Most of us would be happy just to be considered geniuses. Imagine getting paid for it. Every year, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago gives five-year monetary prizes to about 30 people deemed to be extraordinarily creative. Since 1981, 414 people have won these “genius grants” (formally known as MacArthur Fellowships), stipends ranging from $160,000 to $375,000, depending on the age of the recipient.
Prizes are paid out over five years, with no strings attached.
In a secretive process, about 100 anonymous nominators fan out across the country every year, proposing individuals whose work will have or has had a positive impact on society. They may be of any age, race or sex, but they must be U.S. citizens. They should be at a point where winning a lot of money will make a big difference in their careers.
And make a difference it does, both in their careers and in many aspects of their lives. About one-fourth of the winners have been women since the program began, although the proportion has increased to about half over the last few years. Five of those women recently told us how the fellowships had changed their lives.
Byllye Avery
Byllye Avery laughs when she remembers the week she was notified that she’d won $310,000.
“The Monday before I heard, I was eating at a Chinese restaurant,” she said in a telephone interview from Swarthmore, Pa. “After the meal they brought in the fortune cookies. I picked one up and handed it to my friend. She said, `I will get my own, thank you very much.’ So I opened it, and it said, `You will come into money and you will travel.’
“I got the message the following Wednesday.”
It was 1989, and Avery was well into her life’s work. She had established the National Black Women’s Health Project in Atlanta in 1981, a self-help advocacy organization. That project had spawned others, including a public-policy and education group in Washington, D.C. that focuses on reproductive health issues; the Center for Black Women’s Wellness, which organizes self-help groups for women in public housing; and Sister Reach, the international arm of the National Black Women’s Health Project.
“It was such a precious gift,” Avery says of the fellowship. “It freed me to be able to take some time and look at what I’d done. It helped me direct myself in ways I wanted to go.”
For one thing, she promoted herself out of the Atlanta office and into peace in Swarthmore, where she can conduct business by fax, telephone and computer.
But she hasn’t avoided the attention that the fellowship brings. “It absolutely catapults you into the public eye,” she said. “I got increased demands for speaking, for reading manuscripts.”
And for someone who said she had little interest in making money, “it was wonderful being able to pay all the bills at one time.”
With time running out on her stipend, Avery has yet to do two things she planned when she won, write a book about herself and learn to play the harp. “But as a matter of fact,” she said, “I just spoke to someone today about finding a teacher.”
Tina Rosenberg
Tina Rosenberg says that her fellowship propelled her career and recommends that the foundation reward more people her age. One of the younger winners, Rosenberg was 27 when she got the award in 1987.
A free-lance journalist, Brooklyn-born Rosenberg had been traveling in and writing about Latin America.
“I was writing magazine articles and pretty much struggling,” she said in a telephone interview from the National Security Archives in Washington, D.C. where she has an office as the organization’s author-in-residence this year. “I had been in Chile and wanted to move back and live there. I was trying to figure out how.”
The $190,000 award helped her do that, and then some.
“The most important thing it did for me was give me credibility to get a book contract,” she said. “It also helped finance the writing of my book.”
The book, “Children of Cain” (Penguin Books, $12.50), examines violence in six Latin American countries through the eyes of people who perpetuate and fight it.
Despite her success selling stories to magazines, Rosenberg doubts that a book publisher would have taken a chance on a relatively unknown author. And Latin America, she said, is a generally unpopular subject.
She used to skip newspaper articles about Latin America, until a friend who visits Nicaragua often invited her to come along, and she agreed as a lark, she said. “I thought it was fascinating, like living on the moon.”
The fellowship’s financial gifts ended in 1991, and Rosenberg, now writing a book about former Warsaw Pact countries, said she can’t determine whether its stamp still shapes her accomplishments.
“It’s hard to decide where its influence leaves off,” she said. “If not for MacArthur, I wouldn’t have written the first book. If not for that, I wouldn’t have the second book contract. I don’t think I still am able to do things just because I won the fellowship, but it started the whole ball rolling.”
