Residential Fellows
The cornerstone of the Center is our Residential
Fellows program which awards academic year residential
fellowships for about 45 scholars who form a cohesive and diverse
intellectual community. Fellows enjoy time and freedom to pursue their priority research, and more
importantly, to expand their horizons in active engagement with their
Center colleagues. The basic
elements of this program, which crystallized
early in the Center’s history, are outlined in the
Introduction.
In
its very first year, four CASBS Fellows (Ludwig von Bertalanffy,
Kenneth Boulding, Ralph Gerard, and Anatol Rapoport) conceived and went
on to found the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS),
now among the first and oldest organizations devoted to
interdisciplinary inquiry into the nature of complex systems. This set
a high standard for products of scientific value that emerge from the
Center's "serendipitous microenvironments" (a term used by the
great sociologist, Robert Merton, a CASBS founder).
Through its rigorous application-based
selection system,
the Center identifies
and selects top scholars from disciplines in the social
and behavioral sciences, the natural sciences, and the humanities, as
well as interdisciplinary areas. By
awarding residential fellowships to these scholars, bringing them
together in a lovely setting with opportunity for social interaction,
freeing them from the demands of
normal
academic life, and giving them free rein with respect to work, the
Center serves
as an incubator of innovative contributions to academe and society. The
result is a track record
of influential, groundbreaking work, significant scholarly
transformation, and major short- and long-term
achievements of Center Fellows.
Young scholars
Through our selection process and our program of
Summer Institutes
we seek to identify and recruit promising young scholars to come to the Center soon after they receive tenure. We
believe this represents a pivotal stage in an academic career. Having
worked narrowly for several years to achieve tenure, young scholars now are in
a position to think more ambitiously about their work and to take
greater intellectual risks, provided they have the time and receive the
encouragement to do so. A fellowship at the Center offers the time,
support, and intellectual stimulation necessary for young scholars to
undertake far more ambitious research projects than they would
normally do at their home universities.
