Report for the Academic Years 1987-1988 and 1988-1989

REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR
My association with the Institute for Advanced Study and its mission, programs
and personalities dates back to 1953, when 1 spent a year at Princeton University
on leave from the University of Chicago. During that year I spent a good deal of
rime at the Institute, where I had several collaborators and was friendly both with
many faculty members and with the Director, J. Robert Oppenheimer. The
spring of 1 954 was a traumatic period because of the Atomic Energy Commission's
hearings in Washington "In the N4atter ofj. Robert Oppenheimer," in my
judgment one of the saddest, most shamefril episodes in American history.
I joined the Physics Department at Princeton University in 1957 and again spent
much time with Oppenheimer and others at the Institute. 1 was a Member of
the School of Natural Sciences on three separate occasions while on leave from
the University [1966-67, 1969-70 and 1976-77]. I was and still am a close friend
of Carl Kaysen, who succeeded Oppenheimer as Director in 1 966 and held that
office until 1 976. Harry Woolf my predecessor, and I overlapped briefly before I
left for California in 1978 to assume the Presidency of the California Institute of
Technology. This is all by way of saying that I was no stranger to the Institute or
it to me when I was asked to become the Director in 1987.
One of the first things that struck me about the Institute after nine years away
from Princeton was the evidence of its continuing importance in research and
scholarship. Like everyone else in academic life, I had always been aware of the
unmatched excellence of the Institute faculty and of the impressive numbers of
the world's leading scholars and scientists who had begun and enhanced their
careers as visitmg scholars at the Institute. But I was also aware that in the past
twenty or so years the number of fint—rate research universities in the United
States and abroad had grown steadily and, with them, the range of opportunities
for both post—doctoral researchers and senior visiting scholars. With all these new
and competing alternatives, the Institute might have expected to find that attract-
ing and retaining its faculty was no longer so easy, and that demand for its 150
memberships was in decline.
On the contrary, the Institute is stronger than ever. Three faculty appointments
during my first years as Director confirm that the prestige and drawdng power of
the Institute are undiminished. In 1987 the School of Natural Sciences appointed
Edward Witten. He was trained at Brandeis University and Princeton University
and had been named Professor of Physics at Princeton University in 1980, fol-
lowing three years as a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows. During his
years on the faculty at Princeton Univenity he had emerged as one of the world
leaden in the theory of elementary particles.