Advanced Studies Institute, Opinion Polling Breathe Life into Princeton

Traditionalist Princeton has never allowed itself to slip out of modern American education's mainstream. Although the College operates for the most part within a framework of custom loving conservatism and the graduate school has not yet assumed significant size, "Princeton" the community is alive with intellectual adventure. There the Institute for Advanced Studies conducts its profound theoretical explorations; across town at headquarters of the Gallup Poll experts from the University's Office of Public Opinion Research provide technical assistance in the delicate process of national pulse-taking.

Bound personnel-wise to Princeton if not financially or administratively, the Institute for Advanced Studies offers an opportunity for "post-postgraduate" work to a select group of 30-odd top U. S. scholars. These men freely elect their mentors from a faculty of 16 in an environment stripped of lectures, examinations degrees. Figures such as Albert Einstein lend the stature of their thought. But "the most important thing that can come out of the Institute," wrote then director Frank Aydelotte in 1943, "is not the absolute contribution of an Einstein, great as it may be, so much as the general flow of attitudes toward study and research which can seep down to the very roots of education. Our purpose is to be of the utmost possible service to general American scholarship."

Excellent Facilities

Today Aydelotte's recently-appointed successor, atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer '26, heads up an endeavor equipped with its own comfortable $8,000,000 building, the gift of founders Louis Bamberger and Mrs. Felix Fuld of Newark department-store millions. Professional chambers range from twice to four times the dimensions of those enjoyed at most wealthy universities. Archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld got a sunken floor to admit outsize cases for Persian treasures. Paleograplier Elias Avery Lowe won additional windows to help him avert eyestrain while deciphering ancient texts. It was not like this under the tenure of first director Abraham Flexner--in the Institute's three pioneer years--when the Princeton Mathematics Department turned over Fine Hall for the new project's use.

The liaison established throughout this formative period between mathematicians and physicists on the Princeton Faculty and co-workers in the Institute impressed itself permanently, for scientific studies have completely dominated other facets of the Institute's activity which, in principle, were intended to share emphasis. Now both director Oppenheimer and leading-name Einstein are identified with the era's towering question: nuclear fission.

Linked to Princeton

Furthermore in the technical wizards lies the key to the relationship between the independently-endowed Institute and Princeton proper. Hore the interplay of staff is most evident. Hungarian-born John von Neumann secured the collaboration of Princeton's economist Oskar ("Business Cycles") Morganstern in his comprehensive mathematician's-eye view of economic phenomena. Von Neumann currently supervises construction of the Princeton calculator, and electronic digital affair differing from Harvard's in the same fashion as the University of Pennsylvania's "Eniac," which chooses a course of action rather than "thinks."

Einstein proteges Stefan S. Wilkes and George Bochner both serve on the Princeton Faculty. The atomic-energy-for-military-purposes report, produced by a committee including men from both sources and chaired by Smyth, who holds dual connection, typifies the scope of coordination which can exist, despite barriers of formal organization, in a compact and relatively isolated collegiate center.

Opinion-Polling Charges Atmosphere

This sort of integration has occurred to make the town of Princeton the veritable hub of the country's mushrooming public-opinion polling industry. George Gallup, whose chief employment is with Young and Rubicam's advertising agency, located his polling headquarters in Princeton for the sake of proximity to his farm in the nearby New Jersey hills. Quite coincidentally at the same point in the mid-Thirties psychologist Hadley Cantril succeeded in setting up the University-sponsored Office of Public Opinion Research, sole complete archives of all findings by the various agencies, as well as "Public Opinion Quarterly," the single authoritative compilation of developments within the trade.

Princeton Led Way

Princeton pioneered in the field, Spurts of expansion this Fall at Michigan's Survey Research Center under Francis Likert and at Chicago's National Opinion Research Center (formerly the Donver Poll) are the climax of the preliminary gestures of Cantril and his associates for the past decade. After Gallup's first national poll in 1936 proved that the Literary Digest was wrong, the Cantril concept of small sampling polls as against mass surveys, now utterly beyond question, began to take shape in the development of the spot-check method.

This device became perfected so completely that by 1939 Government leaders could expect single-day response on an informational request, such as what the miners of West Virginia felt about a certain public issue. In 1940 Cantril's "Invasion of Mars," a study of public reaction to the famed Orson Welles broadcast, assumed the proportions of a classic in social psychology. Another of Cantril's efforts, the Leadership Poll, made a significant contribution with its culling of labor and business chieftain viewpoints on current affairs.

Standard-Bearer

Now that the experimental period has passed, Princeton's leadership rests with "keeping standards high," according to Gordon W. Allport '19, Professor of Social Relations, a top public opinion expert himself. "Public opinion polling occupies such a crucial position in our life," he declared Monday, "that we cannot permit it to degenerate into a racket. In this connection Princeton's archives and journal set high levels for both ethical and technical performance.

"It is indeed fortunate that the chief commercial agency, Dr. Gallup's, cropped up in the same location as the focus for academic research in the field. When Cantril and Gallup got their heads together they really sparked pretty well." The latest attempt to hold to standards, Allpot adds, is also Princeton-pushed: the International Congress of Public Opinion Research inaugurated at Williamstown in September and destined to lead to a certification system to insure reliable personnel.

Wide Government Approach

Perhaps in the wake of such a relevant area of undertaking, activity geared to the needs of the day has taken its place within even the undergraduate curriculum at Princeton. The School of Public and International Affairs, soon to be renamed the Woodrow Wilson School of Government, strives to prepare the student seeking entrance professionally into Federal bureaus or the State Department.

Conference sessions focus upon a specific question, for example the spread of Communism in the Balkans. The actual department heads in politics, economics, and history work together to offer this program. With the exception of a similar blueprinted project by Yale, only Oxford's "Modern Greate," including philosophy and consequently less vocational in emphasis, strikes into the task of coherently presenting these logically interrelated areas of study.