“Why would a nice Berkeley girl like you uproot her entire family to move to Stanford for ten months?” I was often asked this question by acquaintances at Stanford as well as at Berkeley. It did not take me very long before I had a vigorous answer: The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences is a very special place, our own magic mountain, where its inhabitants learn to relax into their thoughts amidst convivial and stimulating company, a beautiful natural setting, excellent lunches, and a warm supportive staff. Time at CASBS has its own rhythms defined in part by our common activities, but mostly by the pace we set for ourselves as we work through research problems, and gain strength from sharing these with our friends and colleagues.
That first year at the center was one of the best of my professional life, critical to my work on the history of child abduction– the subject of my research at the time– but also important to my intellectual energy which was refueled and renewed. In 1991-92 (my first time) there were an unusually large group of historians who covered several different specialties (America, early and late modern Europe, history of medicine, gender history, history of education) and our lunch conversations were lively and occasionally brilliant. But that sense of deep engagement was hardly restricted to the historian’s table and colleagues from economics and psychiatry, sociology and philosophy made our days at the center into small gifts of learning across borders, almost never available in our ordinary lives at the universities from which we came in the US or elsewhere in the world. That was also the year that Sissela and Derek Bok were in residence. Derek had just retired as President of Harvard; Sissela was a philosopher of ethics who had recently published a book about her mother, Alva Myrdal. They brought with them deep experience in university life and insights into writing. Derek set up shop in the mornings in the lunch room where there was an available telephone (in those pre cell phone days) and ample coffee, as he tried to remain connected to the university world. Most of us were glad to be far from telephone interruptions. At that time, we were buzzed in our studies by the front office should a call come through from “outside.” We then went to the common phone in each of the units to receive it – or if we chose, not to receive it. When I now think of the ability to just not be connected to all the noise out there, it is genuinely a blissful memory.
The weekly seminar gatherings were inspiring events as we learned to understand our colleagues work and ways of thinking. And the week was sprinkled with more informal seminars around common interests. We also had picnics with our families and trips to Ano Nueuvo, wine tastings, and celebrations of the successes of our colleagues who became presidents of this or that organization, won MacArthurs and other prizes, or published important books. This was the life of the mind as we had imagined it might be when we were graduate students before the reality of the dingy tower took over our lives. By the end of the year, I knew I had to come back.
And so I did, fifteen years later, joined by two other historians of childhood, Bengt Sandin and Steven Mintz, as colleagues in a joint venture (the only basis at the time for reappointment). Steve, who arrived a week before, greeted me quite simply – “Welcome to Paradise.” I still had to relocate the ménage from Berkeley to Stanford, though this time without my two children in tow. Fifteen years had brought them to college and beyond. But my wonderful husband, Jack Lesch, still commuted back and forth to Berkeley to teach, an extraordinary gesture of generosity. By then, I was eager to make the center a focus in which to define how the history of childhood, which the three of us had committed ourselves to developing as a specialty, could learn from and teach others in the social sciences. There was a new director, though many of the staff were still around and, as always, eager to help. The natural setting was the same (even after a devastating fire two years earlier) the food delicious and the company dynamic and stimulating. Since there were three of us who had come together (and several others who joined during the course of the year for two scheduled conferences), we now had a much more clearly defined goal, to produce a volume based on our regular deliberations together. This meant that things were a bit more scheduled and a bit more connected to the outside, less of a world apart and with more intrusions from that other world (including direct telephones in our renovated studies). I even managed to squeeze in time to finish my family memoir, retreating into my study and back in time.
It was still a very special place, still alive with ideas from across the disciplines, and once again had a president and a first lady in residence, this time the former President of Peru, Alejandro Toledo and Eliane Karp-Toledo, excellent company and active participants our activities; both now good friends. By then the center had a harder time raising funds, since foundations and the federal government could not quite understand what it meant to just spend a year thinking (and changing one’s mind), so the residential group was now smaller. We probably got to know each other better, but learned from a smaller range of people. By the end of that year, CASBS finally lost its independence and became part of Stanford University. The experience of shrinking resources was experienced by us, but never so much as to limit our deep sense of community, nor our ability to retreat and refresh.
It is not possible to sum up what these two years meant for me. I can say certain things without qualification: Together they helped me to grow into my scholarship and to explore and develop the field with which I am now most fully identified, the history of childhood. Together they provided me with new colleagues and friends. But they were also a respite and restorative, matters harder to evaluate in career terms. The center is one of those places for which the word institution does not fit except, of course, in so far as it describes time spent creatively in a specific place.
Paula S. Fass
Professor of the Graduate School
Margaret Byrne Professor Emerita
University of California at Berkeley
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