In North Carolina: Corn Bread and Great Ideas

By Melvin Maddocks

In the middle of a North Carolina forest stands a spanking new white brick building with lots of 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.

But in another sense, this riddle of a building, this glass and brick sphinx, thrusts one rude question at 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.

At the 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.

Yet 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."

Ann Douglas, from the English department at Columbia University, actually changed her project after coming to the center, giving up "American Saints of the Victorian Era" for a less highfalutin subject: "Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and the Literary Life of New York in the 1920s." "There's a broader audience than the university is telling us," she insists, voicing a favorite wisdom of the center.

It is in conversation even more than in writing that the center bares its collective soul. To simplify the premise of Plato's Symposium only a little, your thinking man should be able to talk with his mouth full, dauntless even in the presence of hiccups. An informal daily dialogue is staged in the sunken dining area of the center by men and women whose mouths are deliciously occupied with golden corn bread, creamy fried chicken and other Carolina dishes prepared by the cooks-in-residence, Alice and Lucy.

Themes include love, baseball, pre-Newtonian physics. "Insults," one fellow emphasizes, "are not unheard of." The younger fellows, in gaudy shirts, baggy sweaters and crepe-soled shoes, happily bait their seniors, most of them in suits and ties. A department head cannot pull rank here. "There's no power to be gained or lost," Krieger points out.

"This is what I mistakenly thought academic life would be like when I decided to be a teacher," says John Agresto, 33. "We'd say profound things. I thought in my innocence we'd debate the great issues. Here, we actually do."

After lunch there is the ritual known as the walk. If the hickory, pine and bobolinks that grace the center's 15 acres are not enough, there is what may be termed the reality walk. A peripatetic scholar will stroll to the end of the center's private road and scuff pebbles along Alexander Drive while authentic truck drivers roar past. Then, with perspective restored and the latest Alice-Lucy masterpiece well on the road to digestion, it's back to the study. Or to a seminar. There are four ongoing seminars meeting this year, rather forbiddingly titled "Man and Nature," "Ideals of Education" and so on.

On a recent expedition under the heading of "History and the History of Ideas," the leader noted "the difficulties of making national citizens out of family men" because their loyalties are so parochial. This somehow led to the aphorism that a sense of mission creates a nation rather than the other way around, and finally, after a few more turns around the table, to the paradox that in the Third World, the left is the staunchest defender of the sanctity of property.

The debate kept circling back to urgent yet timeless questions. What makes a good member of society? The "higher purpose" his nation exhorts him to? Or the very specific moral and legal demands put upon him by his neighbors, his village and the ties of blood and land? In an era of megamachines and megastates, do we overrate the big in history--the Roman Empire, the papacy? If you wanted to change, really change, the world today, wouldn't you do well to "cultivate smaller gardens," the neighborhood community rather than the U.N.? The seminar concluded in stalemate, but no mind left it entirely unaltered.

Point-counterpoint is the rhythm of the center. If there is a single individual who controls the improvisation, it would have to be William J. Bennett, 35, the executive director. Without intruding, he seems to be everywhere, the intellectual's perfect maitre d'.

Nothing is too big or too small for Bennett to put his hand to. He scribbles away at the obligatory manifestoes, digs in on fund raising, entertains the big-name circuit riders, like David Riesman, Jacques Barzun and Mortimer Adler, who drop by, and sends the fellows out on their own hustings, mostly to lecture at the three universities in the neighborhood: Duke, North Carolina and North Carolina State. Then he taps out a memo: "Lost. Alice has asked us all to check whether her thin black-handled Henckels knife went home by mistake on a cake platter."

The center was founded in 1978 by its present president, Philosopher Charles Frankel, with a $625,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bennett must regularly remind himself, "What are we doing for the public?" Sometimes he is part of the response. A Harvard Law School graduate, he serves on a committee advising the American Bar Association on a code of ethics for lawyers. He has participated in a TV panel discussion on Jonestown, organized by Frankel, who not only continues to teach at Columbia but also mans an office that the N.H.C. maintains in New York City. Long an ideologue of the humanities, Frankel has defined the tightrope Bennett and the fellows must walk. The center is not for "the leisure of the theoried class," he says. But scholarship, on the other hand, "must be free to follow crooked paths to unexpected conclusions."

A party's-almost-over sadness goes with the smell of coffee and fresh biscuits at the morning mail call these days as the first year draws to an end. When an envelope bears the old university's return address, it gets handled like a ticking bomb. Groans go up from the Greek chorus at letters beginning, "When you return in September, you will be serving on the following committees . . ." As if having a last fling, William Leuchtenburg, professor of American history at Columbia, is playing hooky from his book about Franklin Roosevelt and the Supreme Court to do a guest shot as color commentator for a local baseball team, the Greensboro Hornets. Red Barber, meet your New York exchange student.

"We're the heroic age," says Riesenberg with both premature nostalgia and the esprit of a pioneer who is also his own historian. Next year, or the year after, the center could deteriorate into a rest-and-recreation area for tired professors who can't make it to the next sabbatical--the stuff that satirical novels and Senator William Proxmire's "Golden Fleece" awards are made of.

So what is a liberal arts scholar good for? The question, of course, has not been answered, unless it counts to discover that such questions can have no final answers. Plato's Symposium ends with a vision of Socrates standing fixed in thought from early dawn until noon, until sunset, until early dawn of the following day. The image may seem comic at first, but it be comes moving and finally majestic, even though nobody ever learns what Socrates was thinking. Plato gave the only explanation necessary. The unexamined life, he said, is not worth living. Meanwhile, back at the center, the talk flows on. For now, at least, the dialogue is sufficiently rich in wit, affection and charm to prove that the examined life is well worth living. That, in a year like 1979, should be justification enough.

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