【宏觀視野】The Development of Institutes for Advanced Study and Their Role in the Contemporary University
【宏觀視野】
The Development of Institutes for Advanced Study and Their Role in the Contemporary University*
Peter Goddard
Former Director, Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, USA
It is a great pleasure to be in Nagoya for this UBIAS conference and to have the opportunity of discussing the development of institutes for advanced study with so many colleagues from around the world. The Institute for Advanced Study(IAS) in Princeton, founded in 1930, can claim, perhaps, to be the first such academic institution of this kind. Its example was followed quite quickly and, in recent years, institutes for advanced study have been founded in ever increasing numbers.
Institutions like ours might seem like rather tiny cherries on the academic cake, an adornment added as an afterthought, not really part of the main recipe and relatively insubstantial. Here I want to discuss the motivations for the creation and development of institutes for advanced study, their early history, in particular that of the IAS in Princeton, and the reasons for their recent proliferation; and to argue that these are intimately connected with the challenges presented by the evolution of universities over the last two centuries and that they face today. And, although a tiny part of the world of higher education and research, institutes for advanced study have more to offer to address these challenges than might appear from their relative smallness.
Probably, the first suggestion for establishing what came to be called an institute for advanced study was made just a hundred years ago in The Higher Learning in America, a remarkable book written during the First World War by the Norwegian-American sociologist and economist, Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), the man who coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption."
In this prescient and rather sardonic book, published in 1918, he proposed the "the installation of a freely endowed central establishment where teachers and students of all nationalities [……] may pursue their chosen work," and added "There should also be nothing to hinder the installation of more than one of these houses of refuge and entertainment," which I have always thought a nice term for an institute for advanced study.
Veblen's book was subtitled a Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, commenting on the consequences, as he saw them, of the transference of control over the governance of universities from clerics, men of the church, to men of business, which had taken place in Europe and the United States in the 19th century. As he put it, "the consequences [of the] habitual pursuit of business in modern times [……] for the ideals, aims and methods of the scholars and schools devoted to the higher learning."
He argued that they would lead to the introduction of systems of "standardization, accountancy and piece-work" into the academic life of the university and thus in turn to the replacement of "scholarly ideals" with "perfunctory routine mediocrity."
For Veblen, research and the advancement of knowledge was the defining characteristic of the university, as opposed to the American undergraduate college: he wrote that the "university is the only institution of modern culture on which the quest for knowledge unquestionably devolves" and he took the view that the teaching of students only had a place in the university in so far as it "incites and facilitates the work of inquiry"—that is that the education of students should not be the primary aim of university.
This view, perhaps extreme, was the literal antithesis of The Idea of the University, as articulated more than sixty years earlier by John Henry Newman (1801-1890) in his famous book, often cited (in some cases, I fear, by people who have read no more than its title) as the definite articulation of the concept of a university. But the purpose of Cardinal Newman's university was, as he put it, "the diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than its advancement," arguing, exactly contrary to Veblen, that "if its objective were scientific and philosophical discovery, the university would not have students." Further Newman thought that the involvement of the church was needed for the integrity of the university and to enable it to achieve its objectives.
Newman was, I think, defending the old order against the German idea of the modern research university, initiated by Wilhelm von Humbolt (1767-1835) in Berlin in the early nineteenth century, based on Freidrich Schleiermacher's (1768-1834) liberal ideas on academic freedom, and the importance of seminars, laboratories and research. The object, as Schleiermacher put it, was to make it "second nature for [the students] to view everything from the perspective of scholarship [……] and thus acquire the ability to carry out research, to make discoveries."
These ideas influenced the development of universities in the United States. The American Colleges and universities had been founded largely following British models, with strong religious affiliations, following restricted syllabuses and training students as schoolteachers, priests, lawyers, and so on. However, in the second half of the 19th century, American scholars, who had studied in Germany, returned home to become professors and university presidents. These included Charles William Eliot (1834-1926), who served as President of Harvard for forty years from 1869 to 1909, and Daniel Coit Gilman (1831-1908), the founding President of Johns Hopkins University in the 1870s.
