Grant Smooths the Road of Professor Who Upholds the Humanities in a Bastion of Scientists

In the early 1970s when he was in France as a Fulbright scholar, John Benton had to sell his mother’s old typewriter to help raise the money to get his family back home.

But this year Benton didn’t have to worry about how to get home from another scholarly mission in Paris. While he was abroad, he learned that he will receive $250,000 over a period of five years, no strings attached.

It was stunning news for a man who has always held his scholarly, financial and physical life in a precarious balance in order to pursue historical perspectives on love and human values to share with students of science.

Benton is a Caltech history professor who was chosen one of this year’s 25 winners of MacArthur Foundation fellowships. Since 1981, when former Caltech physicist George Zweig was among the first winners, the MacArthur Foundation has given 191 tax-free, five-year stipends to scholars, scientists, artists and others. Recipients cannot apply for the grants, but are selected in secret by an anonymous committee, and there are no restrictions on how the money is to be used.

After getting the news, Benton continued his 30-year study of the late 12th-Century court of the French region of Champagne, and the documents that were issued by rulers of that area. The immediate impact of the money, he said, was “the great comfort it gave me to take a taxi and not have to fight my way through the Paris subway.”

Now he is back at Caltech, where he strongly defends the Division of Humanities in an institution that boasts 20 Nobel laureates--all scientists.

“I’m more interested in giving a sense of historical perspective to a future member of the Atomic Energy Commission than in teaching a future historian how to read documents,” Benton said.

“That’s the true excitement about Caltech. These students will have incredibly important positions some day. That’s why there is a strong emphasis on history, literature and philosophy, particularly ethics. What scientists need most is a sense of historical perspective. They can get a sense of paradigms of thought when they learn how intelligent people could have held quite different ideas in different cultures.

“In science, there is such an emphasis on what is true for today that many scientists throw away their journals after a few years.”

Along with classes in medieval history, this fall Benton is scheduled to teach “Love in the Western World,” described in the Caltech catalogue as “a history of love, marriage and sexual relations from antiquity to modern times,” and psychohistory, “the influence of psychological factors in the course of history and of historical forces in the shaping of groups and individuals.”

“There’s next to nothing in science today that teaches you to learn your own sexuality,” Benton said. “It’s in history and literature that one sees what other human animals have done.”

So far, the impact of the MacArthur fellowship on Benton’s life is “to make possible a real freedom of what you choose to do and how to go about doing it.”

“What I have to do is finish my work on the Champagne documents, as my contribution to scholarship. This is payment of an intellectual debt. Any historian is indebted to other scholars.”

Benton has suffered from arthritis and ileitis for more than half of his 53 years. He has two artificial hips, one artificial shoulder, three intestinal resections. He attributes his illnesses to “random fate,” and dismisses his constant pain with, “it doesn’t lead to sclerosis of the brain.”

With the same absence of self pity, Benton recalls “years of pretty serious financial stringency” that were punctuated with such episodes as the sale of his mother’s typewriter.

He remembers earning $4,000 a year in his first teaching job at Reed College in Oregon in 1957--when he and his wife, Elspeth, were beginning their family of four daughters.

Now Elspeth Benton is director of a Temple City nursery school and active politically as an advocate for children, and the couple’s daughters are grown.

Benton’s other currents interests include how gynecology was practiced in medieval times, modern peace and civil rights movements, application of scientific technology to manuscript studies, and authentication of the correspondence of the 12th-Century lovers Abelard and Heloise.

Besides taxi rides, he said, he might buy some new bookcases and a computer.