FROM THE ARCHIVES: This 1949 photo from the Ottawa, Canada Evening Journal shows Albert Einstein being visited at his Princeton home by recently displaced European children. The photo is among the findings of the Institute for Advanced Study’s History Working Group, which will be the subject of a public lecture on Friday, November 3.

By Anne Levin

After President Trump issued executive orders last January to enforce travel bans and curb immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries, a group of scholars affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) was moved to take action. The History Working Group produced a series of articles and an exhibition focused on the Institute’s response to similar challenges in the 1930s.

On Friday, November 3 at 5:30 p.m., the Institute will hold a public lecture and discussion on the group’s findings and how they relate to the current political climate. “A Refuge for Scholars: Contemporary Challenges in Historical Perspective” takes place in Wolfensohn Hall on the IAS campus.

Institute director and professor Robbert Dijkgraaf is the moderator. Panelists are Joan Scott, professor emerita, School of Social Science; Thomas Dodman, a member in the School of Historical Studies; Ian Jauslin, a member in the School of Mathematics; and Ayse Parla, a visitor in the School of Social Science.

“There was a real sense of frustration about the discrepancy between what I call the grotesque privilege of being [at the Institute] for a year, and everything that was happening around us,” said Dodman, who is a history professor at Columbia University. “The contrast is extraordinary.”

The group held a series of Town Hall meetings with members of the IAS and surrounding community. It was important to include IAS staff members who might be most directly affected by Trump’s actions, Dodman said. Current and former IAS members and donors were among others who attended the meetings. “We wanted to put pressure on the administration to take a more pro-active stance,” Dodman added. “There was an excitement about it, a collective effervescence and energy.”

Founded in 1930, the IAS benefited from the availability of leading German university scholars, and provided them with sanctuary. Help came from the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation.

In an article written in the Spring 2017 issue of the Institute Letter, the Working Group wrote, “it only took a few months and one edict purging civil servants of non-Aryan descent or exhibiting suspect political sentiments in April 1933 to drain the German university of many of its brightest minds and its intellectual vigor. Of course, the contemporary political situation in the United States remains far from this extreme case. Nonetheless, knowledge of this history should serve as a call for vigilance in the face of policies such as travel bans and immigrant deportations, as well as attempts to curb scientific inquiry and cut funding to arts and humanities endowments that now threaten the autonomy of research and the pursuit of a dignified human life. Unfortunately, history suggests it takes much less time to destroy than to build. As it did in the 1930s, the Institute can play a leading symbolic role in our contemporary predicament.”

The Working Group’s research yielded “all sorts of amazing things,” said Dodman, including information that the first IAS director Abraham Flexner was originally hesitant about providing a haven for the prominent German scholars forced to flee their country. “He is very adamant about not meddling in politics, at first, but changes quite radically. By the 1930s he is saying, ‘We need to help these people.’ We thought that was an interesting story to tell.”

Less dramatic yet revealing findings include IAS scholar Albert Einstein’s exchanges with his plumber. A 1954 letter to Einstein from R. Stanley Murray of Stanley Plumbing and Heating Company in New York reads, “As a plumber, I am very much interested in your comment made in the letter being published in the Reporter Magazine. Since my ambition has always been to be a scholar and yours seems to be a plumber, I suggest that as a team we would be tremendously successful. We can then be possessed of both knowledge and independence. I am ready to change the name of my firm to read: Einstein and Stanley Plumbing Co.”

The letter is “a little treasure,” said Dodson. “I’m a historian, and I treasure those bits.”

Being a part of the History Working Group was “a lot of fun,” Dodson stressed. “We really enjoyed it and got to know each other well. It made us feel useful in a small, modest way.”