Word: kaysen
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...large Georgian central building, set on an isolated wooded hilltop near Princeton University, are filled with outraged mutterings about "breach of confidence," "contemptible conduct" and "second-rate scholarship." This uncharacteristic rancor surrounds an epic struggle between a majority of the institute's faculty and its director, Economist Carl Kaysen...
...deferring to faculty opinion, Oppenheimer prevented open warfare. Not so Kaysen. Now 53, he is a blunt, graying man who once taught economics at Harvard. Fresh from five years of advising Presidents Kennedy and Johnson on national security and disarmament, he succeeded Oppenheimer in 1966. The switch from scholar-intellectual to action-intellectual offended many of the mathematicians. Even worse, Kaysen and the trustees announced that they intended to found a New School of Social Sciences. "We know more about the atom than about ourselves," Kaysen says, "and the consequences are everywhere to be seen...
...faculty resented not being consulted on his plans, but at first Kaysen calmed them by moving slowly. Not until 1970 did he make his first appointment to the School of Social Science-naming Anthropologist Clifford Geertz as head-and it received no opposition. Last October, however, when he decided to nominate Bellah, he aroused that special combination of incandescent anger and pettiness of which large intellects are sometimes capable...
...resolve the dispute, the opinion of five outside scholars was sought. Three experts in his specialty endorsed him heartily; the other two had reservations. That convinced the mathematicians that Bellah could not be first rate. By 14 to 7 the faculty urged Kaysen to withdraw the nomination. He refused, and the trustees appointed Bellah...
...School of Historical Studies. Dissenters mailed copies of the minutes of faculty discussions to sympathetic colleagues. They also sent letters critical of Bellah's work to the New York Times, a step that Bellah called "contemptible." Then they demanded that the trustees appoint an outside commission to evaluate Kaysen's stewardship-which amounted to a vote of no confidence...