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.