I was a “double recidivist” at the Center. I couldn’t stay away. After an initial year (1977-78) while I was on the Stanford faculty, I was there again in 1987-88 (from Harvard) and in 2004-05 (from Duke). The first time I was there by myself, but my wife and partner, Nan Keohane, was teaching at Stanford (and a Fellow the next year). The second and third times we had the good fortune to be at the Center together.
The term “double recidivist” comes from the closing show, entitled “The Permanent Fellow,” in 1988 that I co-produced with James Fishkin, who doubled at playing the piano, and that starred Charles (Chick) Judd, a psychologist with a beautiful singing voice. That year, Duncan Luce was in his third year at the Center — hence the “double recidivist” phrase was directed at him. But the show as a whole was targeted at our beloved long-time Director, Gardner Lindsay, and the Associate Director, Bob Scott. Its theme was that being Center Director was really to be a Permanent Fellow — who couldn’t want this? So one of the Fellows had kidnapped the Director, hidden him away, and was impersonating him successfully, until he behaved in an “un-Gardner like way” on the volleyball court and was exposed. Since the music was from Gilbert and Sullivan — H. M. S. Pinafore and Mikado — it was easy to pillory everyone from education professors (“Three Little Girls from School Are We”) to “The Lord High Associate Director.” Since I entirely lack musical talent, where else could I have co-produced an operetta?
The Center offered more serious kinds of synergy as well. In 1977-78 I was trying to understand the politics of the global economy and had the good fortune to learn much from the distinguished economist Robert Hall and the great political scientist Theodore Lowi. In 1987-88 I was working with a focus group with Stephen Krasner and Douglas North while Doug was working on the book on institutional change that helped win him the Nobel Prize in Economics. I was also walking with Jim Fishkin just after he got the idea for “deliberative polling,” an idea that has made him famous. On a perhaps less elevated note, Glenn Carroll, a pioneer in Organizational Ecology, was studying micro-breweries and sponsored a beer tasting at the Center in 1988 —which kept me from drinking beer for roughly a decade thereafter! (More seriously, I have recently done some work on organizational ecology and world politics that draws directly from Glenn’s work, with which I first became acquainted at the Center.)
2004-05 was the year of rainbows and the “It’s a Rainbow!” T-shirt. That year I also had the good fortune to get to know Joshua Ober while he was writing his book on Athenian democracy, and his partner Adrienne Mayor, who was not formally at the Center but was a major intellectual presence and was at the time at work on The Poison King: the Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, which a 2009 finalist for the National Book Award in the non-fiction category. During that year Peter J. Katzenstein and I brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to study anti-Americanism, including the Center Director, Doug McAdam. Serendipity again.
What the Center epitomizes to me is a distinctive combination of solitary reading and thinking, spontaneous discussions about intrinsically interesting issues, and the mental playfulness that is to me the most distinctly enjoyable part of being an academic. At the Center at its best, professionalism is enhanced and enriched by lively intellectual banter. This spirit of fun is particularly important at the current time. The professionalism of academic life has surely increased productivity and winnowed out superficial thinkers whose dilettantish cleverness formerly sometimes passed for deep scholarship. But it runs the risk also of driving out the pure love of ideas, and willingness to play with them, which I believe fosters creativity. The dullest members of my Center communities were those who hid themselves away and tried only to maximize productivity — turning out work that simply systematized what they had already thought. Those who really thrived at the Center were those who both had a focused agenda of their own work, and at the same time were open to new ideas, new friends, and even some detours — detours that could lead to more creativity and new breakthroughs, although this is always unpredictable.
It would be intellectual death for the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences to lay out tasks to be performed by the Fellows during their fellowship years, or to measure its success solely by the number of books or refereed journal articles produced during the Center year. Indeed, the most important results of a Center fellowship are likely to be produced years later and not necessarily to have a Center imprint on them. A conversation here, a walk there, reading a colleague’s work — these can all set a creative scholar’s mind on a new path, with results that cannot be predicted but that have the potential to change the world of ideas, and eventually, sometimes, the world. Let’s all do what we can to make sure that the Center for Synergistic Advanced Study thrives for future generations of scholars as it has for our own.
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