44
El Parthenon

In a time Apocalyptic
On the mountain Eucalyptic
Full of thought Acropolyptic
Stands the Hutchins Hutch.

In this intellectual Attic
Institutions Democratic
Are studied by the Mode Socratic
With the Midas Touch.
—Kenneth Boulding

Said an associate of the business-and-industry-connected Stanford Research Institute: "Don't call us a think tank—we've got more to do than think. We produce. I'll tell you what a think tank is—it's that place down in Santa Barbara. Those guys are paid to think. That's all they have to do: think." The thinking was done in an expensively remodeled (and, of course, spacious) mansion of Greco-Hispanic pretensions—Hutchins called it El Parthenon—atop a hill on the edge of Santa Barbara's suburb of Montecito. The old one-storied structure stood pompously at the vista end of a long curving driveway. Inside the great front doors was a great marbled lobby. Offices ran down the sides. Across the back of the building was the great conference room overlooking the rear terrace above the gigantic swimming pool, and the city of Santa Barbara, and the ocean in the distance. The conference room, the heart of the operation, the reason for the Center's being, the scene of a thousand dialogues, was dominated by the great rectangle of baize-covered tables laden with microphones connected to a soundproof recording studio.

Everything, including the intentions, was great. Of the many hyperboles that came cascading down Eucalyptus Hill from the Center, perhaps the most hyperbolic was Fellow Harvey Wheeler's regarding the conference table: "It seems," he wrote, "to have led me to visualize the Center dialogue as a vast, immortal, computerized memory bank—a kind of contemporary electronic variant of the ancient notion of the logos (speech, word, reason). In my imagination I pictured our private electronic logos as hovering unseen about twenty feet above our conference table, a 'brooding omnipresence,' so to speak."^[1]

Hutchins' dry-land luxury liner was berthed about as far from madding midtown Manhattan as it was possible to get. Santa Barbara, California, had long been the destination of New Yorkers and their eastern likes who wanted to retire away from it all, for good and all, in the decades that preceded Palm Springs. It was quiet, conservative Republican California, a begonia-bursting bastion, in the 1950s, of the John Birch Society. The influential publisher of the local newspaper, Tom M. Storke, for all his conservatism, saw the advent of the Center as a cultural blessing for the town. But it was remote from the areas of the country where the great public decisions were made, remote even from Los Angeles, ninety miles to the south. Its location mystified easterners who said, not "What are they doing there?" but "What are they doing out there ?" The weather was ideal; the climate wasn't. It was far from being a satisfactory locale from which to try to influence opinion in high or far places. It was a far jaunt for most of the eminences invited to participate in the Center's programs; their bases were two to three thousand miles eastward, or in Europe.

Having failed to get a commitment from any of the great men he sought as permanent residents, Hutchins settled for bringing out with him the principal members of the fund's New York staff and installing them as Fellows of the Center. In theory they were to serve as research factotums for the likes of the capital-C Consultants, but the Consultants gradually fell away, some of them appearing at the Center for an occasional discussion or presentation of a paper, and some of them not at all. Their chairs were filled, in the main, by the New York Fellows, who were primarily journalists, publicists, and junior administrators and whose work had been so effective in the crusading-cum-philanthropic programs of the Fund for the Republic. They were none of them possessed of scholarly distinction, none of them original thinkers. Publicist "Ping" Ferry, demurring at coming along, said flatly, "I don't have a first-rate mind"—but in the end he came along as one of the Center's two vice-presidents.^[2] The other was a former war correspondent and speechwriter for President Truman, Frank K. Kelly. Subsequently brought on as a vice-president (and, for a

period, president) was Harry Ashmore, editor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Little Rock, Arkansas, Gazette and a front fighter in the struggle for civil rights in the South. Hallock Hoffman (son of Paul) served as coordinator of studies, having previously managed a regional office of the American Friends Service Committee in Pasadena. John Cogley had been religious editor of the New York Times before coming to the fund and the Center. Overseeing Center dialogues, and ultimately editing the Center Magazine , was Donald McDonald, who left the journalism deanship at Marquette University. Director of development, John L. Perry, was a Florida newspaper reporter who had been deputy to a Commerce Department undersecretary. And Edward Reed, director of Center publications, had been editor of Theatre Arts magazine.

