Paradise in Princeton

Arnold Toynbee, inarticulate and somber, lunching daily on one banana and two apples. Albert Einstein, vainly seeking one more climactic insight, trudging home, declining rides, saying, "I must walk. I must walk." Physicist Paul A. M. Dirac, coatless in the coldest weather, striding the grounds, muffler flying. Physicist Wolfgang Pauli, while sipping tea in the faculty lounge, writing non-existent equations on an imaginary blackboard, then rubbing them out with an equally imaginary eraser.

Presumably, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J., would not mind terribly if one of its resident experts wanted to dance naked on the lawn in order to think better. For this is the first and only goal of a "university" that has neither students nor classes, and conducts seminars that no one is obliged to attend. Now 36 years old, the Institute is a unique haven for scholars to think, ponder and grow wise, shielded from life's more mundane distractions and freed from normal academic obligations. "The one thing we will never ask you," Institute Director J. Robert Oppenheimer tells newcomers, is 'What are you doing?' "

"Perfectly Informed." Last week, with typical lack of fanfare, Oppenheimer, who is 62 and ailing, retired after 19 years as the Institute's director, although he will stay on in the physics chair once occupied by Einstein. His successor is Harvard Economist Carl Kaysen, 46, an energetic generalist who has been a weapons consultant to the Pentagon, an antitrust scholar, a foreign affairs adviser to President Kennedy. A rare breed for the Institute, he is not a noted specialist in anything, but his Harvard colleague, J. Kenneth Galbraith, calls him "the most perfectly informed man I have ever known."

The Institute, which has no formal ties to nearby Princeton University, lives mainly off the income from a $19 million endowment given to it by New Jersey Department Store Owner Louis Bamberger and his sister, Mrs. Felix Fuld. They did so at the suggestion of Medical Education Reformer Abraham Flexner, the Institute's first director, who convinced them of "the usefulness of useless knowledge." It now has 23 permanent "professors," each of whom was selected by the vote of the other professors and who get about $24,000 for a seven-month academic year. In addition there are 100 "members" who stay at the Institute only a year or two. Also chosen by the Institute's professors, members get $15,000 or less, scaled to the size of their family and outside income. Neither professors nor members are required to publish the results of their speculations.

Massive Pre-Eminence. The Institute is organized vaguely into a School of Mathematics, a School of Historical Studies, and a School of Natural Sciences composed mostly of physicists. All are devoted to "pure" rather than practical research--so pure that the physicists do not even have laboratories. One of the few bitter faculty clashes in the Institute's history was a fight over whether to retain the engineers brought in by Hungarian Mathematician John von Neumann to build a huge digital computer he had designed. The professors not only voted out the "hardware" men--but the computer as well. Less painfully, Oppenheimer in 1950 quietly phased out a school of economists who turned out to be more interested in advising Government and industry than in scholarly theorizing.

Oppenheimer set up a director's fund that has provided short-term professorships for such untypical Institute intellectuals as Critic Kenneth Burke and Psychologist Jerome Bruner. But Oppenheimer has resisted pressure to broaden the Institute's scope with the argument that it is better to do a few things well. Justifiably, he can claim that the Institute has achieved "massive preeminence" in theoretical mathematics. It was at the Institute that Von Neumann developed his games theory, and his speculations on programming, which proved essential to the development of the computer. Hermann Weyl polished his "group representations" approach to the analysis of differential equations at the Institute.

The Institute has achieved almost equal renown in physics, thanks in part to the presence of such formative thinkers as Einstein and Niels Bohr. Discoveries recorded there include Oppenheimer's work in particle physics, George Placzek's separation of slow neutrons from solids. Among its historians, probably the most influential is Art Historian Erwin Panofksy, author of the definitive biography of Duerer.

Temperature Charts. Acting on the theory that its experts may be just moments away from some momentous discovery, the small Institute staff solicitously seeks to answer every reasonable human need. Because Mathematician Kurt Goedel is acutely sensitive to heat and cold, the temperature variations in his office were carefully charted for a month before he took occupancy. When Physicist Dirac's thoughtful walks were disturbed by a trailing dog, the staff sniffed out its owners, asked them to keep it at home. Even the members' own children are banned from the Institute's eight small, mostly red brick buildings, can run and shout only in the nearby faculty "project," which consists of two-story garden apartments. The passion for privacy is so great that Greek Historian Harold Cherniss, whose secretary recently failed to block a telephone call, barked into the phone: "This interruption is an outrage."

A community of intellectual giants is not always sweetly harmonious, and over the years there has been less interchange of ideas than the Institute would have liked. The young mathematicians talk mainly to each other, probably because no one else can understand them. Older continental scholars frown at younger types who lunch without coat and tie. Some U.S. social scientists quietly sneer at the work of their European counterparts as pedantic and isolated from contemporary currents. Yet since most of the scholars are at the top of their fields, there is little jockeying for prestige and plenty of mutual respect. "This is a sort of paradise," says Literary Historian Marjorie Hope Nicolson, 72, former head of Columbia's English Department. And Philosopher Morton White calls it "a cosmopolitan island in the middle of suburbia, a place of refuge in which every moment is precious."

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