Dunn and five of his colleagues left Yale and formed a successor organization, the Center of International Studies, at Princeton University that same year.
[2] Dunn later wrote that the timing was not accidental, as the rise of Fascism in Europe during the early 1930s was clearly threatening the security of the United States.
[2] The new institute had the support of the President of Yale, Charles Seymour, and was initially funded by a five-year, $100,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
[3] This last was especially important; unlike some other academic efforts in this area, the institute explicitly attempted to both study and influence the decisions of the present.
Although concerned with all aspects of this broad field, its research program is devoted primarily to studies designed to clarify contemporary problems in the foreign policy of the United States.
[6] Wolfers started out in the mindset, then converted the previously idealist Spykman, and Dunn, a disillusioned former legal officer at the U.S. Department of State who had become a scholar of international law, followed suit.
[7] As part of its emphasis on the present, the institute sent hundreds of copies of its studies to officials in relevant areas of government, where they found a welcome audience.
[2][9] The institute also created a "memorandum series" of treatments of contemporary research problems; these were longer than journal articles but kept shorter than books so that they could be more easily read by time-pressed officials.
[3] In addition to the regular staff, a dozen or so other scholars would be attached to the institute for temporary appointments to carry out particular research projects; these included Harold D. Lasswell, Robert A. Dahl, Annette Baker Fox, and Ellen Hammer.
[8] The themes of the courses revolved around national security and war; this sometimes upset undergraduates who were interested in going into missionary work or in joining efforts towards building world peace, but it accurately reflected the realist perspective of the institute.
[8] Also quite influential was one that Brodie wrote along with Dunn, Wolfers, Corbett, and Fox, The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, published in 1946, which laid down the fundamentals of nuclear deterrence strategy and explored ways the A-bomb might be put under international control without idealistic notions of world government being in place.
[15] In 1950–51, the institute ran into conflict with the new President of Yale, their former colleague A. Whitney Griswold, who felt that scholars should conduct research as individuals rather than in cooperative groups.
[6] In the estimation of political scientist Annette Baker Fox, the creation of an institute such as the Yale one, which is separate from the usual departmental structure, "alters the making of choices by undergirding particular intellectual activities, thus changing academic priorities and who gets to rank them ... [the Yale Institute] foundered on this rock of university structure.
"[9] Finally, there was some personal animosity involved, related to Griswold believing that institute members had argued against him receiving tenure.
[17] In 1949 the Rockefeller Foundation had agreed to another term of funding for the institute, $75,000 over three years, but it, like the previous grant, was dependent upon Yale University committing to raise an even greater sum on its own.