Gilman emphasized that the fundamental purpose of a university should be study rather than training. Together with the other founders of Johns Hopkins, he sought to create an exclusively graduate university, but this ideal could not be maintained against local pressure for undergraduate education and in the absence of a sufficient stream of well-qualified graduates seeking admission. So, in 1883, undergraduates were admitted to Johns Hopkins, and amongst those who arrived a year later was a seventeen-year-old, Abraham Flexner (1866-1959).
Flexner, the first of his family to attend university, was one of nine children of Jewish immigrants. Because of his financial circumstances, he could only take a two-year degree at Johns Hopkins, but he became fired with its ideals. He returned home to become a schoolmaster in Louisville, Kentucky, eventually founding his own school, aimed at preparing students for the Ivy League colleges back east, and achieving a national reputation. All of his first hundred students got into the Colleges of their choice. Among his pupils was one Anne Crawford (1874-1955), who gained entry to Vassar. When she returned to Louisville on graduating, she did some teaching back at Flexner's School. Romance blossomed and they married in 1898.
Anne Crawford Flexner did not remain a schoolteacher: she became an outstanding successful playwright. Her 1903 play, Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, although not well known today, was the biggest hit on Broadway for seven years. William Claude Fields (1880-1946) starred in one of the four film versions; and Mae West (1893-1980) was in one of the touring companies. It was the financial success of Anne's plays, rather than the success of Flexner's school, that enabled Abraham Flexner to sell his school in 1905, leave Louisville and begin to make his way on the national and international scene. He spent a year studying psychology and philosophy at Harvard, and then, accompanied by Anne, he spent two years studying at Berlin University, which was for him the opening of a new world.
Flexner then began writing a caustic commentary on the deficiencies of American higher education, published as The American College. He castigated the American college as being confused as to its purpose: it did not prepare students for university, like the German gymnasium; yet it did not provide proper university-level study, like the European universities. This caught the attention of the President of the newly formed Carnegie Foundation and he commissioned Flexner to produce a report on Medical Education in the United States and Canada. Flexner visited each of the 155 medical schools in North America personally and his tough report, exposing powerful and profitable vested interest, tenaciously resistant to criticism, established his reputation. It resulted in the closure of more than two-thirds of the medical schools then operating. The Flexner Report of 1910 remains a landmark in the history of medical education.
After writing further reports for the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, Flexner worked for the Rockefeller Foundation from 1913 to 1928, when he was ousted from his very influential post after losing an internal power struggle. He was then aged 62. He was invited by Oxford University to deliver the prestigious Rhodes Lectures, and he developed his lectures into another book: Universities: American, English, German.
Flexner's book praised the German universities with their greater emphasis on research, criticized the ancient English universities for being too concerned with the cultivation of gentlemen, and was scathing about the American colleges with their focus on undergraduate general education with postgraduate study awkwardly grafted on. Very much echoing Veblen, he concluded in terms familiar today, that, in order to fund expansion:
they have had to be organized as business is organized, which is precisely the type of organization that is inimical to the purposes for which universities exist [……]; they have been dragged into the marketplace; they have been made to serve scores of purposes—some of them, of course, sound in themselves—which universities cannot serve without abandoning purposes which they and no other institution can serve at all.
He was reviewing the proofs of this book when, in 1929, he was approached by representatives of the philanthropists, Louis Bamberger (1855-1944) and Caroline Bamberger Fuld (1864-1944), brother and sister, asking for his advice. Like Flexner, the children of German Jewish immigrants, the Bambergers had made a fortune from the retail trade, owning one of the leading department stores in the United States, Bambergers' Store in Newark. At age seventy-three, Louis Bamberger had decided that the time had come for him to retire. He sold the store to his rivals, Macy's, for about $25 million, fortunately a few months before the crash of October 1929.
Already great philanthropists, the Bambergers wanted to use their fortune to benefit the people of Newark. When asked about the Bambergers' proposal, Flexner was disparaging of the idea: a first-rate medical school needed an outstanding teaching hospital; it needed to be associated with a leading university; and Newark was too close to New York to set up competition with the medical schools there. But, never one to miss an opportunity, he asked his visitors if they had ever dreamed a dream, and proceeded to tell them his dream: the establishment in America of a purely graduate university, devoted to learning and researching rather than to undergraduate teaching.
