47
The Refounding Father
As big-name conferences and convocations flourished and dialogue faltered, bickering and backbiting became the order of the day at El Parthenon. The animosities between individuals and cliques in the fellowship grew apace. Nineteen sixty-eight saw the death of Scott Buchanan, whom Hutchins had tried to persuade to serve as the Center's first dean. The bickering went on. Hutchins knew he had made a mistake in bringing the New York staffers to California and establishing them as Fellows of a philosophical center, but he didn't know what to do about it now. He saw only one way to avoid an open explosion, and that was to reorganize the enterprise.
By the spring of 1969 the talk of "constitutionalizing" the Center had been going on for almost a year, with no discernible progress. The structure was intolerable. Hutchins was the chief executive officer, and the other officers and staff members all played up to him. Ashmore had his ear, and Ashmore was not popular in the fellowship. Harvey Wheeler carried considerable weight, but divisively; "Mr. Wheeler," Hutchins told a friend, "has something of a conspiratorial nature." There were conspiracies swirling around the man who had meant to establish a consecrated community. This one was neither consecrated nor communal. And the constitutionalizing process—whatever that pomposity may have meant— was getting nowhere.
"I'd led a sheltered life," said Ashmore the nonacademic, "until I got mixed with academics. . . . The kind of politicking that goes on in the academic community is far more virulent than goes on in city hall or the state legislature. . . . What you have is a kind of ruthlessness in jockeying for position. It's probably not much worse than a run-of-the-mill bureaucrat or journalist on a big newspaper fighting for preference or advance-
ment. But the difference between [that and] what happens here—and in any university community—is that all the jockeying and struggling and climbing over people is coupled with protests of utter morality." [1] More and more people crowded around the conference table, and more and more often the political activists among the Fellows were busy about social issues elsewhere. Something radical was crying to be done.
Even then it is questionable whether the extremely weary Hutchins would have done anything drastic. What finally moved him to action— though he still managed to avoid firing anyone himself—was the last of Chester Carlson's bequests, amounting, as part of his residual estate in 1968, to almost five million dollars in Xerox stock. For the first time since the original Ford grant had run out, something could be done at the Center with a perspective of more than a few months at a time. Hutchins asked a committee of five of the Fellows to advise him about the reconstituting of the operation. One of the five, John Cogley, suggested a procedure that was generally acceptable. The fellowship would be dissolved and Hutchins would appoint himself a senior Fellow and select another from the group. These two would select a third, and so on, until a majority could no longer be mustered. Hutchins selected the controversial Wheeler, and the two of them spent a week on the long-distance telephone—largely to Europe— inviting the usual great men to come to the Center for nine months a year at $25,000. (Tugwell later said that Hutchins had indicated to him that he hoped that the reconstituted Center would consist of "the most distinguished people to be found anywhere in the world.") The telephonic invitation to the most distinguished people in the world was uniformly rejected, and Hutchins was face to face at last with the fact that he could not get anything like the world university of his dreams. [2]
Then he and Wheeler chose the elderly Tugwell; while the three men deliberated Ashmore suggested that he and Cogley be named ex officio, and they were both named full senior Fellows. The five elected John Wilkinson, and the six elected Elizabeth Mann Borgese. There the majority vote failed for the remaining Fellows—Ferry, Seeley, Pike, Barr, Gorman, Hallock Hoffman, and Pauling. The part-time paid consultants were dismissed en masse and told that they would be hired on an ad hoc basis.
The election, and rejection, came as almost as great a shock to the electors as it did to the rejectees. The perfervid Ferry, a vice-president from the start, had lost favor around the table (from which he was frequently absent) and with Hutchins, whom his extreme public statements had often embarrassed. Seeley had been the dean in whom Hutchins was supposed to have placed great confidence. Hoffman, like Ferry, had come from the Fund for the Republic. The rambunctious Bishop Pike, like Linus Pauling,
had been a frequent absentee; but the aging "Winkie" Barr was an intimate friend of Hutchins.
Some of those who were told to move on—with generous severance pay—took the pink slip very badly, above all Ferry, who, along with Hoffman and Seeley, represented a strong political activist segment of the fellowship. Looking back on the purge, Ashmore suggested that there was more to the selection process than scholarly work. "The divisions within the group had become evident," he said. "I think they were in part spurious, but you had the classic political radical view represented by Ferry. Then you had this hippy-radical thing represented by Hallock Hoffman and Seeley. And then you had me as the old, square liberal." [3] The rejectees had not all been activists, nor the acceptees all nonactivists, but it was true that the political activists on the whole had skimped their work at the Center in favor of other activities. The other rejectees—Kelly, McDonald, Reed, and Sheinbaum—were asked to continue what they were doing, but as non-Fellows they were excluded (along with all the droppers-in) from the dialogue at the conference table.
