Word: center
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sliding glass doors and a glass-domed roof, as if the architect intended to build either a hothouse or a window on the world and simply could not decide which. When Peter Riesenberg, professor of history from Washington University and a fellow-in-residence, first saw the National Humanities Center, he cried, "I've lucked into a monastery!" Surveying his $2.5 million home away from home, Martin Krieger, on leave from the University of Minnesota's Institute of Public Affairs, murmured, "After Brooklyn, everything's unreal...
There are 27 fellows at the center in its opening year-eight historians, five philosophers, four members of English departments. They come from England, Sweden and Israel, as well as all over the U.S. Six are in their 30s. Four are professors emeriti. Five are women. And it is safe to say that they look at the center 27 different ways as they drive up each morning from houses and apartments in nearby Chapel Hill, Raleigh or Durham...
...them all: In a world where the physical scientists promise to solve social problems and the social scientists promise to solve all the rest (including happiness), who really needs a liberal arts scholar? By their words, by this year of their lives, the first fellows of the National Humanities Center are working on an answer for the many people, not excluding themselves, to whom the absolute value of a liberal arts education has become a casualty of modern doubt second only to religion...
...center, a day in the life of a fellow begins as early as 7 o'clock. The morning is sacred territory, generally reserved for the "project," the book proposed by a candidate as part of his reason for coming. Each fellow has a study with the inevitable sliding glass door leading out to a first-floor terrace or a second-floor balcony. Before noon the most delicate knock on a resident humanist's door requires supreme courage. Even the ring of a telephone constitutes a gross intrusion...
...even the solitary act of writing is influenced by the center. "We're not writing the kind of books, unless there's some mistake, that will find their way to racks in bus stations," says Joseph Beatty, who will be teaching philosophy at Duke next year. But he finds himself thinking oddly subversive thoughts, like "I have to persuade society philosophers are needed...