years, “a gateway to a new life, and for a very few a final place within which to continue to work and transmit to others the style and the techniques of great learning from the other shore.”35 Veblen assumed the chairmanship of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Emergency Committee for Displaced German Scholars, using Rockefeller money and the promise of temporary appointments at the Institute to counter the twin misfortunes of anti-Semitism in Europe and a depression in the United States.
The problem was how to squeeze displaced scholars into a shrinking job market without provoking the very anti-Semitism those scholars were trying to escape. The United States offered non-quota visas to teachers and professors, but with insufficient openings for American candidates, finding positions for the refugees, especially in Princeton, was a difficult sell. An invitation to the Institute for Advanced Study allowed Princeton University, historically resistant to Jewish students and faculty, to reap the benefits of the refugee scientists without incurring any of the associated costs. The arrival of Einstein helped open the door. Princeton, despite its role in the American Revolution, had become one of the more conservative enclaves in the United States, “a quaint and ceremonious little village of puny demigods on stilts,” as Einstein described
it to the Queen of Belgium in 1933.36
Veblen pushed not only for academic positions but for land: enough to establish a refuge for wildlife as well as a refuge for ideas. “There is no educational institution in the United States which has not in the beginning made the mistake of acquiring too little rather than too much land,” he wrote to Flexner, urging the acquisition of “a sufficiently large plot of land, which would thus be kept free from objectionable intruders.” Flexner, who favored investing in scholarship over real estate, was gradually persuaded. “I have it in mind now to go down to Princeton quietly for a week or so for the purpose of familiarizing myself with the general situation, for that may help us in our final choice,” he reported in October 1932. “I should like to be away from undergraduate activities and close to graduate activities.”37
There was no turning back, once word leaked out that the Institute was looking for a home. “The fact that we propose to locate in the vicinity of Princeton is now a matter of public knowledge to such an extent that, I believe, we are being made the victim of a distinct firming up in prices, and that we had better attempt to come to an early decision,” Maass advised Flexner in November 1932. “If we are going to have inflation, would it not be well to speed up the land question?” Veblen argued. “At least two of the proposed sites seem good to me.” Despite the Bambergers complaining about “a policy of acquiring so much land for an institution that proclaimed not size but highest standards,” Veblen persisted, and by 1936 some 256 acres had been purchased for a total of $290,000, including the 200-acre Olden Farm.38 The property included Olden Manor (the former William Olden house, now the director’s residence), a cluster of farm workers’ houses at the end of Olden Lane, and a large working barn.
“I think it would be prudent for the present to keep the matter quiet,” Flexner wrote to Bamberger in October 1935. “Though I do not wish to criticize either Mr. Maass or Professor Veblen, I think there is some danger that they will both be too enthusiastic about the acquisition of additional land.” The Bambergers responded, as Maass reported to Flexner in December, by “[playing] Santa Claus by paying for the land.”39 Over the next few years, Veblen drove a series of tough bargains with Depression-strapped landowners to extend the Institute’s holdings to a total of 610 acres, including the land bordering Stony Brook that now constitutes the Institute Woods. “I have walked over the new property of the Institute several times since there has been a hard crust on top of the snow,” he reported in early 1936. “This enables one to explore the woods down near the brook much better than one will be able to after the ground gets soft again.”40 Veblen arranged to have forty thousand evergreen seedlings from the state nursery in Washington Crossing planted on Institute property in April 1938.
In 1937, after the failure of negotiations that would have seen the Springdale Golf Club build a new clubhouse on Institute property and allow the Institute to occupy the old clubhouse (formerly Stockton’s farm) on College Road, it was decided to begin construction of an Institute headquarters in the middle of Olden Farm, on level ground about halfway between Olden Manor and Stony Brook. The Bambergers, long opposed to spending money on buildings, changed their minds. Being snubbed by the old guard at the golf club may have helped.
Fuld Hall was an expanded version of Fine Hall, transplanted away from the university and given room to grow. The mathematicians played chess in the common room while the trustees played cards in the board rooms upstairs. “They were all friends—original friends of Mr. Bamberger,” recalls Herman Goldstine. “Maass was his lawyer; Leidesdorf was his pinochle-playing crony and accountant, and that’s how they were on the board. These people like Lewis Strauss were all of the kind of Jewish merchant princes, if you will.”41
The Institute academic year, divided into two terms, extended from October through April, with a generous winter break in between and no duties or responsibilities except to be in residence at the Institute during term—amounting to about half the year. “The other half of the year the staff will be technically on vacation,” it was reported in 1933, “but Dr. Flexner has found that those engaged in research often do their best work while ‘on vacation.’ ” Flexner believed in generous remuneration for the permanent faculty, noting that although wealth might invite distractions from academic work, “it does not follow that, because riches may harm him, comparative poverty aids him.” This generosity was not extended to visitors, “for on high stipends members will be reluctant to leave.” Despite the Depression, and the war, faculty salaries continued to go up. “Professor Earle, who is extremely grateful for the increase in his salary, has been driven by his conscience to raise the uneasy question as to whether such increases in salary as we have recently made and are making are legal,” Frank Aydelotte, Flexner’s successor, noted in 1945.42
Princeton University professors referred to “the Institute for Advanced Salaries,” while Princeton University graduate students referred to “the Institute for Advanced Lunch.” The Institute was the unacknowledged realization of Thorstein Veblen’s original call (in 1918) for “a freely endowed central establishment where teachers and students of all nationalities, including Americans with the rest, may pursue their chosen work as guests of the American academic community at large.”43 Despite Flexner’s claims to paradise, Veblen’s mathematicians never quite regained the informal camaraderie that had permeated the computing shacks at Aberdeen or the early days of Fine Hall.
