By: Jeff Milgram
Does the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study want Professor Piet Hut to leave his tenured professorship because he has become more interested in computers than in astrophysics? Or does it want Dr. Hut to leave because he failed to win a grant from the National Science Foundation?
It will be up to a federal court judge in Trenton to decide.
"The Institute for Advanced Study filed a complaint with the court solely to determine the status of a signed agreement between the Institute for Advanced Study and Professor Piet Hut," said Phillip A. Griffiths, the director of the institute where Albert Einstein once worked.
The complaint was filed July 25 and would force Dr. Hut to leave the institute by July 2001.
A messy dispute over the employment of a tenured faculty member seems like an anomaly at the institute, where tea is served every day at 3:30 p.m.
The institute offers academic freedom to its permanent faculty and visiting "members," who are given time to do their own research and not required to teach.
Professor Hut, 47, who was appointed to the permanent faculty in 1985 at age 32, filed a countersuit that claimed there is no agreement.
In a prepared statement, Dr. Griffiths said the institute began to discuss Professor Hut’s status with him beginning in 1989 "after Professor Hut had concurred that it would be better for him and for the institute were he to move on."
An agreement was signed in 1996 that would require Professor Hut to leave the institute within five years, Dr. Griffiths said.
"From 1996 to 1999, Professor Hut accepted the benefits of the agreement, and he repeatedly affirmed his intention to find a new position," said Dr. Griffiths. "Only recently has Professor Hut informed the institute that he does not intend to honor the agreement he signed in 1996."
Professor Hut, who specializes in stellar dynamics, the study of the motion of stars and galaxies, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he was intimidated into signing the agreement that only restored a pay cut.
"They threatened to take something away from me and they gave it back to me," he said.
He said he was given an ultimatum that "I either resign with a buy-out package and relinquish my rights or face drastic trustee-approved action of being marginalized and forced to endure humiliating and economically damaging salary cuts."
After signing the agreement, he said, he exercised his right, which the institute put in writing, to revoke the agreement within seven days.
"I signed the agreement and then, after carefully considering what it would mean to revoke it, I gave the official notice in writing that I did not wish to accept the institute’s agreement," he said.
Professor Hut said it is ‘ludicrous" for the institute to say this is not about tenure.
"Who would voluntarily give up their tenure rights?" Professor Hut said Thursday.
Professor Hut says his problems began in the mid-1980s when the institute’s School of Natural Science appointed a faculty member who opposed his plans to acquire a state-of-the-art supercomputer.
"Suddenly it was made clear to me that my supercomputer wasn’t going anywhere," Professor Hut said Thursday.
In its lawsuit, the institute said the former director of the institute "told Hut that the decision to become heavily involved in computational aspects of astrophysics had slowed his scientific productivity and had cost him dearly in time writing grand but unsuccessful proposals to the National Science Foundation."
Professor Hut has been getting support from other scientists.
"I am personally familiar with a substantial part of Professor Hut’s work," said Edwin L. Turner, professor of astrophysics at Princeton University. "I cannot imagine any valid reason for the IAS to attempt to discourage or prevent Professor Hut from exercising his academic freedom."
