Mr. Keck’s Bequest : Caltech Vs. UC Berkeley in a Story of Academic Intrigue, Technological Breakthroughs and Astronomical Ambition

IN AUGUST, 1984, THE PRESIDENT OF THE University of California, David P. Gardner, was vacationing with his family on an island in the middle of a Montana lake when a neighbor rowed over with an urgent message: “Please call Frazer.” Since William Frazer, UC’s vice president for academic affairs, wouldn’t normally disturb Gardner on vacation, it had to be important. Gardner took a boat ashore and called Frazer from a pay phone. The news concerned UC’s proposed 10-meter telescope, and what Gardner heard, he says, left him “startled” and “concerned.”

For nearly a decade, UC astronomers had been looking for a way to catapult the university into the front ranks of astronomical observatories by building the world’s largest and most powerful telescope. But it wasn’t until early 1984, after a year of intense negotiations, that Gardner had received the money for the project--$36 million from the estate of Marion O. Hoffman--in exchange for a promise to name the telescope after her husband, Maximilian E. Hoffman, a wealthy importer of Porsches and BMWs. Although the $36 million was the largest single gift in UC’s 116-year history, it would cover only half the cost of the new telescope. As a way of raising some of the rest, Gardner had asked Caltech to contribute $25 million to the project in return for 25% of the viewing time.

To everyone’s surprise, Caltech succeeded beyond its wildest expectations, which was the reason for Frazer’s frantic call to Gardner that day. Caltech president Marvin L. Goldberger had just revealed that he had an unsolicited offer of $70 million from the W. M. Keck Foundation, enough to fund the whole telescope project and, as Frazer immediately realized, to dramatically change the entire relationship between Caltech and UC.

At the same time, the gift left Gardner in a terrible bind. Just three months before, he had held a news conference to announce that the telescope would be named after Maximilian Hoffman. Now as a result of this new gift he would have to go back to the Hoffman Foundation and say he was terribly sorry, the telescope would instead be named after W. M. Keck. He wanted to be fair. He wanted to be ethical. He didn’t want what he called Keck’s “unexpected generosity” to be misunderstood by the Hoffman people. Most certainly of all, he didn’t want to have to turn around and give back $36 million. No wonder he was, in his words, “perplexed.” His efforts to fund the telescope had become a “complicated high-stakes” game, and the end, he feared, was nowhere in sight.

TO BOTH HIS ADMIRERS and critics, David Gardner was in many ways an anomaly for a university president. He was a Mormon, had earned his doctorate in the relatively unprestigious field of education and, in contrast to some other university presidents who use their office to speak out on such major moral issues as apartheid and arms control, in public he was so determinedly nonpolitical that one state legislator called him “the most infuriatingly inscrutable public official” he had ever encountered. Once, when Assembly Speaker Willie Brown heatedly challenged him to provide “one scintilla of evidence that the atrocities of the South African regime” in any way bothered him, Gardner responded that, as a Mormon, he had first-hand experience with injustice and persecution--the bones of his ancestors, he said, were strewn all over the western United States--and as a result he abhorred oppression wherever it occurred. Unlike Brown, however, he did not “choose to advertise it.”

Despite Gardner’s mild-mannered nature and a tendency to speak in academic boilerplate, his track record at raising money was enviable. Unlike his predecessors, who had lived with static or declining budgets under the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown, Gardner--by proceeding in a systematic, non-confrontational manner--won a commitment from Gov. George Deukmejian to increase state support for UC by 64%, which was another reason he chose not to denounce social injustices over which he had no control. Speaking out would compromise what he saw as his real job: maintaining the university as a place where ideas are welcome and respected; serving the faculty and students, and finding ways to fund important new projects--for instance, the world’s largest telescope.

WHEN ASTRONOMERS at UC’s Lick Observatory first started thinking, back in the mid-’60s, that they needed another telescope, it was not their notion to build something twice as big and four times as powerful as Palomar. All they really wanted was another 120-inch reflector in a dark location to supplement the Lick Observatory on top of Mt. Hamilton just east of San Jose. If you wanted to do deep-space observations, you need a totally dark night sky--something that was no longer available on the outskirts of San Jose.