Flexner’s own tenure was short-lived. He started out determined to avoid “dull and increasingly frequent meetings of committees, groups, or the faculty itself. Once started, this tendency toward organization and formal consultation could never be stopped.”44 However, after a number of unwelcome decisions on his part, including two permanent appointments to the ill-fated School of Economics and Politics, the faculty held a series of meetings that bordered on revolt. Flexner resigned on October 9, 1939, and was replaced (bypassing any ambitions on the part of Veblen) by his understudy, Frank Aydelotte, a Louisville schoolteaching colleague who had become president of Swarthmore College (and an influential Quaker sympathizer), and who, by not belonging to either camp, was able to keep the scientists and the humanists in line.
Despite his lifelong support of scholarship, Flexner never claimed to belong to the club himself. “I, alas, have never been a scholar, for two years at the Johns Hopkins between 1884–1886 do not produce scholarship—though they do produce and did produce a reverence for it which I am now leaving in safe keeping with you,” he wrote when turning over the directorship to Aydelotte in 1939. Flexner was deeply hurt by the faculty rebellion that pushed him out. Von Neumann remained neutral, and never forgot that it was Flexner’s lifeline that had allowed him to stay in the United States. The feelings were reciprocal. “Flexner’s attitude towards Johnny was real fun to watch,” says Klári. “It was a mixture of an uncle towards a favorite nephew and a circus trainer showing off the magnificent tricks that his trained lion can do.”45
Aydelotte, who had been a trustee of the Institute from the beginning, presided with great diplomacy through World War II, granting leave to those, such as von Neumann, Veblen, and Morse, who were engaged in the war effort, while preserving a refuge for those who were not. “In these grim days when the lights are going out all over Europe and when such illumination as we have in the blackout is likely to come, figuratively as well as literally, from burning cities set on fire by incendiary bombs, some men might question the justification for the expenditure of funds on Humanistic Studies—on epigraphy and archaeology, on paleography and the history of art,” he reported in May 1941. He could not announce that the Institute was already engaged in behind-the-scenes support for work on atomic bombs, but he did announce the Institute’s unwavering support for “the critical study of that organized tradition which we call civilization and which it is the purpose of this war to preserve. We cannot, and in the long run will not, fight for what we do not understand.”46
Aydelotte was succeeded by J
. Robert Oppenheimer in 1947, who presided until 1966. Whereas Flexner and Aydelotte had both been skilled teachers and educational administrators, but not scientists, Oppenheimer was both a first-rate scientist and a skilled administrator, as well as a connoisseur of history and art. The poet T. S. Eliot, who had been invited by Aydelotte and listed The Cocktail Party (1950) as his only “publication related to IAS residence,” arrived at Oppenheimer’s “intellectual hotel” as the first Director’s Visitor for the fall term of 1948.47
The School of Mathematics opened in 1933, followed by the School of Humanistic Studies in 1934 and the School of Economics and Politics in 1935. The School of Historical Studies (amalgamating the humanists and economists) was formed in 1949, and the School of Natural Sciences was formed as an offshoot from Mathematics in 1966. The School of Social Science was established in 1973. Every decade or so there had been an attempt to smuggle a biologist into the Institute, starting with J. B. S. Haldane in 1936. “Haldane was interested in the applications of mathematics to biological phenomena,” Veblen explained to Flexner, arguing that bringing in a biologist would not require starting another school. “The exact field to which he proposed to make the applications is genetics.” Haldane declined the invitation, saying that he “was going to Spain to help with the defense of Madrid against a gas attack threatened by German and Italian invaders.”48 Sixty years later, a temporary group in theoretical biology was established in 1999, and a permanent Center for Systems Biology in 2005.
Two different Institutes have managed to coexist. “One, which was adopted more by the historical school,” according to Deane Montgomery, “is that it’s a group of great scholars who occasionally communicate with the public and who have great thoughts. They tended more to think of it as a lifetime fellowship for themselves.” Veblen, adds Montgomery, “said he and Einstein and Weyl didn’t feel up to that.”49 The other Institute was the annually changing group of mostly young visitors at the beginning of their careers, interspersed with occasional established scholars taking a year off. Benoît Mandelbrot, who arrived at von Neumann’s invitation in the fall of 1953 to begin a study of word frequency distributions (sampling the occurrence of probably, sex, and Africa) that would lead to the field known as fractals, notes that the Institute “had a clear purpose and a rather strange structure in which to assemble people: heavenly bodies in residence, and then nobody, nobody, nobody, and then mostly young people. Now it has a much more balanced distribution in terms of age and fame.” Mandelbrot got along wonderfully with von Neumann, admiring how he “had accumulated a number of people who were not part of the Princeton pigeon holes,” while observing that among the visiting scholars, “everybody else had the dreadful feeling that this may be the best year of their life, so why wasn’t it more enjoyable?”50 The freedom from day-to-day responsibilities came at the expense of a pervasive and sometimes crippling expectation to do something remarkable with one’s year off.