May arrived over the Hudson Highlands with a swift, vibrant awakening of pale beech leaves and wild azaleas that carpeted the steep granite slopes leading down to Stony Point. The air had cleared after three days of mild spring rain, leaving the Hudson wide, deep, and brilliant blue under a vast afternoon sky. Down along the lower promenade, where the stone piers extended into the water, the river moved without a whisper, reflecting the sharp white contours of the East Pavilion like a dark mirror.
Inside the glass-domed lecture hall of the research complex, the morning symposium had just concluded. Sixty international doctoral fellows—the inaugural cohort admitted under the formal stewardship of the Supervisory Council—were gathering their notes and tablets, discussing the morning’s prese