The award didn’t change her personal life much, she said. “I went back to Latin America, where nobody had heard of it. My friends in the States were all very nice, though; nobody said the obvious thing, which is, `Why you?”‘
Elaine Pagels
The award couldn’t couldn’t have come at a better time for Elaine Pagels, one of six women recipients in 1981. Now the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University, she studies ancient religious texts in Latin, Greek, Coptic and Hebrew.
When she won, Pagels had recently finished a book on the Gnostic Gospels, writings about Jesus that were discovered in Upper Egypt. Pagels spent years reading the Scriptures and trying to figure out why they had been left out of the New Testament.
“My theory was that they were left out because at (the time the New Testament was compiled) the Christian movement was becoming institutionalized,” she said in a conversation from Aspen, Colo., where she spent the summer. These writings might have undermined the effort.
In one of the books, for example, Jesus talks about what we can do to save ourselves. “That suggests we don’t need the church for salvation,” Pagels explained. “That’s not useful to building an institution that claims that outside of it there is no salvation.”
Pagels was immersed in her work, happily married and had just had a baby when she got word of her $196,000 windfall.
“Everything in my life was wonderful at that point,” she said. “The only thing I didn’t have that I really wanted very much was time.”
Pagels, then 37, was chairman of the religion department at Barnard College in New York City and barely keeping up with her duties there.
“It was staggering to be given a gift of time,” she said. “And what I did with it was essentially say, `I just want five years off and no telephone.’ It was wonderful to have the time. It changes everything.”
Although she didn’t know it then, that time would be invaluable to Pagels for more personal reasons.
“The fellowship happened to coincide with the five years of my son’s life,” she said. “He died when he was 6 1/2, and I’m grateful that I had that time with him. It made a tremendous difference.”
Sharon R. Long
Sharon R. Long has yet to feel the many of the changes that come with a gift of $260,000. The 42-year-old molecular biologist was awarded her fellowship last year, too late to change her teaching plans at Stanford University, where she’s a professor.
She has donated some money to charity and taken a trip with her husband to Chicago, one of their favorite destinations, but most of the funds have been poured into a special account for her research.
“My work is what’s fun, so it’s the obvious thing to use the money for,” she said on the telephone from her office in California.
The work she so enjoys, and for which she won the fellowship, involves studying the symbiotic relationship between certain bacteria and such plants as alfalfa and soybeans.
Some bacteria convert nitrogen to a form of protein that plants can use. Long discovered the genes in the bacteria that allow them to help the plants and the way the bacteria and plants find each other using the chemical equivalent of a sense of smell.
Vivian Gussin Paley
Vivian Gussin Paley says that that her fellowship did more for her profession than for her. The kindergarten teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools was 60 years old and working on her sixth book when she got the news in 1989. She thought it was a joke.
It wasn’t that she didn’t think she deserved recognition for her work. Paley developed the idea of “storyplaying,” children acting out stories they tell their teachers and classmates.
“It really makes the classroom into a theater,” Paley said in a conversation from Wisconsin, where she recently began a sabbatical. What’s important about such a transformation, she explained, is that it allows teachers to “humanize” their classrooms. More important, it creates activities in which all children can participate.
The title of her most recent book echoes a sign posted above the piano in her classroom: “You Can’t Say You Can’t Play.” She said the book describes her belief in the importance of the classroom as the first venue in which children experiment with issues of morality and democracy.
Paley’s recognition by the MacArthur Foundation meant that others outside her profession appreciated the significance of what went on in schools.
“The most important aspect was that a classroom teacher got the award,” she said. “I felt that the whole notion of the incredible importance of early childhood education was being recognized by an outfit that usually gave its approval to college professors, artists and writers.”
Daily life hasn’t changed much for Paley; she still teaches and writes. But this year, the last of her fellowship, she has used some of her $355,000 to take a sabbatical in Door County, Wis., where she hopes to finish a new book.
The speaking invitations tell it all, she said.
“Here is a profession that has been given credibility,” she said. “The people I’ve heard from would never have called me without the imprimatur of the MacArthur Foundation.
