Rewind

The first things that the trustees of a new foundation decide to support are often a mere reflection of the explicit instructions or known interests of the donor. Sometimes, however, such posthumous guidance is lacking. This was true of two of the foundations I have known best, the Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Neither Henry Ford nor John D. MacArthur prescribed the initial agendas of their foundations. In the latter case, Mr. MacArthur had told the first trustees, "I made the money; now you fellows will have to decide what to do with it."

In a six-year period culminating with the death of the donor's son in 1984, I had the memorable experience, as a kind of male midwife, of helping the MacArthur foundation incubate, and then hatch, the first of its undertakings: the much-discussed and unusually ambitious program of five-year, no-questions-asked awards to persons of exceptional talent, dedication and capacity for self-direction, in almost all walks of life and at almost any age.

Constricted and "Pre-Shrunk"

The first trustees, principally kin and business associates of the donor, decided to seek advice from a number of persons. Among the letters they received was a plea from G. E. Burch, chairperson of Tulane University's Department of Medicine, which met an immediate and passionate response from the donor's son, Roderick (henceforth in this article called Rod).

In his letter, Professor Burch, himself schooled in the organization of scientific research, complained that research scientists were becoming increasingly constricted. Their projects were "pre-shrunk" by detailed conditions attached to their grants by funding sources anxious to know what their money would buy and fearful of critical scrutiny by legislators alert for signs of venality.

Rod MacArthur had the support of William T. Kirby, his father's lawyer and a fellow trustee, in pursuing Professor Burch's idea. Rod, a free spirit and self-described maverick with deep suspicion of established institutions, saw in the notion of supporting creative people—without specifying the expected products of their work or monitoring their progress—something that his fiercely self-reliant father would have approved. In fact, at the time, he hoped that the entire income of the foundation would be devoted to the lifetime support of MacArthur Fellows.

When Rod and Bill Kirby sought the advice of the Ford Foundation, McGeorge Bundy, the foundation's president, arranged a meeting attended by the heads of two havens for very creative scholars and scientists: Carl Kaysen (Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton) and Meredith Wilson (Behavioral Sciences Center in Palo Alto, California). Wassily Leontieff, former senior fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard, Harold Howe and I, as current and former Ford Foundation vice presidents for education and research, were also there.

After that discussion in New York, Rod MacArthur asked me to help design the program and get it started. Shortly thereafter, I asked Gerald Freund (later the program's first director), who I knew had a gift for identifying and encouraging exceptional writers, to help plan the undertaking.

A great deal of the program's incubation period was taken up by a series of consultations, single and collective, with persons who were either good "truffle hounds," creative individuals, or preferably both. In addition, I remember visiting the conscientious and high-minded Swedes who managed the Nobel Prize program, as well as the Guggenheim, Sloan, and Johnson foundations.

The reception by most of those consulted was distinctly positive but not without recognition of the difficulties such an effort would face. (And one skeptic, a hardnosed "philanthropoid" in charge of a single-subject fellowship program at another foundation, was derisive, likening the proposed fellowship to one of those lavish and unexpected prizes awarded on television, with the recipient shrieking, "A fur coat! A refrigerator! A pearl necklace! All for ME?").

Adapting Baseball's System

The principal elements in the final design emerged slowly from considerable and often sharp debate. The decision to rely on some hundred nominators for candidates in many regions and fields of endeavor, reflected my respect for major league baseball's scouting system, which seemed adaptable to identifying artists, scientists, and other creative persons as well as shortstops. Eugene Borowitz, a psychiatrist and former college baseball star, who joined me later in monitoring the selection process in its first post-natal years, supported me in this.

Nominators were to be anonymous but unlike baseball scouts were to be rotated, for a reason explained below. In interviews with foundation fellows, I learned that about half of them knew or guessed (not always correctly) who had "turned them in."

Members of the selection committee, at their own insistence, also were to be anonymous. Both nominators and selectors feared cultivation by would-be nominees if their identities were known.

