I joined the IAS first as a Co-Director in January 2021, whilst COVID still locked down many countries, international travel was vastly difficult, and IAS Fellowships were held virtually. As my term as Director began, we had the lifting of those restrictions, but in their wake has come an increasingly uncertain world with challenges undreamt of only a few years ago. Yet, these uncertain times are when an IAS might shine the most.
Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study, the first IAS to be established, began its life in an equally uncertain world in the 1930s. The world then was still recovering from the shock of the Wall Street Crash, fascism was on the rise across Europe, and new technologies (such as radio) were starting to transform lives, and politics. And yet, the IAS at Princeton was established with a core principle of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and where researchers were able to pursue their own goals independent of top-down direction.
The idea of the Princeton IAS was to break boundaries – primarily across disciplines, but the Institute challenged many other boundaries too. In writing to the trustees in the IAS’s early years, the Bamberger siblings who founded and funded the Institute wrote ‘It is fundamental in our purpose, and our express desire, that in the appointments to the staff and faculty, as well as in the admission of workers and students, no account shall be taken, directly or indirectly, of race, religion, or sex.’. Here then was a place prepared to let people do what they wanted to do, irrespective of the barriers others might impose, and where value was placed on ideas and evidence rather than on any personal characteristics, or indeed the content of those ideas. These principles set at the foundation of the Princeton IAS stand at the heart of every IAS around the world, including here in Durham.
Some of the challenges facing the world when the Princeton IAS was established are eerily familiar to us today, and therefore it is critical that IASs, in whatever shape, size, and form they take, adopt the same key principles. Trust excellent researchers to do excellent things. Create a space in which all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds and with all kinds of expertise can come together and share what they know. And do all of this in an environment where people are valued for their ideas above all.
Interdisciplinarity is not easy. It is uncomfortable. It challenges our own concepts and ideas, often at a foundational level. But it is immensely rewarding. Not just for the knowledge it creates (valuable as that is) but also for the spirit in which it is enacted. Within the IAS at Durham we have a simple philosophy. We want to be a home for ideas. That word home is critical. It means safety and it means a supportive environment where we can challenge each other, but with respect and in a way that means we can live and work together in partnership afterwards. That environment is critical for ideas to emerge at an early stage, be tested, pulled apart, put back together again, and emerge stronger than they might ever have been otherwise. What the idea is, who presents it, and where it goes afterwards is not as important as the process by which ideas can be made bigger and better through discussion, debate, and the input of different perspectives.
Professor Alex EastonIAS Director
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