Flexner, a man of great persuasive powers, convinced the Bambergers to enable him to realize his dream, instead. What was needed in the United States, and the academic world more generally, was, as he put it, "not a graduate school training men in the known, and to some extent in the methods of research, but an institute where everyone—Faculty and Members—took for granted what was known and published, and in their individual ways endeavored to advance the frontiers of knowledge."
Flexner argued for
a haven where scholars and scientists [would not be] carried off in the maelstrom of the immediate; [……] simple, comfortable, quiet without being monastic or remote; [……] afraid of no issue; [……] under no pressure from any side which might tend to force its scholars to be prejudiced either for or against any particular solution of the problems under study; [……] it should provide the facilities, the tranquility, and the time requisite to fundamental inquiry into the unknown. Its scholars should enjoy complete intellectual liberty and be absolutely free from administrative responsibilities or concerns.
In 1930, the Bambergers donated $5 million to establish an Institute for Advanced Study and designated Flexner as its first Director. On June 4, the Bambergers wrote to the first Trustees of the embryonic Institute to charge them with their task:
There is never likely to be an over-abundance of opportunities for men and women engaged in the pursuit of advanced learning in the various fields of human knowledge. Particularly, so far as we are aware, there is no institution in the United States where scientists and scholars devote themselves at the same time to serious research and to the training of competent post-graduate students entirely independently of and separated from both the charms and the diversions inseparable from an Institution the major interest of which is the teaching of undergraduates.
This was an idea whose time had come, but it needed someone like Flexner to take it from dream to reality. He set out to establish "a free society of scholars and students devoted to the higher training of men and to the advance of knowledge," recruiting internationally, and, in the various versions of his essay, The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, Flexner articulated his belief that the advances in knowledge of the highest practical value do not come from objective-driven research but from research driven by intellectual curiosity.
In his famous essay, Flexner was again echoing Veblen, who had written in The Higher Learning, that we instinctively seek and value knowledge: we are endowed with an idle curiosity, idle in the sense that knowledge is sought without any ulterior use in mind, but this does not imply at all that the knowledge gained will not be turned to practical value.
Some of those Flexner consulted advisors thought he was too obsessed with European models for the Institute and urged him to visit Caltech in particular. On his visit there in February 1932, he coincided with Albert Einstein (1879-1955), already an iconic figure. Flexner filled Einstein with enthusiasm for his plans. They agreed to discuss them further in Oxford that summer. Einstein cabled Flexner from his home in Potsdam saying he was "flame and fire for it." Eight months after his visit to Caltech, Abraham Flexner was able to announce publicly the creation of the School of Mathematics, with the appointment of Albert Einstein and also Oswald Veblen (1880-1960), a leading geometer and nephew of Thorstein Veblen, to the first faculty positions.
The announcement in The New York Times on October 11, 1932, said "The institute will be unique among American institutions of higher education, designed to make it 'a scholar's paradise'," The New York Times wrote, adding, prophetically, "although it is hoped that eventually it will set an example that will be followed by the establishment of similar institutions." The Institute for Advanced Study was already seen as potential model for other institutes.
Flexner set out his general plan as follows:
I should think of a circle, called the Institute for Advanced Study. Within this, I should, one by one, [……] create a series of schools: 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.
In emphasizing the breadth and flexibility of his proposed Schools, Flexner was responding to the trends towards specialization. Institute for Advanced Study had been born out of the tensions and conflicts associated with the development of the modern research university. In the nineteenth century, along with the essential involvement of the university with the advancement of knowledge, came the specialization and the development of separate disciplines with their own faculties, transforming the original medieval academic structure of the university, which was based on the study of the liberal arts, which could be followed by specialized professional training in theology, law or medicine.
By 1935, within two years of the Institute's inauguration, Flexner had added two further Schools: first a School of Economics and Politics and then a School of Humanistic Studies. Today, the Institute has four Schools: Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Historical Studies and Social Science.
Each of these Schools covers a range of subjects much broader than that of a typical university department or faculty. The Institute has remained remarkably faithful to the development plan envisaged by Flexner, and the mission that he had articulated of fostering disinterested research into fundamental questions in the sciences and humanities.
