I have had many and quite diverse connections to the Center over the years, so I hope I will be excused for the egocentricity of emphasizing the memories that have come to me directly through my own eyes and relationships.
My earlier memory comes from an event at the beginning of my junior year at Stanford in 1955, the year the Center opened. My father, Robert R. Sears, a developmental psychologist and then chair of the Stanford Psychology Department, was on the Board of the Center. I vividly remember his excitement over what he regarded as a great coup in locating it in the Bay Area, and even better, right next to Stanford. He was an ambitious man, and hoped to help turn Stanford from a good regional institution into a top tier national research university. He had two principal reasons for his delight. One was that he was sure it would give Stanford a lasting advantage in faculty recruitment. To bowdlerize the old World War I ditty, “How are you going to get them back to Boston (or Minneapolis, or Chicago) once they’ve seen The Farm?” More churlish perhaps was his feeling of triumph over the rather smug Eastern academics who believed that only intellectual wastelands existed west of the Hudson (or perhaps the Delaware) and south of the Potomac.
I believe I am right in remembering that an, or perhaps the, inaugural event at the Center was a reception given for A. Robert Oppenheimer in September 1955. The APA convention had been held in San Francisco, and Oppenheimer had given a highly heralded invited address. He was famously ‘the father of the atom bomb,’ and at the time was embroiled in a highly political McCarthy-era war with the Atomic Energy Commission about the removal of his security clearance, on the grounds of his supposed leftist political sympathies from years gone by. Many academics, including my parents, knew other academics who had been touched by the anti-Communist witch hunts of the day, and Oppenheimer was something of a hero to them. I think they wanted, by hosting him at the Center, to declare some solidarity with him. I was grateful to be on the invitation list, and vividly remember meeting such an impressive man up close and personal, though in the end I probably sat at the kids’ table.
In our household, the Center was at the time known simply as “The Ford Center,” because of the outsize influence the Ford Foundation endowment had over its establishment. I was taken aback when, in the early days of my own first fellowship there, in 1988, I referred to it in those terms, and everyone looked at me as if I was an alien. Those roots had long been forgotten at that point.
The Center had been designed by William Wurster, a prominent architect who was also a professor at Berkeley. My parents got a junior member of his firm to design an equally spectacular home for them under live oak trees on a hillside in Portola Valley overlooking the Coastal Range. Its signature features too were large floor to ceiling glass windows and open wooden beam construction. Lawrence Halprin, a prominent Bay Area landscape architect who often worked with Wurster, did the landscaping for my parents’ home. They lived there quite happily for many years, until advancing age convinced them to move into a more modest ranch house in the flats of Menlo Park.
My own early attitudes toward the Center were ambivalent. Rather than aiding Stanford in recruiting wonderful faculty, it simply created a brain drain, as far as I was concerned. My main mentor was H. Stuart Hughes, a European intellectual historian. During my junior year, he had met with me and three other undergraduates in a seminar for one night a week at his house, for an entire quarter. The focus was entirely on the material he was then starting to pull together for the book that soon earned him an appointment as full professor at Harvard, Consciousness and Society. The next year he was sucked away to the Center just as I was about to start my senior honors thesis with him, where he finished the book. My engaging cultural anthropology professor, George Spindler, was also sucked away to the Center just as I was prepared to learn more about that subject from him. The Stanford of that era had fewer such luminaries than is true today.
When I got to Yale for graduate work, having switched to social psychology, I took a summer research assistantship with the political scientist Robert E. Lane. Bob was at that point on crutches, having broken his foot at the Center the previous spring. Doing what? You can guess. Not the only such casualty in all those years, of course. He was 40, then. Not too many 40 year olds playing professional volleyball on the beaches of Santa Monica, Bob. He was soon to be promoted to tenure at Yale, partly based on his work at the Center, and later became president of the APSA. He also was a pioneering figure in political psychology, and received an NIMH training grant to develop that field at Yale. He later recruited two of my students, John B. McConahay and Donald R. Kinder, to direct the program. I would count him as my de facto mentor as I gradually transitioned from social psychology to political psychology, partly through his generous effort to let me co-author a short volume on Public Opinion with him in 1964. He has always had a greater interest in psychoanalysis and in depth-interviewing than in the then-budding field of survey research on political behavior, though that what my later career has centered on. I think the year at the Center was a key influence in his own intellectual development. As I write this, Bob is a vigorous 98 year-old and still writing.
When I got to the Center in 1988, I was given a study that I later found out had been the location in which John Rawls had written his most famous book. I have to ruefully admit that neither that year nor another year spent in the same study in 1992-3 was sufficient to convert the book I was slowly writing on symbolic politics from notes and thoughts to a full manuscript. I got about halfway there. I am chastened by being reminded of the pronouncement made by the department chair of our History Department, at a reception honoring one of our retired colleagues, Daniel Howe, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for his history of the American Whigs, that Dan had done what we all claim we are going to do, but rarely accomplish, which was in retirement to “finally write the great book we all know is inside us.” I hope that still will be true for me, though I did make good use of my time at the Center to complete other, lesser, projects.
Both of my parents later had fellowship years at the Center themselves. My father, hardly a techie, took some pride in developing a computer program for a statistical test he was using, this in the 1970’s. Sadly each of them passed away during a year that I was a Fellow and living in the area, my father in 1989 at the very end of my first year at the Center, and my mother, Pauline S. Sears, an Emeritus Professor of Education at Stanford, in 1993, halfway through my second year. Happier memories of that second term were numerous dinners with Gardner Lindzey, then Director of the Center, and Lyn Carlsmith (a psychologist who also was the widow of my late cousin, J. Merrill Carlsmith, a professor of psychology at Stanford at his premature death, and former Fellow of the Center). It will surprise no one who knew him that Gardner was a wonderful person to go to dinner with, because he loved food and drink, and he loved a good laugh, sometimes with wry asides about mutual acquaintances.
I took two years at the Center, one in the middle of about a decade as Dean of Social Sciences at UCLA, and the other at the conclusion of that service. Both that position and the Center itself greatly appealed to my zeal for interdisciplinary work in the social sciences, as reflected in my undergraduate major of History and my joint appointment in Psychology and Political Science at UCLA. I found the lunches at the Center among the most stimulating intellectual experiences of my life, and the Wednesday night seminars as well, though they were often more demanding. I met many fascinating scholars in my two years in residence and have always felt grateful for the opportunities they opened up. I did get that book about half-written, but after I left the Center it became displaced by other projects. One began at the Center and resulted in a 2014 book with Jack Citrin, American Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism. I guess starting a major project at the Center counts too. I suspect that there have been a few other somewhat guilt-ridden former Fellows over the years along with those who wrote their great books there (really guys, I have been pretty productive over the years….). I tell myself I need to complete one more book, also halfway done, on Southern realignment, then back to symbolic politics. Wish me luck. If so, I’ll prominently credit the Center.
David O. Sears, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Political Science, UCLA
September 19, 2015
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