Social sciences, humanities research center joins Stanford
BY JONATHAN RABINOVITZ
Claude Steele, director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, said the center’s new relationship with Stanford “creates a more efficient organization that will support our traditional mission and allow us to expand into new areas of thought and action.” Steele, above, stands on the center’s grounds.
The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), known for sparking many of the most important works in the humanities and social sciences over the last five decades, has become part of Stanford University, effective Jan. 1, 2008.
The new arrangement brings the center's financial and administrative operations under Stanford management, while maintaining the independence of its core program: the annual fellowships for 40-some scholars from a variety of disciplines. The center now will be able to benefit from all that the university has to offer, including technology resources, support services, employee benefits, and strong academic and research programs.
In the past, the center was often mistaken as part of the university; its complex is on land leased from Stanford at 75 Alta Road near the Stanford Golf Course. But the center had no other formal connection to the university before the beginning of this year. It financed its own operation, and its chief executive, with its board of trustees, charted its own course.
The center will continue to have responsibility for its own financing and fundraising, but now these efforts will be helped by Stanford's Office of Development and by Stanford's management of the center's endowment. Stanford also will assume some of the center's operational costs.
"A remarkable amount of important scholarship has been produced in the unique environment of the center," Provost John Etchemendy said. "Stanford has always felt fortunate to have the center housed on its campus, and we are pleased to be able to play a greater role in supporting its work in the 21st century. Our new relationship with the center underscores the university's commitment to multidisciplinary research and studies across the spectrum of academic disciplines."
Claude Steele, the center's director, called the new arrangement "a welcome and logical step forward" in its mission to inspire scholarship in the behavioral sciences.
"This creates a more efficient organization that will support our traditional mission and allow us to expand into new areas of thought and action," he said. "By eliminating redundancies and freeing up resources, we will become an even more prolific incubator for new ideas—ideas that will broadly inform our society and culture as well as specific policy areas such as the economy, education and healthcare, among others."
The new relationship with Stanford is the latest in a series of changes that the center has taken to expand its mission and inspire new scholarship. Since its inception in 1954, the center has granted fellowships each year, providing economists, psychologists, sociologists, historians and other leading intellectuals with a year to pursue their studies in a bucolic setting for writing and contemplation, as well as the opportunity to be part of a scholarly community drawn from different disciplines.
In the last few years, the center has made it a priority to have a higher public profile, a departure from its past policy of staying out of the public eye. As part of this initiative, it has started selecting subsets of fellows to address problems in areas in which they share a common interest. The themes for 2008-09 are "Improving Health and Healthcare" and "Achieving Equality."
The center also is changing the way it selects fellows by opening the process to applications instead of choosing each class from those nominated by previous fellows.
The center's new focus on promoting interdisciplinary work in both basic and applied research is in line with President John Hennessy's agenda for Stanford. Ann Arvin, vice provost and dean of research at Stanford, pointed to recent university initiatives emphasizing multidisciplinary research that will yield advances in environmental sustainability, human health and international relations.
"The university will benefit from a closer relationship with the center and its distinguished visiting scholars, as it opens the door for broad and collaborative research endeavors in the behavioral and social sciences and related policy issues," Arvin said. "We look forward to having more opportunities for the fellows and members of the Stanford community to interact. The center's work complements perfectly the many efforts to enhance multidisciplinary research at Stanford."
By and large, the new arrangement will make little noticeable change in the center's day-to-day life. Its board will be able to focus more on center programs and fundraising. Stanford candidates for fellowships, like candidates from other universities, will continue to be limited to 10 percent of the annually selected group of fellows—the same policy that has guided selection criteria for many years.
To be sure, the new arrangement grows out of the special, informal relationship that has developed between the center and Stanford because of their proximity. More than 250 Stanford professors have benefited from fellowships since the center's inception. And the current director, as well as one previous director, is a member of the Stanford faculty. (Steele is the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences and a professor in the Department of Psychology.)
"I expect it to be a very easy transition," said Anne Petersen, the center's deputy director. "It ultimately is going to make it easier for us to focus on the most exciting part of our work—encouraging creative thinking—and that is a tradition that both Stanford and the center passionately want to continue."
Established 54 years ago by the Ford Foundation to "foster knowledge that would help the human condition," the center is recalled fondly by hundreds of fellows who say they benefited from their time "on the hill" (the center is on a hillside overlooking the main campus). Scholars from around the nation and abroad are selected from a variety of fields, including—but not limited to—anthropology, art history, biology, classics, economics, education, geography, history, law, linguistics, literature, mathematical and statistical specialties, medicine, musicology, philosophy, political science, psychiatry, psychology and sociology.
The founders of the center believed that new ideas could be hatched and cultivated by offering a "serendipitous microenvironment" for contemplative thought, invigorating discussion and rigorous scholarship. The fellowships have given many of the leading minds of the latter 20th century a year free from the daily obligations of their regular jobs, comfortable work spaces and a community of inquisitive thinkers that not only gathered for seminars but also regularly lunched together in the center's courtyard, sang holiday carols and played volleyball on the center's grounds.
Evidence of the center's success can be seen on its library shelves. There are more than 1,700 books, many of whose authors credit their writing to the yearlong fellowship. Among them are such seminal works as Robert Dahl's Who Governs, E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution and John Rawls' A Theory of Justice.
Other signs of the center's influence are apparent in the recognition its fellows receive later in life. For example, 17 of the fellows have gone on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
The center also has produced research that has shaped government policies and the political process. Fellowships were vital to producing the most comprehensive study to date of test differences between blacks and whites, as well as the largest study ever done to determine the effects of racial segregation. The federal government's system of auctioning off different frequencies on the radio band is the result of fellowship work, as is Deliberative Polling, considered by many to be the most effective way of sampling public opinion.
In the coming years, Steele believes the center has an even bigger role to play.
"We live in a time when the specialization of knowledge has made it more difficult for professors in one field to comprehend the work of their colleagues in another," he said. "More than ever before, society needs institutions like ours that encourage the synthesis and broadening of knowledge. As our problems become increasingly complex, we need to enable a new generation of scholars to reinvigorate the established disciplines and create entirely new ones, allowing us to apply the knowledge we have gained.
"It is more difficult to do than in years past," he added. "We need to grow if we are to succeed, and the new relationship with Stanford is a big step forward."