The Institute had antecedents, of course: the research institutes that had been established in German universities, though these were specialized as subjects of study; some new American universities that were focused more on research than teaching, such as the California Institute of Technology and the Rockefeller Institute, later Rockefeller University, and, of much earlier date, the Collège de France, founded by Francis I in 1530, at another turning point in university development, as a teaching institution, to promote the humanist disciplines, as a counter to the entrenched medieval scholasticism of the Sorbonne.
Before long, the example provided by the Institute in Princeton, was being emulated. The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, DIAS, was founded by Act of Parliament in 1940; the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences was established at Stanford in 1954; the IHÉS, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques near Paris, in 1958, and so on.
Writing to the French Government in support of the IHÉS, Institute Director Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) developed Flexner's reasoning thirty years on:
With the increasing magnitude, complexity, and busyness of scientific progress in all fields, and with the growth of educational systems which corresponds to a new development in the world's history, university chairs no longer necessarily offer that opportunity for seclusion, and for the most difficult and intensive intellectual effort, which was once their special hallmark. For this reason, places of retreat, which are in effect places for advance, have been brought into being. These serve multiple functions, but basic to them all is an opportunity for much more intensive concentration on study and research than is elsewhere possible. [……] For these reasons, [……] institutes for advanced study [……] will multiply throughout the world.
Flexner had argued for a separation of fundamental research from what he termed the "charms and diversions" of undergraduate teaching, at least in the context of the American college of the time, confused to purpose as he saw it. Since then, the growth of the mass tertiary education, illustrated here by a comparison between the rates of growth in the US of enrollments in higher education, and of primary and secondary education, over the last 140 years, has continued to accelerate around the world. This great expansion of university systems around the world, good and necessary in itself, has led to the maelstrom of the immediate, as Flexner described it, being an all too familiar sensation within the university.
This dramatic change is also illustrated on a longer time scale by enrollments, that is matriculations at the University of Cambridge. Graph 1 shows matriculations over the period from 1544 to 1989, with gap of about ten years at the end of the 16th century for which data have been lost. The salient features of the graph show that the university was not uninfluenced by the outside world: a dip marks the Great Plague of 1665; a greater dip followed by a peak marks the First World War, while the Second World War had less impact, because it was not assumed that it would all be over by Christmas and so university life continue, albeit at a reduced level.
Graph 1 Changes of matriculations at the University of Cambridge, 1544-1989
However, the most striking feature of the graph is that, from the beginning of the 19th century, after the industrial revolution has taken hold in England, the numbers rise exponentially. Actually, if one smooths the data, by taking 10-year rolling averages, the exponential fit is remarkably good, with the numbers doubling every 40 years, corresponding to a compound growth rate of about 2% per annum.
Such an expansion of higher education naturally entails much greater expenditure, both public and private, and with this inevitably come demands from government and from others for greater accountability. And, after all, accountability is now the spirit of the age. In particular, the view is quite often taken that, if you are dispensing public funds, you had better know precisely for what, and how, they are going to be used; and then you should check up afterwards that they have been used exactly in the way specified, that the predefined objectives have been achieved.
But such requirements, while providing good and transparent ways for awarding contracts for public works or the provision of services, are inimical to truly fundamental research (and enlightened education as well): if you have to say before you start precisely what you are going to do, how you are going to do it, and when you will have done it, you are unlikely to be doing truly original research, research that might change fundamentally the way we think and understand the world around us. As one of my mentors was fond of saying, the nature of the most significant research is often not "what is the precise answer to this existing carefully specified question" but, rather, more nearly, "what is the precise question to which this is the vague answer."
Of course, there are ways round such bureaucratic systems. The eminent Russian mathematician, Yuri Manin, once explained, "In the Mathematics Institute in Moscow there was a clear-cut system: I would write that I was planning to prove the theorems that were in fact proved in the past year. Then I had a whole year to continue my work." Such methods are not unknown in biomedical research, I gather, where funding is very objective driven. In this way, the cultural practices of the former Soviet Union are being preserved for future generations. A century ago, Veblen also foresaw that, as he put it, "the free pursuit of learning might no longer find a place in the university, except by dissimulation, much after the fashion in which, in the days of medieval scholasticism, the pursuit of disinterested knowledge was constrained to a shifty simulation of interest in theological speculations."
