Education: Lighthouse Keepers

In the outskirts of Princeton, N.J. stands a colonial-style red brick building which houses the most exclusive academy in the world. Its members are not there to teach anybody anything; they go there to live in peace and do their own work.

In its 17 years the Institute for Advanced Study (which has no connection with Princeton University but is generally confused with it) has attracted some of the world’s best minds. It offers them a moderate salary, an office, and leisure to write books, tutor prize protégés (who are all Ph.D.s) or just sit around and think.

Every afternoon, the members emerge from their separate dens for tea and talk. Among them: Albert Einstein, crack Mathematician Oswald Veblen (nephew of famed Economist Thorstein Veblen) and the institute’s new boss, Physicist J. Robert (“Oppy”) Oppenheimer.

Last week, the institute invited three more famous names to join its lighthouse of civilization. The three: Denmark’s Nobel Prizewinning Physicist Niels D. Bohr (who has been there once before), British Historian Arnold J. Toynbee (who presumably will work on the last volumes of A Study of History) and Poet T. S. Eliot (St. Louis-born, but a British subject since 1927). The institute didn’t ask them what they would do; it was satisfied to let grown-up minds continue growing.