What’s so great about excellence? (1981)

Summary

People, even editorial writers, have compared the MacArthur Foundation scheme to that old television series, “The Millionaire,” in which an anonymous financier dispatched one-million-dollar checks to unsuspecting ordinary people. But the premises of the two enterprises are quite different. The charm of “The Millionaire” was the spectacle of fate being flouted. Life had dealt these characters a lousy hand, but suddenly they had a royal flush. The MacArthur Foundation, by contrast, sees itself as fate’s midwife, combing the nation for life’s winners and making sure they are delivered safely into affluence and esteem.Fate rarely needs such help. The redundancy of the exercise is well illustrated by the names of the first MacArthur Fellows. Roderick MacArthur, son of John D., seems to believe that his selections are more exotic than those of similar exercises that are the stock-in-trade of other foundations, fellowships, prize committees, and so on. “It’s a high-risk venture,” he told the newspapers, “. . . the risky betting on individual explorers while everybody else is playing it safe on another track.” In fact, far from requiring 100 anonymous tipsters, putting together a list like this is a parlor game. Given one or two of the names, many people could come up with half a dozen others without even knowing what the list was for. It could be this year’s honorary degree recipients at Princeton, or a Presidential Commission on the Future of Values, or the celebrity endorsers for a particularly tony Scotch advertising campaign. Round up the usual suspects; check for diversity of fields, sexes, races; call the press conference.What philanthropic purpose is served, for example, by conferring yet another honor on Robert Penn Warren, dear old poet though he may be? Warren won a Rhodes Scholarship back in 1928. Since then, according to Who’s Who, he has been the official poet of the Library of Congress, the Jefferson Lecturer of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Ho...