Word: ulam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Down the long corridor from Ulam, the center's premier figure, is Doctorow, who has yet to earn his academic spurs. Like most institutions, a favorite word describing many topics is used at the center--"deplorable--and Ulam, the veteran, and Doctorow assails the present Soviet regime as "deplorable." He claims that the recent inability of doctoral programs in history and Soviet studies to find jobs for their graduates is "morally deplorable." And when asked about the center's present financial condition, the director focuses on his pipe and responds "it's deplorable...
...Ulam is a European, old-world scholar, while Doctorow says he is typical of a new generation of academics. Contrasting his approach with that of graduate students of the 1960s, Doctorow says, "My generation is no longer so political. We didn't go into Russian studies to learn about revolution." He is severe: precisely dressed and pressed, with a neatly clipped dark beard and a habit of gnawing on the ends of his wire-rimmed glasses while thinking, his passion is "unearthing unknown documents" and his impressions of the present Soviet regime "unequivocably negative...
Whether the problem is boring or not, the center is in financial trouble, and if something big is not quickly forthcoming, neither Ulam nor Doctorow nor any of the other 100 or so scholars affiliated with the center will have a spiritual or physical home next year. In July 1976 the Ford Foundation will cease to provide about 80 per cent of the center's annual operating budget--as Ford has since the '50s--and the center, consequently, is going public this year, with industries doing Soviet business and other foundations as the main foci of a $1 million fund...
...York City and London, however, there are no visible signs of crisis at 1737 Cambridge--the phones still work, the paint isn't peeling and the mid-morning coffee hour, at which Ulam is said to regale fellow members with recitations of Polish poetry, is still going strong. Few of the center's members are familiar with the annual budget and its determination--it is in the vicinity of $150,000 and is worked out by Ulam and Edward Keenan '57, associate director and professor of History, then submitted for pro forma ratification to a group of Harvard senior faculty...
...person who is concerned about the center's finances is Toumanoff, an owlish, genial and relaxed man who occupies an office set far back from the scholars' corridor that Ulam and Doctorow inhabit. On Toumanoff's desk and shelves there are no dusty volumes, but a clipped article from the New York Times Week in Review section called "Can the World Organize to Save Itself?" (on food and resources), the latest Club of Rome report on dwindling world resources, and a two volume policy-oriented study entitled Rapid Population Growth...