Having asked the approximately 1500 living Fellows of CASBS to write for the web site at the time of the 60th birthday of the Center and having received about 30 wonderful responses, I thought it would only be fit and proper that I should write something myself. (All of the responses so far celebrate the Center. One person wrote that she would be likely to write something that wasn’t complimentary and she assumed that that wouldn’t be acceptable. I assured her that such would be welcome but so far I haven’t heard from her.) I was further inspired to write a short piece by a lunch time experience some days ago. An eminent sociologist asked another such to tell her something about the meaning of “path dependency,” a term I hadn’t heard of before. So I learned something new and enjoyed a conversation in which a historian, an economist, a lawyer, a communications person, and a philosopher took part. Such is the serendipity of the Center. In the course of the conversation the Pulitzer Prize winning sociologist mentioned that at the time of his earlier presentation to the group he had been asked if he weren’t going to pursue a particular line of inquiry and had replied no, but then he later realized that he should, and now he has. Another mentioned that the Center provided quiet moments to think, while watching a hawk fly by. It is a place both of intellectual turmoil, but in a low-key way, and excitement, but also of serenity.
I’ve been very fortunate in my connections with the Center. I was here as a regular Fellow in 1988-89, and then as a Fellow again in 2013-14 and as a Consulting Scholar 2014-15. The first time I was at the Center, I was a bit worried about spending a year of leave so close to my home campus and that surely I would be frequently be called upon by my Department to give advice particularly as I had just recently be its chair. I didn’t hear a peep and clearly the department could get perfectly well without any participation whatsoever on my part. That has been even truer these recent two years as I am retired. The first time I was here, there were Stanford colleagues from other departments at the Center and some of them complained that their departments wouldn’t leave them alone. I suspected that they felt, in fact, that without their participation their departments would obviously make wrong decisions. But I didn’t go so far as my colleague Carl Degler who the year that he was at the Center wouldn’t attend any Stanford event unless it was so important that if he were elsewhere he would have flown in for it. I thought that it was rather sad that on this basis that he missed the dedication of the History Department’s newly renovated building.
In my first year I had a fine time and completed the writing of my book on early Bloomsbury, On or About December 1910. For some reason I didn’t give a talk about it and as far as I remember there were not other Fellows who particularly shared my interests. The title of my book was the first part of a famous half-serious remark by Virginia Woolf: “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” I was intrigued that very frequently the line was misquoted and “nature” substituted for “character.” Why this should happen and what is the difference between the two terms? I circulated a question about that to my fellow Fellows and received some interesting replies none of which I can remember but I’m sure they helped my thinking. A wonderful community develops among the Fellows and one imagines that after the year, one will keep in touch but of course with few exceptions that rarely happens. Almost by coincidence and certainly serendipity, and to my pleasure in recent years I have been in touch quite a bit with Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney who was here that year. There were lively historians as part of the group, Richard Goldthwaite, Nell Painter, and Christopher Lasch. Kit Lasch provided one of my favorite moments, particularly appropriate now in these days of “big data.” In the discussion of Larry Bobo’s presentation on school busing in Boston Kit said that busing hadn’t worked. Larry said that the data showed that it had. Kit said that the data was wrong!
In the almost twenty-five years before returning to the Center I had very little connection with it, rarely visiting except when there was a Fellow there whom I knew previously. I made sure the historians there for the year were asked to History Department events but quite rightly they tended not to come to campus, jealous of their time at the Center. Nowadays the Fellows had urged to have more ties with Stanford, perhaps because since 2008 it has been part of the University. Over the years, one was generally asked to a beginning of the year party for former Fellows to mingle with the new group and there was some events at the Center itself. Also the Center has provided a wonderful way of recruiting people to the Stanford faculty, most notably in the case of the History Department, Gordon Craig and Keith Baker. But then in May 2013 I was written as a former Fellow and was asked if I would like to apply for a Fellowship for the coming academic year, the Fellowship consisting of an office, lunch and a small research fund. Because of financial difficulties, I presumed, the Center was not able to bestow as many Fellowships as it had in the past and it seemed a pity to have those wonderful offices empty. Though retired, I still have a small office in my department and worked perfectly well at home but it seemed a wonderful possibility to have a place to go, to work, and to be with a serendipitous group of people. I was delighted that I did so under the superb interim directorship of Iris Litt. There weren’t people there whom I knew before but it was a very congenial group, including three or four returning Fellows of a similar vintage to myself. The year also lead to my first trip to Israel as one of the Fellows had close connections with the Israel Museum and persuaded me to go with him to its annual gathering for its supporters. It was also the perfect place for me to complete the writing of the short biography I was doing of Edward Upward, the “unknown” member of the Auden group, continuing my interest in British writers of the 1930s.
In the course of the year I became intrigued that the Center was just about to turn 60 and was rather fascinated with the history of the Center itself. It was kind enough to invite me to spend a second year there as a Consulting Scholar in order to look into that question. But it became increasingly evident that a full history of the Center was really not a desirable goal. The asking of former Fellows for their memories was, and it has resulted on interesting postings on the web. Over the year I have learned a lot about its early history. It has seemed to me that its two founding spirits were the Columbia sociologists, Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton. Arnold Thackery had already written two fine essays, published in annual reports of the Center, on the story of its founding and the selection of its location and its being built in six months by the splendid architect William Wurster with the grounds by Thomas Church. The timing was right in the early 1950s. The Ford Foundation has just come into its millions, academia was expanding, and the Cold War was on. (It was also the time of McCarthyism and the term Behavioral Sciences was chosen rather that Social Sciences to avoid any hint of socialism!) It is particularly intriguing that at this moment there is much revisionist thinking about the Cold War. It had, of course, many negative aspects but current thinking points out that in order to arm ourselves against the Russians we needed to move forward in combatting racism, in supporting the arts, and in improving our abilities in the social sciences. Funding was also secured from the Mellon Foundation so that there would be a certain number of Humanities Fellows and so there have been over the years, such as Thomas Kuhn, H. Stuart Hughes, Edward Said, Ian Watt, Wallace Stegner, Bernard Malamud, Meyer Schapiro, Carl Schorske, Peter Gay, Karl Popper, Mark Schorer, Gordon Wright, and others.
Lazarsfeld wanted a place where senior scholars would give seminars for junior ones. But quite quickly Merton’s vision, as well as that of the first Director, Ralph Tyler, prevailed: that it should be a community of equals, working on their particular projects. There might also be some joint projects. Merton was also very taken with the idea of serendipity. (As a British historian I was particularly pleased that the word should have been invented by Horace Walpole.) The word was the subject of Merton’s posthumous co-authored book. Serendipity means the coming together of sagacity and chance. The Center exists for people to do their own work which they could do elsewhere, not as a part of a group of fellow scholars. But I think it is striking that many a scholar has written their most important book at the Center. There are many examples and one should just mention John Rawls and Thomas Kuhn. But what is special about the Center is serendipity. Sage people come together, talk together, listen to one another, and from that enrich one another and their world. I feel very lucky to have spent three years there.
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