Membership Dispute Divides Institute for Advanced Study

The Institute for Advanced Study, a prominent center for post-doctoral research, is embroiled in the most serious dispute of its 40-year history.

The controversy over the qualifications of a new member has prompted the Institute's faculty to call for an outside evaluation of Director Carl Kaysen.

Kaysen supported the nomination of Robert N. Bellah '48, professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, to the Institute's Social Science program. Bellah taught at Harvard from 1955 to 1967.

'Inferior' Work

The IAS, located in Princeton, New Jersey, has a permanent faculty of 26 members who do research and writing in their special fields. Several members from the Schools of Historical Studies and Natural Sciences objected to Bellah's nomination because they said his work was inferior to the Institute's standards.

The IAS faculty voted twice against Bellah's nomination, and urged Kaysen not to forward his name to the Institute's trustees. Kaysen rejected their recommendation, and the position was offered to Bellah on February 14. His appointment begins on July 1.

"The people who are opposed to my appointment have no interaction or communication with the Social Science program," Bellah said yesterday. "Both Professor Geertz [the only other Institute member in the Social Sciences] and I are products of Harvard's Social Relations Department, and we want to take a new non-disciplinarian approach at the Institute."

"I want to orient my work toward historical and humanistic studies, rather than survey research," he said. "And I hope that the Institute will become a lively intellectual center for this particular approach."

Edwin O. Reischauer, University Professor, was one of five outside scholars asked to evaluate Bellah's work. "I told the Institute that I think Bellah is a very brilliant man," he said yesterday.

Reischauer said that the Institute is experiencing "growing pains." "Bellah's work is very significant, and people not in his field can't appreciate what he is doing."

"At Harvard no one would ever dream of allowing a natural scientist to pass judgement on the works of a sociologist," Reischauer said.