Does it matter, if the money comes and we can get on with our work? Yes, it does, because an institution whose value to society depends essentially on its commitment to the disinterested pursuit of truth is compromised by dissimulation.
At the Institute for Advanced Study, we would tell the incoming fellows that not only did they not have to do what they said in their applications that they planned to do—we actually hoped and expected that they would do something else, something that neither they or we could have imagined when they came there.
Along with simplistic ideas of accountability and audit, has come a crude form of utilitarianism, a focus on what is termed wealth creation, and an assumption that even fundamental research can be best taken forward by a managerial approach, by requiring that research necessarily fit into national initiatives or international frameworks. Just a few days ago, the eminent British mathematician, Michael Atiyah, a Fields medalist and former President of the Royal Society, commented on this in an interview in the Simons Foundation's Quanta Magazine, available on the web:
If you try to direct science, you only get people going in the direction you told them to go. All of science comes from people noticing interesting side paths. You've got to have a very flexible approach to exploration and allow different people to try different things. Which is difficult, because unless you jump on the bandwagon, you don't get a job. Worrying about your future, you have to stay in line. That's the worst thing about modern science. Fortunately, when you get to my age, you don't need to bother about that. I can say what I like.
Atiyah's perspective may provide a counterbalance to somewhat more dirigiste views of how to enable scientific progress that we have heard earlier in this meeting.
Perhaps this utilitarianism is the payoff for a Faustian deal: arguably, it was the realization in the early nineteenth century of the practical significance of science and technology that encouraged the development of the modern university, with its specialized disciplines, largely freeing it from clerical domination and taking it beyond Newman's idea of a university, as a place whose objective was "the diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than its advancement." Now practical benefits and the ability to attract funds often determine the future directions of a university's development and Flexner's assertion that "a poem, a painting, a mathematical truth, a new scientific fact, all bear in themselves all the justification that universities and research institutes need [……]." no longer holds true in practice, it seems.
The management techniques introduced into universities in the UK and elsewhere in the recent decades are inimical to the fundamental research. They have been forced on a largely unresisting university system by funding mechanisms which are based a sort of commoditization of research, involving the assessment of units of research output, increasing by short-term metrical criteria, systems of "standardization, accountancy and piece-work" as Thorstein Veblen prophetically put it a century ago. Such metrics may distinguish the good from the bad, but, intrinsically, they are poor at identifying contributions that will be outstandingly important in the long-term, that will shape the subject. Most significantly, through institutional funding pressures, they influence the research undertaken by academics, which is, after all, what they are designed to do. They encourage the production of work that is easily and immediately recognized as good, but major breakthroughs, by their very nature may take time to be recognized.
As a fairly typical example, consider the great development in particle physics, with which we have all become acquainted at this meeting, the paper by Kobayashi and Maskawa, CP-Violation in the Renormalizable Theory of Weak Interactions, published in 1973, for which they received the Nobel Prize in 2008. Over the 43 years since it was published, this paper has been cited 10,400 times, according to Google Scholar, that is about 250 times a year on average, but of course, those citations are not evenly distributed. Here is a histogram of citations by year.
Histogram
The average number of citations in the first five years is about 15. The graph suggests that it took about 6 years for the particle physics community to appreciate the significance of what Kobayashi and Maskawa had done and about 20 years before they understood that it was really very important. And research assessment exercises are typically on a five-year timescale, too short to be confident of identifying work that changes the way we think.
These short-term methods of assessment are really designed for quality control, but for that you need a predetermined product, and, of its nature, ground-breaking research is not determined in advance. A university education or a year at an institute for advanced study may be a life-changing experience; such experiences and their outcomes are not predetermined or quality controlled. Quality control mechanisms are designed to ensure good, perhaps very good outcomes, not to produce deep insights or works of art.
