Meditation U.

Rural, placid Fairfield (pop. 8,715), Iowa, is an unlikely home for a university that preaches the virtues of transcendental meditation (TM) and the science of creative intelligence (SCI). Yet in the year since the followers of tiny, beflowered Maharishi Mahesh Yogi started the Maharishi International University on the campus of now defunct Parsons College, the townspeople, at first wary about the newcomers, have not only learned to like them but have even begun to join them.

"The M.I.U. students are almost too good to be true," says Real Estate Man Paul Madden. "There are no scantily clad women, no fast cars, no problems whatsoever with drugs or booze." Adds a farmer who lives a mile down the road: "These are nice clean-cut kids. They don't fill our ditches with beer cans the way the Parsons crowd did." Impressed, Madden has begun meditating himself. So have Presbyterian Minister Jack Dilley, Merchant Lee Gobble and 300 other Fairfielders. Gordon Aistrope, the president of a local savings and loan association, says that TM has lowered his blood pressure. He is so enthusiastic, in fact, that he hopes "to see Iowa rise to No. 1 in the number of meditators per capita."

M.I.U. was first organized two years ago by a group of students and professors who had been meditating together in Santa Barbara, Calif. They quickly outgrew their quarters in a converted apartment building and began shopping for a new campus. They finally found a readymade one: Parsons College, which had gone bankrupt in 1973. The maharishi has agreed to buy it from Parsons' creditors for $2.5 million.

About 500 students now pay $1,200 a quarter for tuition and board at M.I.U.; in return, they get a largely traditional liberal arts education from a faculty of more than 40 (including some with Ph.D.s from M.I.T. and Yale). In addition, they have videotaped lectures by the likes of Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan.

Fourth State. Everyone on campus, students and staff, meditates at least 20 minutes twice a day. It is not unusual to see students or staff members with their eyes shut in the auditorium or over their lunch trays in the cafeteria. There is also a one-month mandatory course in TM and an introduction to SCI, which the maharishi describes as a general philosophy emphasizing "the infinite, unbounded nature of intelligence." Says Keith Wallace, 29, the school's president: "Beyond waking, dreaming and sleeping, there is a fourth state of consciousness, another realm of experience. What we are saying is that an experience heretofore reserved for men of genius like Einstein can be taught on a mass scale." Dianna Visek, 22, who transferred to M.I.U. after three years of Asian studies at Harvard and Cornell, agrees. "SCI was simply the most powerful theory I had ever encountered," she says. "It's a powerful tool for understanding; it's what I had been looking for."

Wallace says that one purpose of M.I.U. is to develop a curriculum that can be used on the maharishi's planned campuses in Thailand, England,'Canada, Norway and France. Last month, on his first visit to the campus, the maharishi urged students to spread the gospel of TM: "The students must go and create an atmosphere of orderliness in the brains of people residing in this state." He then climbed aboard a pink turboprop and flew off.

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