Word: casbah
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...scholars who cry for time to stretch the mind, a curious oasis in central California beckons like Elysium. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, initial-named the Casbah, has been called "a resort for academic hipsters, a dreamy pad for a bunch of non-celibate monks." Its stunning redwood-and-glass buildings, sprawled elegantly on a green hill above Palo Alto, make it look like a motel for Rolls-Royce owners. It comes close to being a boondoggle-and one of the world's most exciting havens for deep thinkers...
Insights-and irreverence-are the daily Casbah pattern. The point is to give outstanding scholars a free year (at their regular salaries), and let them nourish one another "in the raw." Begun five years ago with a Ford Foundation grant, the Casbah (grants to date: $10.3 million) was built near Stanford University because scholars liked the isolation and their wives liked the weather. Already 233 fellows have passed through, representing 52 institutions and eleven foreign countries. Director Ralph Tyler, onetime dean of social sciences at the University of Chicago, has no trouble recruiting. His fat waiting list now includes...
Darts & Volleyball. Casbah's first 36 fellows got mired in false starts and misfired projects. Recalls one charter scholar: "We didn't know what to do with the freedom. By Christmas the two most popular people were the two analysts. Everybody wanted room on their couches. We began to form committees and seminar groups, until everybody began bitching about too much organization. Then we settled down, and in the last six months we did a prodigious amount of work...
Needs & Wants. Not all Casbah scholars are social scientists. Recent alumni include M.I.T.'s noted Mathematician Claude Shannon and Literary Critic Mark Schorer, who worked on his biography of Novelist Sinclair Lewis. "Here I need no library," said Harvard Linguist Roman Jakobson. "If I have a question in psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, literature, I just go down a few doors and knock: 'May I come...
...works so well that it proves distracting. Psychologist Charles Osgood of the University of Illinois came to write a book on language behavior, wound up studying Hopi Indians at the edge of the Grand Canyon. But the usual effect is heady reappraisal. One famed fellow recalls that his pre-Casbah world had shriveled to six friends with the same opinion. At his first Casbah meal, he was plumped down with a sociologist, a historian and a literary critic. "That first luncheon," he said, "was like opening windows in a stuffy room." Equally impressive is Yale Neurosurgeon Karl Pribram...