The eight people composing the selection committee spanned most, but not all, of the fellowship's eligible fields. Except for the trustee member, they served for a limited term. Their deliberations were markedly rich, not only because of their caliber—two were Nobel laureates—but also because of the diverse perspectives and forms of knowledge they brought to the conversation.

The Right to Remain Silent

In 1981, the first selections were announced. For the next three and a half years, I prepared for and attended the quarterly meetings of the selection committee. Eugene Borowitz and I were given the task of suggesting ways in which the committee might refine its procedures in the program's first years. To this end, we interviewed fellows at varying times from the dates of their awards. I also talked with nominators and with administrators in institutions to which many fellows belonged. We reported regularly to the selection committee (often in connection with answers we had to present to the members) and to a trustee subcommittee.

Like a British policeman, I found myself assuring the numerous fellows I interviewed that it was their right to remain silent, especially since the foundation was determined not to micromanage their lives or their work. Once reassured, they were glad to talk, if only to send their thanks to a hitherto faceless benefactor. I found no fellows eating of the lotus. They were, indeed, exceptionally dedicated and self-directed.

Reducing Risk

Although any selection among individuals is likely to be criticized, the MacArthur awards were peculiarly subject to criticism for the following reasons:

• Support was unusually generous, and because the media are attracted only to unusually large grants, conspicuous.    
• Fellows enjoyed an enviable freedom from institutional duties and routines.    
• Both nominators and selectors were anonymous and therefore easily suspected of being up to no good.    
• Those selected were drawn from a wide variety of occupations, from social activism to astrophysics.

The selectors were always in a position similar to dog show judges choosing the best dog in show, having to decide whether this chemist was better as a chemist than that writer was as a writer. Somehow, they managed to agree in almost all cases on the choice to be made, finding in those chosen the creative flair they were looking for. There was evidence of this in the very few errors of omission or commission cited retrospectively by the selectors. And most selectors cited the same "mistakes."

Among the criticisms of the fellows program, by far the most serious was the charge that the selections were random, and therefore, unfair. This risk was reduced—if not removed—by the rotation of nominators and selectors already cited. For any given year, there might be the impression, and even the reality, of partiality, but over a stretch of years, rotation tended to offset it.

A second preventive measure was a provision that a once-rejected nominee could be considered a second time. Also, in contrast to the United States Supreme Court, decisions were not taken when the selection committee was divided.

The seriousness of nominators' recommendations and the staff's meticulous and rigorous preparation of dossiers were further safeguards against haphazardness in selection.

However, to me, the most reassuring aspect of the selection process was the unfashionable readiness of very able selectors to make difficult qualitative judgments (rather like Oxford Dons distinguishing between first- and second-class student minds) without employing those quantitative criteria and formulas to which so many selection committees now resort for fear of being thought capricious. At one point, the committee considered standardizing the weight to be assigned each factor entering into its decisions, but the attempt at quantification foundered on the fact that each actual choice of a nominee was the unique outcome of a set of considerations peculiarly elicited by that particular individual.

What Makes a Success?

Personal as the support for the fellowship had been, even within the foundation, it survived Rod's death in 1984 and seems to have gained a wider public acceptance than I had expected.

That doesn't mean the program is a demonstrable success. In the planning period and thereafter, there was much discussion of an "evaluation" of the effort. A tidy comparison of the "production" of fellows before, during and after the fellowship period was dropped as we learned of the various uses to which the fellows put their awards. Some made no change in their regimens until present obligations were discharged. Others made arrangements, stretching to their retirement, enabling them to alternate periods of "normal" activity with periods of complete freedom financed from their fellowships.

A suggestion that fellows be asked to maintain diaries in which they would cite changes for the better that might be credited to their fellowships was dropped as inconsistent with the foundation's promise not to monitor the fellows' personal or professional lives. It would have gone beyond tactful to compare the "output" of a group of fellows with that of a "control group" who had, unknown to them, received a fellowship.