At first the astronomers thought they could build a new observatory on Junipero Serra Peak, in the Los Padres National Forest south of Monterey. But the site was criticized by environmentalists, who said it would destroy a wilderness area, and by Indian groups, who said Junipero Serra was a sacred mountaintop. Most important, to the funding agencies the idea of another 120-inch mirror was a big ho-hum.

It wasn’t until 1976 that UC began to shift its focus from the idea of building just another telescope to building the world’s largest. And the reason was the rapid pace of technological progress. Until that time, astronomers had been able to continue their study of the ever-fainter galaxies by increasing the efficiency of the electronic detectors with which they captured incoming photons, the elementary constituents of light. But by the mid-’70s, the efficiency of such detectors had reached its theoretical maximum. And now astronomers, who lust after photons the way CEOs lust after market share, had no choice. If they wanted to study these most distant and ancient galaxies, they needed a bigger reflector.

In 1977, therefore, a committee was formed to look into the future of UC astronomy, and one of the people asked to join the committee was Jerry Nelson, a particle physicist at UC’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. If anyone was in a position, by temperament and training, to design a new telescope, it was probably Nelson, though he didn’t always give that impression. He dressed like a graduate student and looked like a cross between Tom Hayden and Howdy Doody. When giving a talk, his manner was so matter-of-fact one would think he was discussing a new offering of municipal sewer bonds, not the world’s largest telescope. Yet he was a persistent and capable scientist with a gift for devising elegant solutions to unexpected problems.

When Nelson started to work on the telescope project, there was, he says, no consensus about what should be done. A world-class telescope seemed exorbitantly expensive; the techniques for going larger than Palomar were not currently available; the anticipated problems seemed overwhelming. On the other hand, in chaos there is opportunity. And for Nelson it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to design a major new instrument with literally cosmic implications. Right from the beginning, Nelson set his heart on a 10-meter reflector, which would make it twice as big as Palomar. “You at least want a factor of two,” he says. “Otherwise, it’s not worth doing.” At the same time, UC’s site search committee decided to place the telescope on top of 13,600-foot-high Mauna Kea, an extinct volcano on the island of Hawaii. At this altitude (2 1/2 times as high as Palomar) the air was so thin and cold that astronomers needed supplemental oxygen. In return, they had one of the sharpest, clearest views of the heavens from anywhere on earth.

This combination of the world’s largest reflector on possibly the world’s best site would allow astronomers to study galaxies whose light has been traveling through space for the last 12 billion years, three-quarters of the way back to the original Big Bang, when the universe and time began. Such a telescope would not only stir the imagination of laymen; for scientists, it would also offer an opportunity to answer some of cosmology’s most perplexing questions: Where do galaxies come from? Why do they look so different? How is it that a single quasar (a large, starlike object) is able to outshine whole galaxies of billions of stars? Is there, as many astrophysicists suspect, an immense black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy? Is the universe open or closed? Will it end, as it began, in a cataclysmic fireball? Or will it continue to expand until it runs down, falls apart and dissolves in a thin, cold haze of elementary particles?

“You look out and you see this zoo,” says Nelson. Neutron stars, red giants, white dwarfs, pulsars, quasars, supernovae, spiral galaxies and trillions of stars. “Where did it all come from?”

AT FIRST,NELSONrecalls, he didn’t know much about the difficulty of building a large telescope. “I was ignorant,” he says. “ ‘Gee, why not make (the Palomar design) bigger?’ Well, it doesn’t take very long to understand why you can’t make the 200-inch design bigger.” If all one did was double the dimensions, he explains, the gravitational deformations of such a huge mass of glass would leave you with a critical optical surface four times less accurate than Palomar’s. And even this assumes that you could pour a piece of glass twice as big as Palomar’s--which may or may not be possible, since it would weigh about 150 tons. The expense of making such a massive mirror--and the machinery to support and point it--could easily drive the project’s cost beyond the capability of any university or private donor.

“You buy telescopes by the pound,” says telescope-project spokesman John Gustafson. A 10-meter telescope made by traditional technology would have cost half a billion dollars or more. Only the Department of Defense has that kind of money. And what would they want with a deep-space telescope? If you exclude second-order applications like celestial navigation, the practical applications of astronomy are almost nil. But its philosophical implications over the centuries have been incalculable, radically altering the way mankind sees itself and its place in the universe.