Hutchins' selection of these men and their likes set the day-to-day pattern of center discussions in the absence of the great men, who came out on special occasions. The center never recovered from the wholesale importation of the team, or troupe, from the east. They were, to be sure, articulate; whatever else it did, the dialogue didn't sag. But neither did it leap to the heights, nor plumb the depths, that Hutchins either anticipated or somehow hoped it would. Over the next ten years there were a few academics who became attached as Fellows: Wheeler, a political scientist; Rexford Guy Tugwell, the one-time Chicago economist and Roosevelt Brain Truster; John Wilkinson and William Gorman, young philosophers; Stanley Sheinbaum, a young economist; sociologist John Seeley; none of them, however, of the caliber that Hutchins had originally tried to get. An ailing Scott Buchanan—who was of that caliber—came out for a few years preceding his death, as did his St. John's associate, historian Stringfellow Barr. Another of the Fellows was Elizabeth Mann Borgese, nonacademic daughter of Thomas Mann and widow of Hutchins' old associate, G.A. Borgese. Nobel Prize-winning chemist and peace activist Linus Pauling and the controversial Episcopal bishop James A. Pike accepted fellowships but were more often than not away.

The dialogue, Hutchins maintained, was the reason for the Center and its end product. This pedagogic procedure had been a successful technique in the undergraduate program at Chicago with Adler, and a popular alternative to the lecture method. It had considerable vogue around the country with self-selected adults. But it had not been tried, in modern times, with a group of supposedly sophisticated intellectual peers. As a teaching device it defied very close inspection. It was, at best, a roundabout way of getting at the truth. At worst, it was a kind of fencing match in which reasoning was attenuated to the point of fatuity.

Dialogue is likely as not to be a verbal ramble—one of its friends called

the Center the La Scala of the bull session—or a more or less serious gamesmanship enterprise in doing down an opponent. As an earnest inquiry into a serious problem, a cooperative search, it is better suited to learning than to teaching. The participants in the Center discussions were supposed to be learners, but the Center itself was trying to reach the public with its transcripts, tapes, and publications and persuade the public to consider basic issues—that is, it was trying to teach by example. Good dialogue is, however, by definition inconclusive. "The questions that can be answered are not worth asking," said Scott Buchanan. The dialogue at the Center was intended to clarify problems, not present solutions; so its general appeal was limited, its output unsatisfying to the great audience, which would rather be taught (or told) than participate in the pain of trying to advance knowledge.

Over the years the Center achieved a respectable degree of popularity among professional intellectuals—the Center Magazine , established in 1967, reached a circulation, at its peak, of 100,000, nearly all of it in the colleges and universities—but it never reached the general public. Whatever general influence it may have had was indirect and immeasurable. Neither, of course, do the lucubrations of a university have an audience outside the academic world; but a university, unlike the Center, has no such explicit purpose as the Center's to bring its work to the public at large.

The dialogue in Santa Barbara was further handicapped by the disposition of its moderator. Sitting at the head of the conference table Hutchins would light and relight one of his pipes and then settle for a cigarette, on the whole maintaining a seemingly attentive silence. He never directed the discussion beyond recording the names of those who indicated a desire to talk and then calling on them in succession. He rarely contributed to the conversation, beyond occasionally asking a question that suggested that he was following it closely. And he was following it closely, or closely enough, in the way he followed all conversations while his mind was elsewhere. He did not pursue the answers to the occasional questions he asked. He was unfailingly polite, too polite to indicate that he was bored; but after several years of the Center he told a friend one day, "We have had two hundred visiting speakers this past year, and I don't want to have to listen to any of them again."

The visiting speakers or conferees were mostly academics who had a paper they wanted to read—or a paper plus an inclination to get out of the winter weather of the north (or just the inclination). They were mostly proposed by a friend or ex-colleague at the Center; the Fellows had an almost unfailing tendency to go along with one another's recommenda-

tions. This practice itself was enough to demoralize Hutchins' vision of the dialogue. Instead of having some sort of discernible organization, the program was a miscellany and, as such, an open invitation to visitors and residents alike to bring to the table any topic they chose and to digress freely during the course of a given discussion, which sometimes sank, unchecked by Hutchins, to nitpicking and bickering far from the subject at hand. For all its flow of papers read by visitors and residents, the work of the Center had no coherence.

Hutchins called the Fellows to the conference table by ringing an old school bell three or four mornings a week—occasionally five—at 11 A.M . The twenty to twenty-five persons assembled as often as not included whoever happened to be on the premises, invited or uninvited. Staff members, local and visiting financial contributors, guests, and friends of guests might take chairs at the table instead of along the wall at the back. Having instituted the fund-raising category of Founding Members, at a thousand dollars a year apiece, Hutchins was helpless, and his colleagues knew it, to move such members away from the table or exclude them from the discussion; or, if not helpless, too polite; or, if not too polite, too downhearted.

