The Road Less Traveled

For two decades, the MacArthur Awards have celebrated smart people who follow their own muse. This year’s 23 winners, announced last week, show that the awards also play a vital social role. By recognizing a quirky and eclectic sort of genius, the MacArthur Awards value the sort of accomplishment increasingly slighted by U.S. universities, which tend to place a premium on corporate grant-getting and academic specialization.

The late insurance executive John. D. MacArthur, who endowed the foundation in 1970, and his son Roderick, who launched the awards in 1981, wanted the grants, now half-a-million dollars apiece, to free Americans from social straitjackets that “stifle self-direction.”

The grants may not have lived up to Roderick’s impossibly grand ambition to recognize blinding achievement early on--”finding a Michelangelo.” But most of the foundation’s bets have been sound ones. The 1981 awards recognized Robert Coles, Stephen Jay Gould and Henry Louis Gates Jr., who went on to contribute great scholarship in psychiatry, paleontology and African American history.

The awards have been knocked for rewarding “unconventional or seemingly obscure endeavors ... that cannot get financial backing through more traditional, risk-averse sources.” Granted, some of this year’s recipients initially sound like almost comically grandiose utopians. For instance, Stanford astrobiologist Christopher Chyba, 41, won for his “passion for protecting human civilization from human destruction,” while David Wilson, 55, was recognized for “challenging our acquiescence to the traditional means of presenting and preserving knowledge.”

However, Chyba and Wilson--like all the others on the 2001 list--have done much more than navel-gaze. Chyba’s study of species extinction using a unique blend of astronomy, chemistry and biology has suddenly made him a federal consultant on bioterrorism. And Wilson’s gently satirical Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, run on a shoestring, brings his esoteric ideas down to earth.

Today, when anxiety can easily encourage cynicism and timidity, the MacArthur Awards’ celebration of bold, brave and idealistic thinking is more necessary than ever.