Are the Faculty the University?

Isador Isaac (I.I.) Rabi was a professor of physics at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize in 1944 for his resonance method of recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. He was widely regarded as one of the top physicists of his time and was a colleague of Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Robert Oppenheimer, and Werner Heisenberg. He refused the associate directorship of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in 1942, stating “he did not wish to make the culmination of three hundred years of physics into a weapon of mass destruction” (Bird & Sherwin, 2006). Rabi was instrumental in establishing Brookhaven National Laboratory and Nevis Labs (Columbia University). He was also generally credited with giving European physicists the idea for establishing CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) Laboratory in Geneva. Rabi, however, is particularly remembered for his interesting encounter with Dwight D. Eisenhower, the thenpresident of Columbia University. In 1948, at their fi rst meeting, Eisenhower was congratulating Rabi on his Nobel Prize for Physics, adding that he was always happy to see “one of Columbia’s employees honored.” The remark, it is recorded, drew from Rabi a careful response: “Mr. President, the faculty are not employees of the University-they are the University.” This was the beginning of a twenty-year friendship between the two (Devons, 2001).