The photocopying facilities in the converted garage on the grounds never stopped running. A paper to be discussed was distributed in advance, to be studied before the school bell rang. The author of the paper— resident or invited visitor—presented a short précis of it, which sometimes turned out to be a very long précis. Then the meeting was opened for discussion. Sometimes the author was quizzed, and sometimes in the course of his elucidation a meaningful exchange ensued. But often the discussion went off on its own around the table. At 12:30 Hutchins adjourned the meeting for lunch, and usually for the rest of the day. Fellows, staff, and visitors partook of a generally tasty $1.50 buffet lunch, with wine, and small groups ate on the terrace outside the conference room or at the table. Hutchins rarely missed a conference-table meeting, but he was often in town having lunch at the Biltmore with a prospective supporter. "Out there" he traveled less frequently than he had at Chicago, and he accepted (and received) progressively fewer speaking invitations. He no longer wrote articles except in the Center Magazine , where he tackled constitutional issues and generally supported the Warren Court's doctrine of judicial activism. In 1963 he undertook to write a syndicated weekly column for the Los Angeles Times . It ran in some thirty newspapers of modest circulation and dealt crisply and controversially with social issues and with education. It did not make a great splash, however, and after two years the Times readily agreed to his dropping it.

Leisurely-pleasurely Santa Barbara took its toll of the Center early. The

boss was the first to arrive—the early riser. The other Fellows trickled in around nine or nine-thirty. They went through their mail or finished reading the Center's daily bible: the New York Times delivered by air. Sometimes they also got through the paper to be discussed at eleven. Sometimes they didn't. And after a reasonably hearty luncheon, complete with a glass, maybe two, of wine, they drifted back to their offices, sometimes taking a constitutional first; got their mail out; got in an hour's work or so; and tooled down the great driveway in the direction of home not too much later than four o'clock (Hutchins and two or three others excepted).

What were they doing out there ? They were pushing their assorted Center projects forward, rounding up scholars by mail and phone to prepare papers or commentaries on papers, and planning two- or three-day conferences with a given visitor. But most of them had work of their own to be done; some of them were engaged on books. For these, the eleven o'clock meeting was something that interfered with their work. It was something they were none of them accustomed to. The morning was the best time to write, for most of them. Several of them—perhaps most of them— resented the interruption. It shot the day. But they were unfailingly faithful in their attendance: the dialogue was the Center's reason for being. It was sacred—to Hutchins. Hutchins was the Center's center.

But for all his longtime talk about a community of scholars, the "consecrated community" that the university should have been and wasn't, he was not himself a communitarian; and neither were the rest of the Fellows. Like university professors—and poets and painters (and people generally?)—the Fellows and staff members, and certainly the visiting conferees, were private persons living private lives and emerging from their studies and their libraries and offices only for social or professional occasions. Some of them, and many of the invited visitors, were prima donnas who actually resented that school bell. The Fellows got themselves houses all over town, without any suggestion by Hutchins or anyone else that they might live within communal distance of one another or build themselves houses on the handsome Center-owned acreage. There was no community, consecrated or not, on Eucalyptus Hill.

It would certainly have taken nothing less than the spirit of community to hold the Center together in the face of the forces that pulled it apart from the first. Like other people who are thrown together too closely, the Fellows eventually got on one another's nerves. All of them knew what each of them was going to say at the conference table as soon as he began talking. (Plato's dialogists did not meet every day at 11 A.M. ) At best the Fellows, and participating staffers, and frequent visitors, came to bore one another; at worst, to annoy. They were every one of them forceful per-

sonalities. Several of them were a pleasure to listen to—but not all of them every day. Animosities fed on boredom and annoyance, on the repetition of pet sentiments and even of pet expressions. And there was no objective force to restrain those animosities.

In commerce and industry the objective force exists pretty much up and down the line: the sales charts. In the arts and pure sciences, especially in the humanistic arts and sciences, the objective control of the sales charts is missing. And in Santa Barbara personality clashes and cliques were not only inevitable but inveterate. It was all predictable—the jealousy, the contempt, the scorn, under ordinary conditions masked but still understood around the table, under trying conditions flaring into the open. A strong leader could have exerted control at least over the manifestations of tension and distress; but Hutchins refused to be a strong leader.

Ten years after the Center was established in 1959 the tension and distress would finally break out into the open—even into open court—and on one of those wretched occasions Hutchins would shake his head sadly and say, "And I appointed them all." But for those ten years, until he reorganized the institution (and thereafter), the fires would smoulder and occasionally erupt. The Center group had come to Santa Barbara far, far from home. Its members were unacquainted locally—unacquainted with, and a little contemptuous of, the faculty of the burgeoning local branch of the University of California. They were thrown into each other's arms socially—these same men who were thrown into each other's arms professionally every day. They were stuck with each other in an intolerable degree of proximity.

The time would come when Robert Maynard Hutchins, the lifelong promoter of the dialogue, would confess that "the right formula for the dialogue hasn't yet been found." But by that time he would be in his seventies.