Whenever we talk with former Fellows and Scholars about their time at the Center, we hear vivid tales of epiphanies impossible without the synergistic interactions with other fellows, new professional connections, and stimulating conversations. And often the stories conclude with the same phrase…“It was the best year of my life.”
We invite all Fellows and Scholars to contribute personal recollections to what will become an organically growing collection of stories and photos. Please share your stories and photos by sending them to casbs-info@stanford.edu or you can use this online form to type in a story directly.
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
As a graduate student in the fifties, I had had the good luck to be an assistant to a new SSRC committee (on linguistics and psychology), so while still a student I met many important scholars at regular conferences.
The year at CASBS was one of meeting and talking with many stimulating colleagues, and using the library a lot too.
I remember it as a very productive and exciting year. The lunch conversations were unusually interesting,
the anthropologists being most relevant to my work on pragmatic contexts of talk. I did not come with a group project, and was on my own working on a series of articles.
That year followed several years at work on affirmative action in Berkeley, so I also spent time trying to get more women nominated as CASBS fellows. That year, Gillian Sankoff, Scarlett Epstein and I were the only women. I also tried to get the SSRC to study gender issues more and got support letters from many leading female social scientists. Though NRC studies showed females with PHDs had better ability test scores than males when tested, they were underemployed. At UCBerkeley then in the social sciences the deficit between available PhD women and hired faculty was 14.1% at full, 8.7% at associate, and 15.5% at assistant professor levels. (It’s still true they get paid less than matched men). My year at CASBS was productive in many ways.
Susan Ervin-Tripp
Professor Emeritus
Psychology Department
University of California, Berkeley
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.
I remember the sunny autumn day in 2014 when I got my office key, standing there, scanning the ‘Ghosts in the Study’ list. There was a pleasurable shock of recognition when I saw Joseph Weizenbaum’s name for the year 1973. Weizenbaum was the creator of the computer program ELIZA, which is still extant on the internet today (e.g. http://cyberpsych.org/eliza/#.Vb-wZniFdbM). The program, written to test out ideas about computational linguistics (Weizenbaum 1966), imitates the strategies of a Rogerian psychotherapist, adeptly parroting back phrases from one’s comments to drive a peculiarly intimate-feeling dialog. When debugging the program, Weizenbaum asked his secretary to try it out, and after a few exchanges with ELIZA she asked if he’d please leave the room (Curtis 2014). This was indicative of how people responded to ELIZA—it was a very successful evocation of the potential power of computational linguistics to shape our future.
Weizenbaum became unnerved by the response to ELIZA, and very concerned with the overreaching assumptions made by those who interacted with the program, and the implications for our relationship with technology. During his time at CASBS, he was working on a book about the subject: Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. As he puts it in the Preface: “I spend the first of those two happy years at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, California. It was there that I met Steven Marcus, as well as others of the Center’s Fellows, who struggled mightily to educate a primitive engineer.” (Weizenbaum, 1976). His book launched quite a controversy among early Artificial Intelligence researchers (Dembart, 1977), as it took a strong stance about the limits of AI in contrast to human wisdom, and the dangers of over-applying the metaphor of computation. As Weizenbaum put it, “The artificial intelligentsia claims that the computer metaphor can somehow explicate the whole man. This strikes me as being enormously arrogant and just plain wrong—wrong in principle.” (Dembart, 1977)
Weizenbaum remained concerned for the rest of his life with balancing engineering-minded proclamations and assumptions about the role of technology. There is now a bi-annual prize given out in his honor (the Weizenbaum award) by the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology. One can watch interviews with an elderly Weizenbaum in the 2010 documentary ‘Plug and Pray’. By the time that footage was recorded, he had moved back to Berlin, where his family had lived before being swept up by history—they had immigrated to the US in 1936, when he was only thirteen.
I found this study ghost deeply ‘haunting’ and resonant with my own experiences, both as a scholar and as a human being. On a personal level, my husband’s grandparents also fled the Nazis in the 30s, to return later to Germany, and I have spent many summers in Berlin. On a professional level, though trained as a social scientist, my career has been firmly in the technological realm. I’ve worked at technology startups, and have taught primarily in engineering schools. The book I worked on while at CASBS was about the impact of digital games on players’ emotions. The conversations I had with CASBS fellows were deeply grounding for me, in terms of human ethical concerns and practical considerations of shaping the society in which we’d all like to dwell. Comments from Maryanne Wolf, Fred Turner, Joshua Dienstag, Paul Starr, and many others at my seminar talk and at our daily lunches, were a powerful antidote to many prior years almost exclusively lived among technologists.
For me, CASBS was a place to reconnect with an extremely talented and bright community of people who hold very dear the project of being wise in the sense that Weizenbaum articulated in the book he worked on while at the Center. It’s amazing to me that the culture of the place resonates and remains strong across the years—reading the forward to Computer Power and Human Reason, I found myself feeling the same gratitude that Weizenbaum articulates. I’m so glad the Center endures, and to have been shaped by my year there.
References
- Curtis, A. 2014. Now Then. BBC online, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-30a0-9a0a-3ff76e8bfe58.
- Dembart, L. 1977. Experts Argue Over Whether Computers Could Reason, and If They Should. New York Times, May 8, 1977.
- Weizenbaum, J. 1966. Computational Linguistics, Communications of the ACM 9(1): 36-45).
- Weizenbaum, J. 1976. Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. New York: WH Freeman and Company.
meaningful for me. It changed my scholarly identity, making my historical
research more thoughtful, my statistical research more rigorous. My
writing improved and I found myself truly humbled by the experience and
insight of the Fellows around me.
I made friends with whom my family and I still keep in touch, and there
have been reunions in Cambridge, Los Angeles, San Francisco, even the
Canary Islands.
In the years following my CASBS year, I published an important
mathematical paper whose essential proofs I completed at the Center
(“Protection without Capture,” /American Political Science Review/
2004), and later, my second book (/Reputation and Power: Organizational
Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA/ (Princeton, 2010)), as
well as some pivotal papers on the history and political economy of U.S.
pharmaceutical regulation. I also started a long-term study of
antislavery petitioning in the United States. This past year, the first
product of that multi-year study finally came to fruition, with the lead
article in the August 2014 /American Political Science Review/, entitled
“When Canvassers Became Activists: Antislavery Petitioning and the
Political Mobilization of American Women.” This article has just been
awarded the American Political Science Association’s Mary Parker Follett
Prize for the top article published on Politics and History in 2014.
The first draft of that paper was presented at CASBS in the Fall of
2003, and while it took another eight years to complete the data
collection, my CASBS presentation decisively shaped that paper and my
ongoing book project on the multilingual nineteenth-century explosion of
North American petitioning.
I learned from people as diverse as the communications scholar Kathleen
Jamieson, the historians Richard White and Walter Johnson, the
anthropologist Webb Keane, the literature scholar Adela Pinch, and the
economist David Lee. I am deeply grateful for the experience and my
family and I cherish our year there.
1999-2000
Yes,for me, too, my year at the Center was one of the best years of my academic life. In the millennial class of 1999-2000,we were too excited about our work, both our own and that of our colleagues, to worry about the impending Y2K catastrophe that never happened. The conversations we had remain with me until today: critical, provocative, encouraging, inspiring. The table talk gave new meaning to the word “interdisciplinary” — I have not been the same historian since. A collaborative project that emerged out of casual afternoon conversations resulted in an unexpected co-edited book now in the Tyler collection. And the friendships last and last. Here’s to sixty more years of CASBS!