The language of modern management now pervades the universities, at least in the UK, in a way would have been unthinkable fifteen or twenty years ago. The classic management acronym stipulates that our objectives must be SMART, that is Specified, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
This is the precisely the antithesis of what is appropriate in truly fundamental research: in research, when we succeed, we do what could not have been imagined in advance, not what we or others Specified; ground-breaking progress may not be, is likely not to be, quantifiable or Measurable, for example in terms of citations within four or five years because it is off-scale, it breaks the mold—the papers on the Higgs boson had hardly any references in the four or five years after publication; if an research objective represents a breakthrough, the result is ipso facto hardly likely to be clearly Attainable in advance; the Relevance of a development that changes the way we understand a subject may well not be clearly relevant in advance; and, perhaps the most difficult, but unavoidable aspect of fundamental research (certainly if one is a doctoral student) is that typically we do not know how long it will take—it is not Time-bound. Such stale middle-management business-school management techniques are the reverse of what is appropriate for research and higher education institutions.
The sheer busyness of the modern university has increased dramatically since Oppenheimer referred to it fifty years ago. The spread of mass higher education implies growth for the sector as a whole, but Government funding mechanisms push individual universities towards growth. New initiatives are encouraged by marginal funding opportunities, offering short-term marginal gains at the expense of building up systemic problems.
And in countries where private philanthropy is a major force in higher education and research, this too provokes institutional growth, and growth is determined or influenced by donors from the world of business. Such donors want to finance new projects rather than helping to address the systemic financial problems of the particular university, or supporting the university's academic priorities rather than then their own pet interests.
So now the philosophy in universities, as in business, has become: you grow or you die. But the biological truth is that you grow and you die and, as a general rule, the faster you grow, the sooner you die. An addiction to growth may shorten the life expectancy of universities, previously hundreds of years in favorable circumstances, to something more like the decades typical for businesses. But it is arguable that one of the essential functions that universities perform for society to be institutions dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge on a timescale much longer than an individual human lifespan.
This unrelenting emphasis on institutional development means that the organization units, the university departments, that resulted from the university reforms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have become the frameworks for the power structures of the university; they have become bailiwicks for professorial barons expanding or defending their territory, and so often are concerned with competition rather than collaboration, ironically, not least between colleagues in cognate disciplines, who may meet most frequently when fighting each other for resources on university committees.
In this context, the institute for advanced study does provide a refuge from the maelstrom, where one is not disturbed by the noise of an academic empire being built, and where, ideally, success is not judged prematurely by immediate "impact," where research is driven by intellectual curiosity, towards the discovery of what could not even have been conceived in advance, rather than towards precisely defined predetermined objectives.
Ultimately, what are important, and therefore the real criteria by which the work of such an institute should be judged, are the long-term significance of the new ideas instigated there and the long-term impact that the institute has on the development of the scientists and scholars who spend time there. This is not to say one should not collect information about what an institution produces and use it in management and in planning for the future, but one should realize that these are at best proxy measures for the real hard task, which is to judge achievements against the ultimate objectives of long-term impact. The problem is that when the necessarily imperfect proxy measures, which one might warily use in academic administration, faute de mieux, become used externally to measure progress and to determine funding, they become in practice the ends themselves.
What are the reasons for the increasing proliferation of institutes, now numbering well over a hundred? Whatever they are, I do not think it would be happening if institutes for advanced study were not perceived to be outstandingly successful in some sense.
Most institutes combine strong international connections, attracting leading academics from around the world, with strong local connections. For such reasons, many leading universities have established their own "institutes for advanced study." These may also be viewed as statements of aspiration or claims to the highest international status. Further, they provide a means of affording a privileged temporary respite for some of their own favored professors from the pressure of university life.
What are the defining characteristics of an institute for advanced study? In some cases it may just seem like putting a prestigious brand name on an entity whose purpose has not been well thought out, but, typically, if not universally, they are research focused, cross-disciplinary and have a visiting fellowship program as an important part of mission. There are many ways in which they vary, in terms of subject range, constitution, funding structure, having themes, having permanent faculty, demography or residential character.
The research assessment exercises for universities in the UK and the excellence initiative in Germany, themselves the products of the perceived need to be selective about research funding in the context of the financial pressures of mass higher education, have led to many universities establishing institutions at least called "institutes for advanced study," though such embedded institutes may have difficulty maintaining their distinctive missions in the longer term against the changing pressures of demands from the parent university.