Ferry had received his unexpected notice while he was on holiday in Scotland. Returning to Santa Barbara, he informed Hutchins that his dismissal "shattered" him. He had been vice-president of the Fund before the Center was established and had anticipated spending the rest of his working life on Eucalyptus Hill. Having to face a man he was firing, Hutchins retreated behind the supposed new fact of life that, with the refounding of the Center, he was merely one of seven equals and could only take up Ferry's case with the other six. Ferry's unhappiness was unassuaged. Hutchins had been one of his closest friends (as he had been one of Hutch-ins'). He had assumed he had lifetime tenure—though the notion that there could be tenure in an unendowed institution was more than a little far-fetched. True, he had been absent from Santa Barbara at least a third of the time on speaking trips, and his designation as the Center's vice-president when he made his unfailingly radical public proposals—such as unilateral disarmament—had, he knew, distressed many members of the board. But he had acted on the informal motto of the Center, "Feel Free." He thought his removal should be reversed. [4]
When Hutchins reported to him that the new fellowship could find no place for him, [5] Ferry's grief turned to fury. He rejected the offer of a $100,000 settlement and filed suit against the Fund for the Republic, as parent body of the Center, for general damages of $263,000 and exemplary damages of $400,000, accusing Hutchins and Ashmore, as chief officers of the fund, of having acted with malice toward him. Hutchins and the other surviving Fellows were subpoenaed and required to give ex-
tended depositions defending their action in dropping him. After two years of legal harassment of the Center and its board, Ferry accepted the Center's original offer of $100,000 as a settlement and left Santa Barbara to continue the fruitful life of social activism in the east. [6] He and Hutchins had no further contact. Hoffman, who had also been with the fund since the beginning, amiably settled for two years' severance pay, as (less amiably) did Seeley.
The first action of the refounded Center, in the summer of 1969, was to invite a dozen prominent men from Britain, France, Argentina, and American universities to a week's discussion in Santa Barbara to help "complete the transformation of the Center into an intellectual community in which the disciplines are forced to come to terms with one another and in which some of the best minds of our time may work together to bring reason to bear on human affairs. This would be a true university." Hutchins added, in his memorandum to the conference participants and his board: "They would also be free to decide whether or not they wanted students. The seven senior fellows now in residence believe that young people should be admitted as assistants or junior partners. . . . The members should regard themselves as professors in a world university, free to study and discuss whatever seemed to them worthy of their attention." [ 7]
Following the meeting the seven self-established Fellows announced the appointment of twelve associates, and Hutchins said, "As the first ten years of the Center draw to a close, as one era ends and another begins, I look back with some satisfaction to the successful attempt to found a center of independent thought and criticism, to learn how to gain comprehension through dialogue, to clarify the basic issues—and some burning ones—and widen the circles of discussion about them." [8] Of the dozen men who attended the post-refounding conference, several agreed to write papers for dialogue sessions and to attend center discussions "as often as possible." Five of them accepted appointments as associates, but only one of the five would ultimately become a fellow of the Center: Alexander Comfort of England, the respected gerontologist whose pop book The Joy of Sex would become one of the all-time nonfiction best sellers—and who would figure spectacularly in the last years of Hutchins' career.
The reorganization produced a small flurry of attention in the nation's press, much of it emphasizing the fact that Hutchins had been elected the Center's board chairman (in place of Justice William O. Douglas, who had resigned) as a likely prelude to his retirement. Vice-president Ashmore took his place pro tem as president.
The country was still asking—when it thought about the Center at all— What are they doing out there? They were going on with the dialogue and
the conferences and the production and distribution of great quantities of publications. A few months after the refounding, the Center published a collection of statements by senators Edward Kennedy, William Fulbright, Mark Hatfield, and John Sherman Cooper, sensationally advocating an end to the American refusal to recognize Communist China—yet another of the "distant early warnings" of things to come that had emanated from the Center. The publication of Asian Dilemma: United States, Japan, and China provoked a new round of attacks from the right, with Congressman Charles Teague of California reiterating his demand for an investigation by the IRS and saying that "the staff is extremely oriented toward the left and is more interested in developing and disseminating extremely liberal propaganda than it is in true education. [9] Once more the board of directors, approving the reorganization, undertook (or, more precisely, agreed to undertake) a search for endowment of the institution.
But with the state of the nation what it was in 1969, what the Center was doing out there seemed to be more remote from reality than ever. Two years earlier the Center invited a group of student leaders from across the country to join the senior Fellows in a three-day conference—which turned out to be a farce, with the representatives of the waterbed generation calling for revolution and the aging denizens of Eucalyptus Hill demanding in vain that the young come up with a theory of human society. (One of the young red-hots said afterward that the Center conference had been "like going to grandfather's.") After the reorganization of 1969 a handful of junior fellows was installed around the table, but that experiment petered out and it was clear that the Fellows envisioned no generational succession to themselves.
Did Hutchins suppose that the refounding of the Center was something more than a holding operation, with seven persons participating who had already been at the conference table for ten years? Were they (himself included) "some of the best minds of our time," who would constitute the core of a world university? Not likely; he knew them (and himself) too well for that. Or was he going through an old man's motions, protesting ever more urgently that he wanted to lay the burden down? He was a manful man and, as he had always been, a dutiful one. Somebody would have to be found soon, very soon, to take his place. Until then he would have to carry on (or go through the motions of carrying on?). He had said so often that it is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere; what was there to do but to persevere, even anew to undertake, to do what he had always done?