To the Editor:

Testimony at the recent Planning Board hearings leaves little doubt that a significant part of the Battle of Princeton was fought on and around the spot where the Institute for Advanced Study proposes to build its condominiums for faculty housing. Princeton is not Europe, where nearly every plot of land was fought over at one time or another. American battlefields are thankfully few, and most of them have already been built on. Those whose terrain remains as it was on the day when the fighting took place are exceedingly rare; in New Jersey, Monmouth Battlefield is the only other field left undeveloped.

The justification the Institute has offered for its proposed development is that the atmosphere of its campus would be further enhanced by having additional members live there. While some sympathy might be in order, there are no professional reasons for building these condominiums.

Physicists and mathematicians have been walking across town to their offices for years. Among the members of the Institute itself, Einstein lived on Mercer Street, Von Neumann on Library Place, and Kurt Gödel on Linden Lane; none of them lived on the Institute grounds. They somehow managed anyway, and I am sure that the present and future members of the Institute will continue to thrive, both professionally and socially, even if their walk to work is longer than it might have been had this subdivision been approved.

Ken Fields

Linden Lane