When I left the scene, in 1984, there were two available sources of consolation for this lack of systematic evidence of the program's value. One was Rod's repeated preemptive strike against any formal evaluation. "One Einstein," he often said, "will justify the whole program." Rod was independently joined in resisting formal evaluation by one of the first fellows who, following a gathering of his peers, handed me the following handwritten admonitions:

• The program is a stroke of genius. Don't change it for anybody, especially prize fellows.    
• Don't try too hard to be socially useful. Keep betting on individuals, and then relax and watch them run.    
• Don't try to 'evaluate' the program. It can't be done. An uncontrolled social experiment has effects that cannot be measured. Trust your instincts.    
• Don't seek out a younger group of fellows. Just find the best people you can, regardless of age.    
• Don't de-emphasize the prize in favor of the fellowship.    
• By all means, retain the folkloric, mysterious, ambiguous quality that it has now. Don't define the purposes too clearly. Keep it flexible. Everyone will have more fun that way.

If this fellow was right, the real question will be whether the foundation continues to live with ambiguity and mystery, or, as with many fellowship programs, the desire to be accountable leads to that excessive specification of measurable outcomes that Professor Burch deplored and the original program set out to avoid.

One Man's Lessons

After those years as a "participant/observer" of the program's operation, a few lessons seemed to be in order. These are put forth below, but with full recognition that further experience in subsequent years may have invalidated some of them.

• In some fields, such as physics, there is a surprising degree of agreement as to which young researchers are the most promising. This makes nomination and selection of fellows relatively easy. However, those same researchers are in most cases well provided for from other sources, and hence, are helped only marginally by a MacArthur fellowship. In some other fields, consensus hardly exists within the guild, but the value of the fellowship to recipients is usually greater.    
• On the whole, "academics" benefit less from a MacArthur fellowship than do self-employed writers (especially poets), artists, composers, translators, independent filmmakers and social innovators.    
• The original assumption that, presumably under rocks, there are numerous "mute, inglorious Miltons" waiting to be discovered turned out to have been mistaken. One nominator, who had spent years seeking out characters in unlikely places, submitted no nominations. (However, this doesn't mean that there are no young persons of exceptional but unrealized "potential" in the country's urban and rural slums. Long ago, as chairman of President Johnson's Task Force on the Education of Gifted Persons, I commissioned two studies of "buried treasure" in American society: able women and bright poor children. The report on the latter study, by Professor Allison Davis of the University of Chicago, entitled "Poor but Able," fully corrected the common assumption that poor children are unintelligent.)

EPILOGUE

I end this memoir on a note of regret bordering on remorse. Looking back to the planning period, I wish now that I had not recommended a duration of five years for the fellowship. Valuable as the present award may have proved to be, I am haunted by what might have been the greater value of the lifetime tenure that Rod MacArthur favored but was persuaded to drop. "I see you're still whittling away at the idea," he once said to me. I now fear that he was right the first time and that I diluted the bolder scheme by applying to it the habitual prudence of conventional philanthropy.

There would, of course, have been fewer fellows, given present funding levels, but with an assured source of lifetime support, sometimes called "Go-to-Hell money." The few might have been as fully autonomous as Gibbon, Montaigne, Nietzsche or the post-Harvard Santayana, and therefore, free to control the timing and duration of such institutional connections as they might find congenial, to choose their own commitments, to say or do whatever they wished, and to allot sufficient time to a given work or task to bring it to full fruition. (In a letter to his literary executor, Santayana once wrote that the hurried last chapter of a book he had just read was typical of books written by Americans).

Although the present program is thought to be radical, perhaps it's not radical enough. It may be that the active presence of a number of endowed mavericks would have been more valuable to our national life than the more numerous but also more conventional and circumspect fellows can be expected to be. If this be so, mea culpa.