Word: casbahs
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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...
...fabled fleshpots of Asia-Saigon, Bangkok, Shanghai-are vanishing before the stern puritanism of new nationalistic leaders. A sordid exception was tiny Kowloon City, a kind of Asian casbah six acres in size on the tip of the mainland opposite Hong Kong...
...Fertile Crescent, that strife-ridden slice of the mordacious Middle East which includes the Bedouins of Syria, the Riffs of Jordan, the fiercely patriotic people of brave little Israel, the Nomads of the Saudi-Arabian wastelands, the oil-rich sheiks of Kuwait and the curvaceous cuties of the Cairo Casbah, not to mention the nubile Nubians of the nether Nile, the nemesis of Nasser nears the nadir of its nebulous naughtiness, forcing the great powers to consider, with great searching of souls and scratching of navels, the threat, the portentous horror, indeed, the phantasmagorical folly of appeasement, of a Munich...