Abraham Flexner

At the Institute for Advanced Study, Flexner helped turn an educational vision into a research community free to pursue questions without an ordinary teaching timetable. Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld supplied the founding gift in 1930, and Flexner became the first director. Holding those roles apart makes the story stronger: the conditions for scholarship required both intellectual design and financial support. Later scholars gave the institution the work through which most readers now encounter it.