The Center of International Studies
The Center of International Studies traces its antecedents to the Yale Institute of International Studies (1935-1951), whose director, Frederick S. Dunn '14, came to Princeton with seven associates in 1951. First incumbent of the Milbank Professorship of International Law and Practice, Dunn was director of the Center until he retired in 1961 when he was succeeded as director by Klaus Knorr (public affairs), who had come with him from Yale. Cyril E. Black (history) became third director in 1968.
The Center, which draws its membership from Princeton faculty and predoctoral students and visiting scholars from other institutions, encourages research in two interrelated fields -- international relations (e.g., studies of world order, foreign policy, military affairs) and national development (studies of comparative politics and of modernization in countries at various levels of development). The Center's members include economists, historians, and sociologists as well as political scientists, and many of its group research projects involve multidisciplinary, comparative, and cross-cultural approaches.
The Center's Program in World Order Studies, which focuses on problems associated with developing a just and peaceful world order, was established in 1970 with a grant from Randolph P. Compton '15 and Mrs. Compton. Younger scholars are awarded predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships named for the Comptons' son John Parker Compton '47, who was killed in World War II.
One of this program's first projects, "The Future of the International Legal Order," was directed by Cyril Black and Richard A. Falk (Dunn's successor as Milbank Professor), with the participation of some forty scholars from twenty-eight institutions in this country and abroad. In 1973, the first four volumes that had resulted from this project received the Annual Award of the American Society of International Law, which cited the editors for having "persuaded some of the world's ablest minds to apply their highest talents to our most important problems."
Additional research and publication at the Center has involved a broad range of topics, including the modernization of Japan and Russia, the modernization of China, thermonuclear war, the politics of developing areas, revolution, guerilla warfare, and problems of ecology.
Besides issuing research monographs and policy memoranda from time to time, the Center sponsors World Politics, an academic quarterly in international relations and national development that political scientists rated highest in quality among sixty-three professional journals in its field in a 1975 survey. Ninety books were written under the Center's auspices during its first quarter century, half of them by scholars from other institutions in this country and abroad.
Support of the Center has been provided by income from an endowment, by appropriations from the Woodrow Wilson School, and by University general funds. The Center has also received support from the Rockefeller, Ford, and Compton Foundations, from the Carnegie Corporation, from numerous individual gifts, and from various research agencies of the federal government.
Source: Leitch p. 273 ff
