Dr. Eugene Borowitz, 71, of Chicago, a psychiatrist who used his experiences as a young baseball player scouted by the major leagues to devise the anonymous scouting system used to find exceptionally creative people for grants from the MacArthur Fellows Program, died of cancer Tuesday, Oct. 3, in Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
“He was a man of great empathy for individuals’ efforts,” said Champ Ward, who, like Dr. Borowitz, was a consultant for the MacArthur Foundation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the fellowship program was conceived.
The idea for the no-strings-attached grants is generally attributed to Dr. George Burch and J. Roderick MacArthur, who conceived of the grants as a way to honor creative people considered to be mavericks in their fields. Fellowship grants can now be as high as $500,000 over five years, with none of the results-oriented constraints most such large grants carry.
Dr. Borowitz, who interviewed several of the fellowship’s first recipients in addition to helping determine how they would be selected, always brought a psychiatric perspective to his job, Ward said.
“He got into their reaction of being designated an exceptional person,” Ward said. “There were one or two cases where he had to hold their hand a bit. But he was a psychiatrist, that was it.”
In many senses, Dr. Borowitz, who was born in Chicago, had spent most of his life around exceptional people. His Ukrainian immigrant mother worked for Jane Addams and brought him along with her to Hull House to play. A few years later, the family moved to the Bronx, New York, where Dr. Borowitz’s mother, Molly, played a key role in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and worked with labor leader Sidney Hillman.
The family counted as friends New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and Democratic Socialist Eugene Debs, Dr. Borowitz’s godfather and the person for whom he was named.
At one point in his life, Dr. Borowitz had his choice of professions: baseball or medicine. He was an All-City quarterback in high school in New York, and while attending the University of Chicago, he was a standout pitcher on its baseball team.
He told his family the Chicago Cubs expressed interest in him joining their organization after scouting him during the 1947 season. Instead, Dr. Borowitz went to Tulane University for medical school. He never explained precisely why, though his family said he was torn by the decision.
He did psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and completed his residency in psychiatry at the University of Illinois in 1959, joining the U. of I. medical school faculty that year. He remained at the U. of I. until his retirement in 1987, serving for several of those years as director of the university’s psychiatric residency training program.
While at the U. of I., he was approached by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to assist with implementing the foundation’s fellowship program, now commonly called the MacArthur “genius grants.”
He remained a consultant with the foundation until 1984, periodically evaluating its success. To date, 588 MacArthur Fellows have been named.
Survivors include his wife, Selma; two sons, Stephen and Michael; a daughter, Jennifer Borowitz Gutzke; and three granddaughters.
A memorial service will be held at 6 p.m. Friday in the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St., Chicago.
