Report for the Academic Year 1992-1993 - The Institute Libraries ...

REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR
I begin my third year as Director of the Institute for Advanced Study looking
back upon this past year's wide range of activities, summarized in the pages that
follow, and also looking to the year ahead, confident that the work of the Insti-
tute will continue to hold a central place in scholarship and postdoctoral educa-
tion. As opportunities for younger university faculty to move beyond their
doctoral level achievements are increasingly limited by shrinking budgets, the
Institute today provides an important service to higher education as a resource
for the development of these scholars who will lead their disciplines and institu-
tions in years to come.
In the year past, the Institute recognized the highly significant scholarship of
deceased Professors Deane Montgomery and Felix Gilbert in separate services of
tribute. I also express the deep appreciation of the Institute community to
Armand Borel, who joined the Faculty of the School of Mathematics in 1957
and became Professor Emeritus in 1993. Although Borel was only thirty-four
years old at the time of his appointment, Robert Oppenheimer wrote: "We value
him for the power and depth of his own mathematical work, for the inspiration
and assistance that he will give to our members — young Americans as well
as students from abroad — and for the weight of his judgment in promoting
mathematical science here, in the United States, and throughout the world." It
was a prophecy amply fulfilled.
During the winter, the Institute resumed a process of Visiting Committees recommended
in the 1976 Segal Committee Report and initiated in the mid-1980s.
Visiting Committees to the School of Natural Sciences and the School of Histori-
cal Studies, both chaired by Henry Rosovsky, the former Dean of Harvard
University, came to the Institute, each for a weekend of talk with Faculty, Members,
Visitors, the Director and the Executive Officers of all four Schools. The
resulting reports with their evaluations and recommendations were presented to
the Board of Trustees at its spring meeting, and the Committees' suggestions
are being discussed and in some cases have already been implemented by the
Schools. The School of Mathematics will be visited in February of 1994 and the
School of Social Science in 1994-95.
Along with the directors of five other research centers in the United States and
Western Europe, I have been involved in a project to assist the establishment of
indigenous centers for scholarship in the countries of Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union. With generous funding from the John D. and Catherine
T MacArthur Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Swedish Council
for Studies of Higher Education and the Ministry of Education and Science of
the Netherlands, we have established the New Europe Prize, an annual monetary
prize to be awarded to individual scholars who have been members at one of the
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