Post-Postgraduates

Princeton, N.J. has one school whose teachers do not count on teaching their students a single solitary fact. It is the ten-year-old Institute for Advanced Study, which has no administrative connection with Princeton University. Its faculty of 16 includes Albert Einstein. Its 28 students do post-postgraduate research, have freely elected their teachers and studies. They are so expert in their fields that they are presumably aware of all the known facts involved. All that the Institute's teachers hope to do is to broaden and deepen their students' points of view toward their subjects by joint approaches from new angles. The students hear few formal lectures, take no examinations, get no degrees.

Last week, however, many were hard at work in the kind of abstruse study which used to be a European specialty. Among the Institute's teachers:

> Albert Einstein has added to his effort to unify theories of gravitational and electrical forces an attempt to solve U.S. Navy mathematico-physical problems (TIME, July 5). His aureole of white hair droops in summer's heat, a string upholds his cheap blue denim pants. Says he: "Here we cook with water." Interpreted a colleague: "We perform no miracles." A current item of Einsteiniana titillating the Institute: on one of his blackboards bearing a brain-taxing mathematical equation, the charwoman found the word "Erase." On another blackboard, marked "Do not erase," was blazoned the formula "2 + 2=4."

> Archeologist Benjamin Dean Meritt is deciphering 6,000 pre-Christian Greek inscriptions. Said suave, barrel-chested North Carolinian Meritt: "Some are right interesting." For 1945 publication, he and Assistant, W. Kendrick Pritchett (now in the Army) have planned a who's who of some 30,000 Athenians mentioned in Meritt's collected inscriptions. Meritt is proud of U.S. archeology, says the long-dominant German variety has declined.

> Historian Edward Mead Earle, who is attached to Air Forces Headquarters, is riding his prewar hobby: U.S. military policy as an aspect of foreign policy. Says he: "We do not study military tactics but the relationship of military power and strategy to American foreign policy and world politics." Today Earle's seminar produces studies which the U.S. armed forces often consult.

> Gentle, affable, pink-eyebrowed Oswald Veblen (nephew of the late great economist-sociologist Thorstein Bunde Veblen) is doing a war job for the Government, having temporarily ceased working on spinors. Asked for a simple, lay definition of spinors, the mathematician shrugged and smiled. He has left behind topology, which he defines simply as "the theory of the properties of a body which are unchanged when you make any continuous deformation."

>Hungarian Mathematician John von Neumann is in tandem with Princeton's Economist Oskar ("Business Cycles") Morgenstern. They will produce an 800-page mathematician's-eye view of economic phenomena.

The Institute flourishes in a single handsome red-brick building, Fuld Hall, at the west end of town. Fuld is surrounded by lush Institute acres--site of the Revolutionary Battle of Princeton. The Institute's founders, Louis Bamberger (of the great Newark department store) and his sister, Mrs. Felix Fuld, have given the scholars $8,000,000 worth of scholarly apparatus and comforts.

To the Roots. Professorial chambers are anywhere from twice to four times the size of those enjoyed at most rich universities. Paleographer Elias Avery Lowe got extra windows so that he might decipher ancient texts without eyestrain. Archeologist Ernst Herzfeld got a sunken floor to admit outsize cases for Persian treasures. Salaries are above general scholarly levels. No professor has administrative chores. Professors may have vacations of about three months twice a year--but rarely take them.

Shepherding the scholars is the Institute's second Director, Frank Aydelotte. The first was Abraham Flexner, long-secretary of the Rockefeller General Education Board, who conceived the Institute to help the Bambergers usefully divest themselves of a piece of their fortune. Kindly, eary Aydelotte, onetime president of Swarthmore College, has reigned smoothly in Fuld Hall for four years. A specialist in Elizabethan literature, he hastens to admit that his professors are usually far beyond him in their special fields. He hopes that the Institute is influencing U.S. education right down to its foundations. Believing that the best teachers must also be functioning, creative scholars, he deplores the fact that few Ph.D.s do research once they have acquired their degrees. Says he:

"The most important thing that can come out of the Institute is not the absolute contribution of an Einstein, great as it may be, but the general flow of attitudes toward study and research, which can seep down to the very roots of education. Our purpose is to be of the utmost possible service to general American scholarship."

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