[127]
Eisenhower was unknowingly building resentment and a reputation among the Columbia University faculty and staff as an absentee president who was using the university for his own interests. As a career military man, he naturally had little in common with the academics.[128]
He did have some successes at Columbia.  Puzzled as to why no American university had undertaken the "continuous study of the causes, conduct and consequences of war",[129] Eisenhower undertook the creation of the Institute of War and Peace Studies, a research facility whose purpose was to "study war as a tragic social phenomenon".[130]  Eisenhower was able to use his network of wealthy friends and acquaintances to secure initial funding for it.[131] Under its founding director, international relations scholar William T. R. Fox, the institute began in 1951 and became a pioneer in International security studies, one that would be emulated by other institutes in the United States and Britain later in the decade.[129] The Institute of War and Peace Studies thus become one of the projects which Eisenhower considered constituted his "unique contribution" to Columbia.