Part 1 - The Institute Libraries - Institute for Advanced Study

were not mezningful ss evidence of scholarship, and recmenled against
them, whereupon Flemer cane nearer to disclosing his hand than usual.
He rep1 fed:
Theoretically f agree with you absolutely about degrees,
but there are practical df ff iculries.. . .I believe that the
best of our rrren cEn save two or three years. As a practical
measure, therefore, for the present, it seems to me
better to thrw,..the best of students cmrletely into the
hsnes of the several schol~rs without any requiremnts as
to previbus degrees and then safeguard a young fellow's
career by giving him a degree if he deserves it.. It ought to
be G very rare degree .... as rare or rarer than the Degree ef
Doctor furis at Berlin, which is very carefully safeguarded ...
I wcnt the Institute to be different in pretty nearly wery
inportznt respect f xom any hrican institution f knou anything
about, and I have tried to keep even these experimentsl
feztures to the minimm required to set up sanething and
to get the consent of the New Jersey Boerd of Education.. . .53
After the State Board of Education granted the Institute the
authority to issue the Ph, D., Dr. Fleer explained to the Trustees r(/
that it had never hen the lntent of the Institute to award it, but that
Mr. Hardin had considered it w ise for legal reasons to secure the right. 54
It might have been 2: - ,sled by anyone familiar with academic
institutions that a small institute representing only a few highly
specialized parts of the three great branches of knowledge would have
been unable, as Dr. Vincent saw instantly, to issue the doctoral degree
in competition with the great universities, with their "traditional
hallmarks." But it did not seem to; only Dr. Keppel had a cazmmt re-
flecting the same recognition as Vincent's. kter it will be seen that;
Dr. Veblen fnsisted for stsrne months tEzt the Institute should admit can-
didates fox the doctoral. Perhaps he recognized then that the Institute
would hardly have been welcomed to Princeton and offered the hospitalfty