The Most Happy Fellows

By Kenneth M. Pierce

Winners of the MacArthur awards can work on what they please

"It's a miracle," cried Randall Forsberg, and so it seemed to be. A disarmament proponent, Forsberg was reacting last week to the news that she had just revived a gift out of the blue: $204,000 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which she can spend any way she likes. Forsberg was one of the framers of the plan to call for a nuclear arms freeze. Says she: "The award will permit me to be more productive in the various aspects of work for peace that I do."

Now in its third year of creating dazzling surprises, the MacArthur fund named 13 other academics and professionals in its latest crop of fellows, including Economist Alice Rivlin, who is resigning as director of the Congressional Budget Office, and two distinguished Columbia University scholars: Sociologist Robert Merton and Soviet Specialist Seweryn Bialer.

The MacArthur awards are five-year stipends that range from $24,000 to $60,000 annually, depending on age (the older the winners, the larger their tax-free gifts). Fellows also get an additional $15,000 to bestow on their institutions.

For all this, the winners have to do nothing, absolutely nothing. The MacArthur giveaway is a talent search designed to encourage "discoveries or other significant contributions to society." But there are no demands for progress reports, let alone a novel or scientific breakthrough. Candidates cannot apply for grants, but are nominated, without their knowledge, by a secret committee of about 100 members.

The foundation began operations after the death in 1978 of Entrepreneur John D. MacArthur, sole stockholder of the Bankers Life and Casualty insurance company. With assets of $930 million, the foundation is the nation's fourth largest (after the Ford, Johnson and Kellogg funds). MacArthur left the disposition of his money up to the trustees, who hit upon the idea of making creative people free of financial worries. Says Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Coles, a winner in 1981: "I can't help but begin to wonder what life will be like when this is over."

As the newest crop of winners celebrated their good fortune last week, TIME sought out some of the 80 past fellows to learn how the prize money had changed their lives:

Composer Ralph Shapey: $288,000 in 1982. "The big difference is psychological," says Shapey, a professor of music at the University of Chicago. "You just aren't worried about money, you don't think about money any more." Shapey continues to compose in his unprepossessing apartment in Chicago's Hyde Park, still does not own a car, and busies himself, as he did before receiving the award, with creating difficult music in a modern idiom that some critics have hailed as "expressive" and "romantic" despite its atonal complexity. Commercial publishers have issued only a handful of his compositions.

Shapey feels that the award may have had its greatest impact in enhancing his reputation: "I'm not a household name, but the MacArthur award has made me a more common name. I'm getting greater exposure." A newfound sense of financial security has also been an aid to creativity. Says he: "There's this myth that the artist has to starve in the attic, but that's romantic nonsense. I can write just as good music on a full stomach as on an empty stomach--and maybe it's even better."

Ophthalmologist Randolph Whitfield Jr.: $220,000 in 1982. The award came just as an idealistic and successful program he founded was about to collapse for lack of funds. During the past eleven years, Whitfield has directed an internationally acclaimed effort to reduce avoidable blindness among tribes in rural Kenya. At Nyeri Provincial Hospital near snow-capped Mount Kenya, Whitfield trains paramedics and clinical officers in outlying districts to combat such prevalent eye diseases as glaucoma and trachoma. He also conducts pioneering surveys that trace the spread of blindness in deprived areas.

The MacArthur funds, says Whitfield, will help his program "just to survive--the amount of equipment or drugs that could be bought with my monthly salary isn't likely to have much effect on the problems of blindness in Kenya." The training methods that Whitfield can continue to develop, thanks to the MacArthur donation, have been adopted for use by the World Health Organization in other Third World countries.

Novelist Leslie Marmon Silko: $176,000 in 1981. Before receiving her award, Silko was an assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona. "I was sliding into despair. I might have thrown in the towel," she says. "Teaching just didn't give me the time I need for writing." Silko, who is a Laguna Pueblo Indian, now lives with her two sons on a small ranch in the Tucson Mountains. She has finished a screenplay, intended for public television, that is based on an Indian fable about an encounter with evil. She also reports "good progress" on her second novel, which retells the history of the Western Hemisphere from an Indian perspective. Her first novel, Ceremony, published in 1977 by Viking, was about a distraught Indian veteran of World War II. Although praised by critics, the book sold only 7,500 copies.

Silko's award means more to her than sustenance. "It released something," she says. "It has given me ideas. When you have the luxury of time, it changes something inside. You're a little less beholden to the everyday world. And I don't have to put up with teaching Mickey Mouse undergraduates any more."

Journalist Richard Critchfield: $244,000 in 1981. "At 50," says Critchfield, "I was an aging freelance reporter who wrote about Third World villages and was finding it harder to make a go of it." The grant helped him conquer those concerns. "I'm saving the whole thing and then I'm going to live off the interest," says Critchfield. "It's income forever, and it affects your writing. It becomes freer. Your anxiety level drops."

Thanks to the grant, Critchfield is devoting far more time than he normally would to a study of a new and different subject, the village of Fessenden, N. Dak. (pop. 600), which happens to be his birthplace. Says Critchfeld: "There was one big, invisible string attached to the MacArthur prize: it was something you had to live up to." Translation: not having the time or the money will not do as an excuse to avoid work.

Biologist Michael Ghiselin: $212,000 in 1981. A specialist in evolutionary biology and author of the acclaimed The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (1969), Ghiselin had resigned from the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley to devote more time to writing and research even before receiving his award. Says he: "I sold my house and was living in draconian parsimony. This award gave me the resources for going places and doing research. I was upset by the award at first--it was hard to deal with after coping with adversity for so many years. But I have no complaints." Indeed, by saving a portion of each monthly stipend, Ghiselin says, "I'll be pretty much capable of surviving for the rest of my life."

Ghiselin has used some of the funds to travel to coral reefs in the Pacific, and to "fool around" in the Darwin archives at Cambridge University. In fact, Ghiselin decided to give Cambridge $5,000 to help preserve the archives, and he also donated $10,000 to the University of Utah, where he was a visiting scholar, for a series of lectures on evolution. Says Ghiselin: "I've become sort of a philanthropist myself. It allows me to share the wealth."

There have been no glittering breakthroughs or Nobel Prizes so far from the MacArthur fellows, but Roderick MacArthur, a director of the fund, is well satisfied with the way that his father's money is being spent: "Ten years from now, I would definitely expect that with at least one in 100 of these people you will be able to point to a real breakthrough, something they do that will make the world a little different. You're working on probability, not any kind of sure thing, but the bet is worthwhile."

--By Kenneth M. Pierce.

Reported by J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago, with other bureaus

With reporting by J. MADELEINE NASH This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.