By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem

A new multimillion-dollar institute and postdoctoral fellowship program have been established here by a higher-education philanthropist who hopes they will help young academics pursue research free from the pressures of teaching and job hunting.

Construction on the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences started in May, and the first seven of 30 Polonsky fellows have already been chosen. Each fellow receives $40,000 a year for up to five years.

Leonard S. Polonsky and his wife, Georgette Bennett, gave $50-million to create the academy and the fellowships. The couple have a long history of supporting education projects in Britain, Israel, and the United States. Most recently they made big donations to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to help digitize valuable books and manuscripts.

"This is an opportunity for very bright people to have the freedom to focus on their work," Mr. Polonsky, executive chairman of Hansard Global, a financial-services company, told The Chronicle.

He said the generous stipend and dedicated building were designed to break the Catch-22 for bright young Ph.D.'s who are too busy teaching or earning a living to build up the body of publications needed to snag valuable university research positions.

"It's a general problem. Some of them find positions, but then they're given stupid work to do. They are there cleaning up the offices and collecting the students' papers," said Mr. Polonsky.

A Model of Efficiency

The academy is being constructed on the campus of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, an interdisciplinary humanities and social-sciences think tank established by a Dutch family foundation in 1959. The 80,000-square-foot building will include 30 offices for the fellows opening onto inner courtyards, a research library, seminar rooms, conference rooms, an auditorium, a gym, and a cafeteria. The target date for completion is early 2013.

Gabriel Motzkin, director of the Van Leer institute and a philosophy professor and former dean of the humanities faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, compared the new institution to the Platonic Academy in 15th-century Florence.

"An academy like this can have a huge impact," said Mr. Motzkin, who described the current obstacles facing fresh Ph.D.'s as "deadly to academic culture."

He said the facility was unique. He contrasted its emphasis on youth and the unencumbered nature of its fellowships to the one-year midcareer fellowships offered by the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and the German system of assistantships where junior academics must answer to a senior professor.

"We feel that here is a true breakthrough in terms of how intellectual culture is organized anywhere," he said. "Nowhere in the world has there been established an institute for advanced studies for younger scholars with the idea that these younger scholars are able independently for a period of five years to pursue their own research."

Menachem Yaari, president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, said the new institute responded to a central problem in the Israeli university system that has contributed to a significant brain drain of young scholars.

"Discourse within the humanities is the central component of scholarship, and a vibrant group of Ph.D. students is the carrier of this activity. The paradox is that as soon as they complete their course of studies, we find ourselves incapable of accommodating them," said Mr. Yaari, a former economics professor at Yale and the Hebrew University.

He welcomed "the possibility of allowing our best graduates, our best Ph.D.'s, to spend five years here in this wonderful setting and bring their ideas to fruition in a well-reasoned process."

The founders said they had consciously rejected the idea of building the academy within an existing university.

"If you have it inside a university you would be subject to all sorts of things I would be very uncomfortable with. They'll compel you to make it different," said Mr. Polonsky.

Mr. Motzkin added that universities would "look for people who will perform very well in terms of very conventional strategies, so they are much less likely to engage in risky picks. In an institute like this, you can decide. You don't give up on excellence, but in your last five or 10 candidates you might have somebody who is slightly riskier," he said. "If we think we are not getting the performance that we want, we can always then terminate the fellowship."

Mr. Motzkin said he expected to see other, similar institutes founded on the same model.

"This is a relatively low-cost way of producing top-notch people. Compared to the investments you have to put into universities, it's extremely efficient," he said.