Faculty and Defense

(The following is an excerpt from President Dodd’s recent report to the Board of Trustees. It describes the extensive work being done by members of Princeton’s faculty in aiding national defense work.)

At the Commencement Exercises of 1940 I pledged on behalf of Princeton all its resources — organization, men, facilities, and equipment — to the country’s use in its hour of need. The faculty have staunchly fulfilled that pledge. By the end of the year one out of every three members of our teaching staff had assumed some specific and important task in the national defense program and the number is growing daily. Those whose special knowledge permits them to make concrete contributions have responded with a fine spirit to the greatly increased demands on their time and energy that have resulted from adding exacting assignments to their normal duties. Their colleagues in their respective departments have loyally put their shoulders to the wheel wherever necessary to compensate for added work when the glory was not theirs. 

           Of greatest importance is the research of our scientists in the field of physics, chemistry, engineering and mathematics on war problems. Twelve different projects relating to devices and mechanisms of warfare have been assigned to Princeton by the National Defense Research Committee in Washington on behalf of the Army and Navy. It is to be doubted whether any other institution has been assigned, in proportion to its size and resources, a greater number of such projects. All of this work is of course of a highly confidential nature. But it can be said that these researches which keep the lights in our laboratories burning late at night constitute one of the most important of our front lines of national defense and one that may very well be decisive if the present war becomes a long-drawn-out struggle.

           Some of our scientists have been granted leave to work on war research projects at other universities, to carry on special assignments for the Army or Navy, or to work in liaison between the scientists of this country and of Canada and Great Britain. Of the sixteen men regularly listed in the staff of the department of physics about half will be on leave for defense work in the coming year.

           Other Princeton scientists have been engaged on important problems assigned to them by the National Research Council or the National Academy of Sciences such as the National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel in Washington, civilian behavior and safety in event of war, public opinion and propaganda. A number have been consultants for the Ordnance Department of the Army. Some have been working for industrial corporations on research problems which have an application to national defense. Others have intensified work in their normal research where it is of fundamental importance to defense problems.

           The staff of the School of Engineering has been doing double duty, giving special training programs to help meet the acute shortage of trained technicians in industry in addition to accommodating a greatly increased enrollment. Last spring it organized in Newark, New Jersey, as part of a federal program, an intensive evening course in advance inspection techniques for the upgrading of a selected group of 60 men employed in the inspection departments of defense industries and of government. During the summer it conducted, again as a part of a federal program, four intensive full-time courses in building construction surveying, chemical engineering manufacturing methods, elementary electrical engineering and radio, and engineering drawing, for more than 100 students of whom 28 Princeton Bachelors of Arts, 15 graduates of other colleges, and the remainder, graduates of high schools in Princeton, Trenton, and vicinity.

           A considerable number of our social scientists are at work in the extensive civil agencies that are required in modern war. Quite a few of them “commute” to Washington and Trenton; four are on leave to give their full time to administrative and advisory jobs at the national capital. The Industrial Relations Section has been devoting its attention almost exclusively to personnel and labor problems of defense industries. A group of historians and political scientists, in cooperation with a group at the Institute for Advanced Study, have been giving special attention to the problems and realities of modern warfare which in “total war” must be understood by civilians as well as by the military. One of them because of his special knowledge of military history and strategy is attached to the General Staff of the Canadian Army in London. The staff of the Princeton Listening Post of the School of Public and International Affairs has been absorbed by the newly-established monitoring division of the Federal Communication Commission. The Office of Population Research of the School is giving its major attention to a project that deals with demographic problems that must be faced after the war. This study is being made in cooperation with the Economic, Financial and Transit Department of the League of Nations, which came to Princeton in September, 1940 at the joint invitation of Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and which is now engaged in the preparation of a series of technical documents on economic matters for the use of policy makers in the construction of a peace.

           The Faculty are striving by means of longer workdays to maintain our high standards of instruction, realizing that a continuous flow of trained men is essential to a National Defense Program of unknown duration. That they have not let the stresses and strains of crisis interfere with their main jobs, unless there has been an immediate need for some service they can perform, is indicated not only by the excellent record made by our undergraduates, to which I have previously referred, but also by the number of significant developments in the University’s normal and long-range program. 

This was originally published in the November 28, 1941 issue of PAW.