The Some Institutes for Advanced Study (SIAS) consortium organizes ten "institutes for advanced study" founded on the same principles as the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which is also one of the members.

Overview

SIAS members were founded explicitly to follow the Princeton model (with certain variations - not all maintain a permanent faculty, for instance), and place an emphasis on granting one-year fellowships. Like a traditional university it was devoted to the promotion of learning, but its scale was smaller and it did not offer formal instruction. Nor did it have large laboratories. It was to be a place for the most highly specialised research, yet provide an atmosphere open to intellectual exchange across all disciplinary boundaries.¹

In SIAS there is agreement about four necessary criteria for possible new members. A candidate institution should fulfil the following conditions:.²

1. It should be a true place for advanced study in terms of a commitment to the highest standards of scholarship.
2. It must offer a genuine and competitive fellowship programme - and, one may add, a programme where each individual candidate is subjected to a thorough assessment, not just accepted as part of a thematic group of scholars or selected by the convener of such a group.
3. Its funding should be stable enough to ensure that it will continue to operate into the foreseeable future;
4. The institution should be part of the academic system but be independent and not be narrowly directed by any single university, or by any commercial enterprise or government department.

The SIAS members

The some members in the United States are:

• Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,
• Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford University. This is the next oldest member of the SIAS consortium. The Center is funded by the Ford Foundation, and was founded after World War II.
• National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle in North Carolina;
• Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard;
• Social Science Research Council
• Russell Sage Foundation in New York City.

The European and Asian SIAS members (which also have been founded since 1970) are

• Collegium Budapest in Budapest, Hungary.³
• Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar, the Netherlands.⁴
• Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, in Uppsala, Sweden;
• Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, Austria.⁵
• Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in Berlin, Germany;
• Institute for Advanced Studies at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel.^{citation needed}

References

External links

• Björn Wittrock, Institutes for Advanced Study: Ideas, Histories, Rationales (pdf file)