Since it seemed next to impossible to build a 10-meter (33-foot) mirror with the techniques used in building Palomar, Nelson decided to follow the lead of radio astronomers. For years they had built their metal reflectors in segments and simply bolted them together to build one large antenna. So instead of pouring a big, thick glass slab that would be ground into one massive mirror, Nelson thought it might be possible to build a parabolic reflector out of 36 separate hexagonally shaped pieces of thin glass and then assemble them into one giant mirror, much as one would lay tile on a bathroom floor. This, in turn, meant the telescope would require a new and incredibly precise control mechanism to keep the individual segments properly aligned as the telescope mirror moved. Nelson estimated the cost of such a telescope at $20 million.

In 1978, Nelson’s proposal for a new 10-meter telescope went to David Saxon, then president of UC Berkeley. Saxon was a physicist, and the technology of the segmented-mirror concept appealed to his sense of the aesthetic. Even more important to Saxon, however, was what such a telescope could do for the University of California. Decades earlier, the particle accelerators and cyclotrons of the Lawrence Berkeley Labs had catapulted the Berkeley physics and chemistry departments--and with them,

the entire UC system--into the front ranks of universities. Now that accelerators and cyclotrons were too large and expensive for mere universities to own and operate, what was needed was a replacement technology to energize the whole university--such as, for instance, the world’s premier telescope.

In 1980, with Saxon’s support, the regents allocated $1.1 million from the university’s opportunity funds (profits on government grants and contracts) to build a small test model that would establish proof of concept for the mirror-positioning system. On the back of each mirror segment there were small sensors that measured the segment’s position 300 times a second in relation to each of the neighboring segments and then made adjustments as small as one-thousandth of the width of a human hair.

To everyone’s vast relief, the test model turned out to be an unexpectedly robust instrument. “It could really damp out vibrations,” says Gustafson. “You could go up and kick it. The outside review committee said, ‘Yeah, it looks like it’s going to work.’ ”

SOLVING THE technical problems was one thing; finding a way to fund the 10-meter scope was another. From the very start, it was apparent that no UC president could ask the state legislature for money to build a telescope at a time when the Jerry Brown Administration was trying to cut its budget. On the other hand, the inherent appeal of astronomy was such that it was not inconceivable that a single donor could be found to fund the whole thing. Saxon asked a no-nonsense former Kaiser Industries president, Eugene Trefethen, to take on the task of finding someone who might be able to donate $50 million (the estimated cost of the telescope at the time). By poring through Forbes and Barron’s, Trefethen compiled a short list of people wealthy enough to give $50 million without feeling a pinch and spent the next several years talking to prospects in the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, Europe and Texas.

The results were not encouraging. Some said it wasn’t their “cup of tea.” Others wanted to put their money only in cancer research. Then in December, 1982, after the San Jose Mercury News ran a story about the proposed telescope, a retired IBM engineer named Edward Kain commended the project to his recently widowed sister, Marion Hoffman. “Her husband, Max Hoffman,” says Nelson, “had left her with an estate somewhere in the $50- to $100-million range. She wanted to have some high-technology memorial. . . . So after her brother told her, she called us up and said, ‘Gee, I’m interested in giving you guys money.’ ”

Unfortunately, Marion Hoffman, who had met her husband while a stewardess with American Airlines, was fatally ill with throat cancer. Because it took more than a year to set up a nonprofit foundation, it wasn’t until Dec. 15, 1983, that UC President David Gardner, who had succeeded David Saxon the previous August, sat down with her and worked out an oral agreement. She would give the university $36 million worth of securities, real estate and artwork (including a Renoir) and future royalties. In return, the University of California would name the telescope for her husband. Consequently it came as a shock to Saxon when Marion Hoffman died the day after he talked to her--without having transferred the money from her estate to her foundation.

At first this didn’t seem as if it would be a problem. Hoffman’s secretary, as executor of her estate, in accordance with what she felt was literally Marion Hoffman’s dying wish, transferred the gift from the estate to the university. “UC actually took possession of cash, artworks, deeds of trust to various kinds of things, and,” says Nelson, a royalty agreement giving UC something like “$50 for every BMW sold in the U.S. for the next 20 years.”

