Prizes with No Strings Attached

The MacArthur Foundation tries a new philanthropic tactic

It was as if The Millionaire were rerunning in life. "Congratulations," said the telephone caller from Chicago, "you have just been awarded $248,000 over five years with no strings attached." Recalls Harvard Psychiatrist and Author Robert Coles, 51: "My wife and kids thought it was a joke."

Coles and 20 other scholars and artists learned last week that the giveaway was not a joke but a new talent search begun by Chicago's John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Its aim: finding creative people and helping them to make "discoveries or other significant contributions to society." Neither Coles nor any other recipient had applied for the MacArthur Prize fellowship. Nor could they have done so, since foundation policy bars anyone from nominating himself. Instead, recipients were chosen without their knowledge by a secret committee of more than 100 members drawn from the arts and sciences.

Winners ranged from Poet and Novelist Robert Penn Warren, 76, to Caltech Physicist Stephen Wolfram, 21, who received his Ph.D. in physics at age 20. Others included Soviet Emigre Poet Joseph Brodsky, 41; American Indian Poet Leslie Marmon Silko, 33; and Bell Laboratories Scientist Douglas D. Osheroff, 35. Warren will receive the maximum $60,000 a year, while young Physicist Wolfram gets the minimum, $24,000. The reason for the difference is that annual fees to fellows are on a sliding scale, based on their age. An extra $800 is added to the stipend for each year. As a result, those 45 and over will receive at least $224,000 during five years, a sum larger than the Nobel Peace Prize, currently $212,000.

At his Fairfield, Conn., home, Robert Penn Warren enthused: "The only way you can make quick cash off poetry is with poetry readings. This makes me free to do what I want to do, and what I want to do is write poetry." Commented Coles: "Now I may be able to hire some people to help me for the first time in my life. I've never been able to afford research assistants before."

The 2 1/2-year-old MacArthur Foundation is the creation of the late John D. MacArthur, an eccentric who became a billionaire in the insurance business. With assets estimated at $862 million, the foundation is the nation's fourth largest, surpassing Rockefeller, Carnegie and Sloan, trailing only the Ford, Robert Wood Johnson and Andrew W. Mellon foundations. The rationale for the no-string fellowships is the argument that important breakthroughs in the past have been the work of lone geniuses devoid of grantsmanship. Said Foundation Director J. Roderick MacArthur, 60, John's son, in accepting the proposal: "My father believed in the individual as opposed to the institution. This captures that spirit--the risky betting on individual explorers while everybody else is playing it safe on another track."

Does it? Except for the youth of a few recipients, the first MacArthur fellows, though gleaming with accomplishments, are indistinguishable from typical grantsmen and grantswomen. In fact, many of the fellows have won other prestigious grants and awards (Pulitzer literary prizes, Woodrow Wilson fellowships, Danforth fellowships) in the past. Concedes MacArthur: "I wish a few more had been less established." Foundation staffers also fret about the possibility that the easy money could dull the personal drive of fellows. Roderick MacArthur takes a longer view: "If only a handful produce something of importance--whether it be a work of art or a major breakthrough in the sciences--it will have been worth the risk."

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