A GREAT DREAM UNFULFILLED: THE MARTIN INSTITUTE AT 30

By Nick Gier

Boyd A. Martin was born in Cottonwood, Idaho in 1911. In 1933 he married Grace Swingler from Kamiah, Idaho. She attended Washington State University and graduated from UCLA with an English degree. Boyd graduated from the University of Idaho in 1936.

When World War II began in 1939, the Martins were in Stanford, California, where Boyd was finishing a Ph.D. in political science. The young couple was so anxious about the state of world affairs that they invested their life savings of $800 to establish a research institute that would study the causes of war. Today that seed money has grown to $1.2 million.

When I came to the University of Idaho (UI) in 1972, I remember passing the small office of Boyd’s Institute for Human Behavior every day. I don’t believe that much was accomplished in those early days, because Boyd was fully occupied as department chair of political science and later as dean of the College of Letters and Science.

After his retirement in 1973, Boyd worked tirelessly to fulfill his vision of a world-class think tank for world peace. In 1979 the Institute of Human Behavior became the Martin Institute, and Boyd was keen to appoint research fellows and start a peace studies curriculum.

The reasons for the delay in Boyd’s project are obscure, but I believe that both Boyd and the UI administration can be faulted for very little progress during the 1980s. Perhaps it was Boyd’s threat to move the money to Stanford’s Hoover Institute that finally got the ball rolling.

In 1990 the name was changed to the Martin Institute for Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution, and a part-time director and about dozen research fellows were appointed.

As one of the new fellows, I was fully committed to Boyd’s dream and focused all of my research on peace studies. I launched an intensive effort to raise funds for my research, but I was thwarted at every turn. The U.S. Institute of Peace was still oriented to strategic and area studies, and there seem to be very little interest in my book project on M. K. Gandhi.

For my 1992-93 sabbatical to India and Japan, I supplemented my half sabbatical salary with a small grant from the Martin Institute with an equally modest grant from the Niwano Peace Foundation.

Boyd Martin was committed to the idea of a peace studies curriculum that would combine existing courses in political science, history, philosophy, and religious studies with new courses in peace studies.

During the summer of 1994, I used Martin Institute funds to develop a course entitled “Peace and the World Religions.” I taught the course twice as an overload, but it died for lack of follow through by the UI administration. As Coordinator of Religious Studies, I had made, in vain, a request for a new faculty member for that program as well as for new Martin courses.

The best years of the Martin Institute were under the leadership of Jack Vincent, who was hired as both director and Borah Distinguished Professor. Vincent empowered the fellows by allowing them to govern the institute by means of three committees. After several years he was unceremoniously removed by the UI Administration.

The new director Richard Slaughter had a top-down management style that led to dissension within the institute. Without any consultation with fellows, Slaughter phased out a very successful program in mediating Pacific Northwest regional conflicts.

Slaughter also had the audacity to tell me that my work on Gandhi was not appropriate for the Martin Institute. He had also been very dismissive and reluctant to fund a two-day UI version of the National Day of Non-Violence, which I organized with students in April of 1998.

During the 1990s my annual external grant applications, except for the Niwano grant, were denied. With Martin grants and half sabbatical salaries, I went back to India in 1995 and 1999 to finish my Gandhi book and another one on Indian religions, both of which are now published.

When I returned to Moscow in January 2000, I was shocked to discover that Director Slaughter had demoted the fellows and had allocated all the research funds to peace science studies rather than to humanities-based peace studies. Martin fellows from each of these areas had gotten along very well until Slaughter sought to drive a wedge between us.

The current director Bill Smith has done a great job with the Martin Scholar and Martin Honors Seminar programs. Every spring the Martin Institute also sends UI students to the Model United Nations.

Bill Smith has also been able to attract excellent speakers for the Martin Forums. I had the privilege of starting this series when in 1998, when I invited Professor Mahendra Kumar of New Delhi’s Gandhi Peace Foundation to speak on the resumption of nuclear weapons testing by the Indian government. I also led the second Martin Forum on the crisis in Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo.

If Boyd Martin were still alive today, he would certainly approve of the fact that international studies and its 195 majors are now part of the Martin Institute. Director Smith has been able to bring in, on a regular basis, Islamic scholars as well as visiting professors from China, Africa, and Central Europe.

Boyd would just as dismayed as anyone that, because of the financial crisis, the Martin Director will also have to chair the foreign language department.

But most of all, Boyd would be solely disappointed to see that the research fellows and successful mediator are gone, and there is still no peace studies curriculum. These elements were integral to his vision, and I regret very much that we were unable to fulfill all the elements of Boyd and Grace Martin’s dream of 1939.

Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years. He was Senior Fellow at the Martin Institute for Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution from 1990-2000. Read chapters from his Gandhi book at www.class.uidaho.edu/vnv.htm.