As a result, in May, 1984, Gardner was able to announce the largest single gift in UC’s entire 116-year history--$36 million from the Marion O. Hoffman trust--to build the world’s most powerful telescope. At the same time, because $36 million would still fall far short of the total cost of the project (now estimated at $70 million), Gardner made a decision somewhat controversial among certain UC astronomers--he invited Caltech to chip in $25 million in exchange for a quarter-share of the viewing time.

NORMALLY CALTECH would not have been interested in playing second fiddle to UC, especially since Caltech had long been one of the country’s pre-eminent institutions in optical astronomy, first with the original 60-inch Hale telescope at Mt. Wilson and later with its unparalleled 200-inch mirror at Mt. Palomar. But the lights from Los Angeles had long ago made Mt. Wilson unsuitable for deep-space optical astronomy. And Palomar, despite its hallowed status, had been completed nearly 40 years ago. In recent years, half a dozen institutions had announced ambitious (though as yet unfunded) plans to build larger and more advanced telescopes, and plans were afoot for a “National New Technology Telescope” sponsored by the federal government and consisting of four 8-meter mirrors (giving it the effective light gathering capacity of a 16-meter-diameter reflector). The Soviet Union had already built a 6-meter telescope in 1976 in the Caucasus Mountains. (It had not produced any noteworthy discoveries, because the mirror was so heavy it sagged under its own weight, and, in any case, for political reasons the observatory had been built in an area frequently obscured by clouds.) In any case, it was clear to Caltech president Marvin Goldberger that new telescopes were going to be built, and he wanted his school of have a part of one. “I was not about to allow Caltech to become No. 2 in optical astronomy,” he says.

The problem was, Caltech had limited options. It was a small school in Pasadena with only 280 professors and a budget of $155 million. The UC system, in contrast, had about 7,000 professors statewide and a budget of $6.3 billion. Even if Caltech had been able to somehow find a donor with pockets deep enough to fund a new observatory, the school couldn’t afford to operate it. A 10-meter telescope at the 13,600-foot level of Mauna Kea would cost $3.5 million a year to run--an impossible drain on the budget of a school the size of Caltech. Thus, when Bill Frazer offered Goldberger a quarter-share of UC’s proposed 10-meter observatory, Goldberger jumped at the chance.

Goldberger is an informal, outgoing man who once rode an elephant around the Caltech campus in honor of Einstein’s 100th birthday. To try and raise the money, he began making the rounds of foundations, quickly obtaining a pledge of $5 million from one and a possibility of $5 million more from another. But he was at a loss for the remainder--until one day in summer, 1984, when a wealthy Caltech trustee, Howard B. Keck, invited Goldberger to lunch to talk about something “important.”

KECK WAS THE son of W. M. Keck, a wildcat oil driller who founded Superior Oil. When he died in 1964, he left a fortune in stock to the Keck trust, which his son, Howard Keck, administered for the benefit of the Keck Foundation. In 1984, at the end of a bitter takeover battle with Mobil Oil, Keck sold some 12 million shares of Superior stock owned by the trust to the Mobil Corp. for close to $500 million. With this money, the Keck Foundation was now in a position to fund really big projects.

Keckf was a large, rumpled man with a wispy, woolly hair, a husky voice and a disconcerting stare. Although he was a plain-spoken man (he had gone directly from high school to work in his father’s oil fields and never attended college), he took an avid interest in big-game hunting, polo, auto racing and horse breeding. In 1953 and 1954, race cars owned by Keck won the Indianapolis 500. And in 1986, with jockey Willie Shoemaker in the saddle, Ferdinand, a horse owned by Keck’s wife, Elizabeth, won the Kentucky Derby. In the meantime, Keck and his wife had built an authentic 17th-Century stone mansion in Bel-Air, replete with exotic and nearly priceless 17th- and 18th-Century French furniture.

As director of the Keck Foundation, Keck had been looking for a way to contribute to the general knowledge of mankind and honor the name of his father in a way that the Keck Foundation’s earlier gifts to Goodwill Industries, Planned Parenthood and public television had so far failed to do. So when in the summer of 1984 he heard that Goldberger was looking for money to buy into UC’s 10-meter telescope project, he decided to invite Goldberger downtown for lunch. He had, he told Goldberger, heard about UC’s telescope project. He liked it. And he had an “idea that the foundation might participate in the funding.”

