The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in

Santa Barbara, California Santa Barbara ( es, Santa Bárbara, meaning "Saint Barbara") is a coastal city in Santa Barbara County, California, of which it is also the county seat. Situated on a south-facing section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Coas ...

was an influential

think tank A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governmenta ...

from 1959 to 1977. Its influence waned thereafter and it closed in 1987. It held discussions on subjects it hoped would influence public deliberation. It attained some controversy with its conference of student radical leaders in 1967, and with a suggested new U.S. Constitution proposed by Fellow

Rexford G. Tugwell Rexford Guy Tugwell (July 10, 1891 – July 21, 1979) was an American economist who became part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first "Brain Trust", a group of Columbia University academics who helped develop policy recommendations leading up to R ...

History

It was founded in 1959 by

Robert M. Hutchins Robert Maynard Hutchins (January 17, 1899 – May 14, 1977) was an American educational philosopher. He was president (1929–1945) and chancellor (1945–1951) of the University of Chicago, and earlier dean of Yale Law School (1927–1929). His& ...

. The center was an offshoot of the

Fund for the Republic The Fund for the Republic (1951–1959) was an organization created by the Ford Foundation and dedicated to protecting freedom of speech and other civil liberties in the United States. In 1959, the Fund moved from New York City to Santa Barbara, ...

, which had been established with a $15 million grant from the

Ford Foundation The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the stated goal of advancing human welfare. Created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, it was originally funded by a US$25,000 gift from Edsel Ford. By 1947, after the death ...

. In its later years, its greatest source of support was

Chester Carlson Chester Floyd Carlson (February 8, 1906 – September 19, 1968) was an American physicist, inventor, and patent attorney born in Seattle, Washington. Carlson invented electrophotography, the process used by millions of photocopiers worldwide. Ca ...

, the inventor of the

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (ha ...

process. For a time, Associate Supreme Court Justice

William O. Douglas William Orville Douglas (October 16, 1898January 19, 1980) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, who was known for his strong progressive and civil libertarian views, and is often c ...

was Chairman of the center's board of directors. In 1969 Hutchins reorganized the center, after which many associates departed.

Harry Ashmore Harry Scott Ashmore (July 28, 1916 – January 20, 1998) was an American journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials in 1957 on the school integration conflict in Little Rock, Arkansas. Early life and career Ashmore was born in Greenvi ...

served as president from 1969 to 1974. After Hutchins' death in 1977, the Center found it difficult to raise funds. It became affiliated with the

University of California at Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the Un ...

, which sold its real estate. The Center absorbed the

, a civil rights and civil liberties foundation, in 1979. The Center closed in 1987; however it exists today as a part of Vanderbilt University.

Prominent fellows

Fellows of the Center included: Stringfellow Barr, from 1959 to 1969; education philosopher

Frederick Mayer Frederick Mayer (11 August 1921, Frankfurt, Germany – 26 June 2006, Vienna, Austria) was an educational scientist and philosopher of the University of Redlands, California and one of the leading creativity experts. One of his most important a ...

("A History of Educational Thought");

Linus Pauling Linus Carl Pauling (; February 28, 1901August 19, 1994) was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific top ...

, from 1963 to 1967; Bishop

James Pike James Albert Pike (February 14, 1913–) was an American Episcopal Church (United States), Episcopal bishop, accused heretic, iconoclast, prolific writer, and one of the first mainline, charismatic religious figures to appear regularly on televi ...

, from 1966 to 1969; Robert Kurt Woetzel; Raghavan N. Iyer; and

Harvey Wheeler John Harvey Wheeler (October 17, 1918 – September 6, 2004) was an American author, political scientist, and scholar. He was best known as co-author with Eugene Burdick of ''Fail-Safe (novel), Fail-Safe'' (1962), an early Cold War novel that de ...

. New appointees following the 1969 reorganization included

Jacque Fresco Jacque Fresco (March 13, 1916 – May 18, 2017) was an American futurist and self-described social engineer. Self-taught, he worked in a variety of positions related to industrial design. Fresco wrote and lectured his views on sustai ...

director of

The Venus Project The Venus Project is a nonprofit organization founded by a Florida-based, architect and social engineer Jacque Fresco. Fresco with his partner Roxanne Meadows founded this organization with a socioeconomic model to develop a resource-based econo ...

Alex Comfort Alexander Comfort (10 February 1920 – 26 March 2000) was a British scientist and physician known best for his nonfiction sex manual, ''The Joy of Sex'' (1972). He was an author of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as a gerontologist, ...

of ''

The Joy of Sex ''The Joy of Sex'' is a 1972 illustrated sex manual by British author Alex Comfort. An updated edition was released in September 2008. Overview ''The Joy of Sex'' spent eleven weeks at the top of the ''New York Times'' bestseller list and more ...

'' fame,

Bertrand de Jouvenel Bertrand de Jouvenel des Ursins (31 October 1903 – 1 March 1987) was a French philosopher, political economist, and futurist. He taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the University of Manchester, Yale University, ...

, and

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...

biologist

Paul R. Ehrlich Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist known for his warnings about the consequences of population growth and limited resources. He is the Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of St ...

, author of ''

The Population Bomb ''The Population Bomb'' is a 1968 book co-authored by Stanford University Professor emeritus Paul R. Ehrlich and Stanford senior researcher emeritus in conservation biology Anne Howland Ehrlich. It predicted worldwide famine due to overpopulatio ...

''.

References

*Didion, Joan. ''California Dreaming.'' In Joan Didion, ''

Slouching towards Bethlehem ''Slouching Towards Bethlehem'' is a 1968 collection of essays by Joan Didion that mainly describes her experiences in California during the 1960s. It takes its title from the poem " The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats. The contents of this ...

.'' New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968, pp. 73–78. *Kelly, Frank K. ''Court of Reason: Robert Hutchins and the Fund for the Republic.'' New York: The Free Press, 1981. *Reeves, Thomas C. ''Freedom and the Foundation: The Fund for the Republic in the Era of McCarthyism.'' New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.

External links

"Guide to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Collection." Online Archive of California.
Political and economic think tanks in the United States {{Liberal-stub