The name ‘Institute’ misrepresented the Frankfurt group’s humanities focus to American empiricists.

Evidence

We must appear to these people [at Columbia] as what we are: individuals, each of whom is following his own theoretical ideas, but who admittedly have a mutual influence over one another and collaborate with one another, as may happen with the anti-Semitism question, for example. The concept of the Institute as we see it corresponds in this country more to that of an endowment or foundation than that of an institute. As we encouraged this misunderstanding ourselves, partly out of courtesy and partly in our own interest, we should now see to it, if the various negotiations fail, that it is fully cleared up, to avoid any conflict of this sort recurring in the future. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1231 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

A further mistake, for which I feel partly responsible, but which may be explained by my background, is our having called ourselves an Institute instead of a Foundation or an Endowment. When we came to this country it had been our idea to devote the funds which we brought here to enable European scholars who had lost their position by the rise of dictatorship to continue their own work. When we became aware that a few of our American friends expected of an Institute of Social Sciences that it engage in studies on pertinent social problems, fieldwork and other empirical investigations, we tried to satisfy these demands as well as we could, but our heart was set on individual studies in the sense of Geisteswissenschaften and the philosophical analysis of culture. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1051 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Institute’s name misled American funders about its true nature — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1231; The Institute’s name misled Americans about its true non-empirical mission. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1051

Related

• The Institute’s name misled American funders about its true nature (similarity 0.97)
• The Institute’s name misled Americans about its true non-empirical mission. (similarity 0.95)
• The Institute resisted American empirical fieldwork demands in favor of philosophical humanities work (similarity 0.82)
• Naming strategy hid the Institute’s Marxist aims behind a neutral title (similarity 0.79)
• The Rockefeller Foundation refused to fund independent Frankfurt Institute research (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The Institute’s name misled American funders about its true nature #corroborates (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1231
• The Institute’s name misled Americans about its true non-empirical mission. #corroborates (0.92) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1051