The reasons for the proliferation of institutes for advanced study over the last eighty years do not differ from those that Flexner articulated:
they provide opportunities for academics to pursue curiosity-driven research away from the usual intense pressures of the modern university;
they are international in an increasingly international academic world;
they are highly successful in terms of the research produced and their impact on the long-term development of those who spend periods there;
But, additionally,
now they are badges of institutional aspiration and claimed status.
There was another factor in Flexner's mind as he formulated his original design for the Princeton institute. As we saw, his plan was to create a series of schools which might change from time to time, with designations "so broad that they may readily cover one group of activities today, quite another group as time goes on." In that way, he achieved a flexibility, which the lack of the inertia associated with the undergraduate curriculum permits, and a cross-disciplinarity, because the Schools of the institute typically cross several different disciplines that would be housed in several different, possibly warring, departments in a university.
Institutes provide environments where there are opportunities for discussing one's work with scholars and scientists from other fields, and, freed from teaching and administration, the leisure necessary to take advantage of them. Only to a limited extent can such opportunities be orchestrated; the serendipitous encounters and exchanges are often more important than the arranged programs. In the contemporary university, it is most often the absence of leisure that leaves little for cross-disciplinary interactions, serendipitous or otherwise.
The research based in the various departments of universities, defined by the disciplines and sub-disciplines delineated in the 19th and 20th century, has increasingly intersected in recent decades.
Some have referred to a third stage of university development, the first leading from the medieval birth of the institution, focused on training schoolmasters, priests, lawyers and doctors, through the changes brought by humanism around the beginning of the sixteenth century, down to Newman's idea of a university, preserving and diffusing knowledge rather than advancing it; the second, the formation of the modern research university, from the nineteenth century onwards, leading to specialization and departmental structures; and the third—well that's the question—what structures do enable boundaries to be crossed while preserving the valuable frameworks and reference points provided by individual disciplines?
The need felt for such structures has led to the formation of cross-disciplinary research institutes inside and outside universities cutting across departments and disciplines. But this can mean that an academic may have three roles within a university, and even, in my own university, Cambridge, for example, where you do not have to dig too deeply to expose its institution archaeology, three offices or places to work: for undergraduate teaching within a College, in a department with a research function within a discipline, and in an interdisciplinary institute. It is reminiscent, perhaps, of the confusion of purpose Flexner perceived a century ago.
In summary, the concept of an institute for advanced study arose, in the first decades of the 20th century, in the context of the development of the modern research university, an attempt, on the one hand, to address a confusion or debate about the purpose of the university as institution for research and the advancement for knowledge as opposed to one primarily concerned with its diffusion and with education, Thorstein Veblen versus John Henry Newman, if you like, and, to provide an environment focused on curiosity-driven research, rather than research driven by utilitarian objectives, primarily because the cultural value of such research is sufficient justification in itself, and, secondarily, because such disinterested research produces the really dramatic society-changing outcomes—the Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, as Flexner memorably, but somewhat confusingly, put it. Beyond that, Flexner saw even in 1930 that an institute for advanced study could cut across the institutionalized divides created in the previous hundred years by the definition and separation of academic disciplines to form the structural components of the modern university.
Over the last 85 years, those prescient ideas have become ever more relevant. The university has become an increasing busy place, where the holders of the most prestigious professorships are expected to be entrepreneurs as well as, if not more importantly than, deep thinkers. Certainly, in Oppenheimer's words, in general "university chairs no longer necessarily offer that opportunity for seclusion, and for the most difficult and intensive intellectual effort, which was once their special hallmark." As systems of evaluation increase, institutes for advanced study provide places of refuge for academics to pursue curiosity-driven research away from these pressures, bringing together researchers from all over the scholarly world. And, perhaps ironically, the institutes themselves are viewed as markers of institutional distinction in the systems of evaluation from which they provide respite.
Institutes for advanced study need not have the hubris to feel that they can solve the systemic problems of the contemporary university. They can help to some extent but, more importantly, they have proved to be really successful and their mission is even more relevant today than it was eighty-five years ago.
* Delivered at the UBIAS Intercontinental Academia Nagoya Workshop held between March 6-18, 2016 by Institute For Advanced Research, Nagogy Universtity, Japan.