Of course, there would be conditions. If the Keck Foundation was going to give $70 million to Caltech to build the telescope, it would have to be named after Howard Keck’s father, not Maximilian Hoffman. Caltech would have to ensure that all publications and press releases regarding discoveries made by the telescope would specifically credit the W. M. Keck Observatory or W. M. Keck Telescope. And the observatory would have to be owned by Caltech, not the University of California.

The following month, Goldberger traveled to Aspen to attend the conclave of physicists held there every summer. One afternoon, on a hike up Buckskin Pass with UC vice president Bill Frazer, he dropped Keck’s $70-million bombshell.

For Goldberger, it was an “awkward, embarrassing situation.” Initially Caltech was to have been the junior partner to UC, and now all of a sudden it had twice as much money as UC did. For his part, Frazer was stunned. “He didn’t say, ‘You S.O.B.,’ ” says Goldberger, but clearly his emotions were mixed. And he hurried back to Aspen to confer with the new president of the UC system, who was vacationing on an island in the middle of a Montana lake.

To UC president Gardner, the thought of having to return $36 million was a tragedy of the first magnitude. Resourceful as he was charming, Gardner came up with what seemed to him a wonderful compromise. Together UC and Caltech would build two side-by-side 10-meter telescopes on the top of Mauna Kea--one named Hoffman and one named Keck. “Scientifically, it would be fantastic,” Goldberger agreed. “You could use them separately or slave them together, which would give you the equivalent of a 14.4-meter dish.”

Although the idea of building two 10-meter telescopes thrilled Gardner and Goldberger (Goldberger called it a “Solomon-like decision”), the Hoffman people were somewhat less happy. For one thing, they had given the money to UC for building the world’s largest telescope, not one of two equal-size telescopes. For another, Marion Hoffman’s sister, who was one of the two directors of the Hoffman Foundation, had sued Marion Hoffman’s secretary, contending that it was the foundation that was to have given the money to UC, not the estate. And therefore UC should return the money to the estate, which would in turn give it to the foundation, which would then distribute it to UC according to the decisions of the directors. Further complicating matters, the sister and the secretary had dissolved the original Hoffman Foundation and set up two new foundations--one called Marion and Max Hoffman, controlled by the secretary, and the other called Max and Marion Hoffman, controlled by the sister. Although lawyers for UC were engaged in daily discussions with the lawyers for the two foundations, trying to strike an agreement under which UC could keep the money, the prospects looked increasingly gloomy.

Caltech, meanwhile, was eager to move ahead and Goldberger, says Keck, flew up to Berkeley and made his position perfectly clear: If UC didn’t promptly sign an agreement with Caltech to build the telescope, Caltech was prepared to go it alone. At this point, UC dropped its plan for two telescopes, and after quietly returning the Hoffman gift, on Jan. 3, 1985, UC and Caltech jointly and with great fanfare announced a 50-50 partnership to build a new 10-meter telescope, to be named W. M. Keck Observatory. Under the terms of the agreement, Caltech would put up the money to build the telescope while UC would supply operating costs of $3.5 million a year for the next 25 years. Although title to the telescope would be held by Caltech, Caltech would lease the telescope to a new corporation (the California Assn. for Research in Astronomy) for $1 a year. Each school would have three representatives on CARA’s board of directors and the chairmanship would alternate. And CARA would administer the new facility.

Ground-breaking for the telescope was celebrated in Hawaii on Sept. 12, 1985. The foundations are complete; the dome is to be delivered this spring. If the project remains on schedule, it will go into operation (called “first light”) in 1991.

FOR THEW. M. Keck Foundation, the publicity generated by the gift was everything it might have hoped. Stories appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, on AP and UPI wire services and on the ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN television networks. As a result, the foundation concluded, it had gained “immeasurable” new credibility and stature in the minds of the nation’s opinion leaders. Furthermore, now that a private foundation has come forward to build a new telescope entirely without federal funds, Congress is even less likely to appropriate upwards of $100 million for a high-technology telescope of its own. Thus, believes Keck, the Keck Observatory will probably remain the world’s largest for many years to come.

At first, some members of the UC astronomical community were more than a little miffed that ownership of the world’s biggest telescope had slipped through their hands. But the more thoughtful UC people realized that they never really had the money to build the telescope in the first place. And besides, as Jerry Nelson is fond of pointing out, sharing equally in the use of the world’s biggest telescope is a heck of a lot better than owning 100% of nothing at all.