A Singular Woman by Janny Scott Page A

ungoverned passion and hate that is sweeping Mississippi over the admission of a Negro to its state university,” the resolution began.
    The campus was changing. At the outset, Ann may well have felt herself to be a fish out of water, but the university was positioning itself in the world in ways that would set the course of her life for the future. In April 1959, a month after Congress voted in favor of statehood, Lyndon B. Johnson, the United States Senate majority leader, who had worked closely with Hawaii’s territorial delegate on statehood, called for establishing in Hawaii an international center of cultural and technical interchange between East and West. For too many years, he said, “we have neglected the simple things that would break down the barriers between ourselves and people who should be our friends.” The president of the University of Hawai‘i went to Washington to help make the case for locating the center on campus. The progress of the proposal became regular front-page news at the school. Professors, politicians, students, and journalists weighed in. “I can see the bright young men from the small towns all over Asia and the bright young men of the United States interested in Asian affairs studying together on the same campus,” said William J. Lederer, coauthor of The Ugly American, the novel about the parochialism of American officialdom in Southeast Asia, which had become a huge bestseller in 1958. Edward R. Murrow of CBS News, passing through Hawaii, called the proposed center “one of the most exciting educational projects I’ve heard of in many a long year.”
    The summer Ann arrived in Hawaii, Congress appropriated $10 million to set up the East-West Center, an institution that more than any would go on, over the next twenty-five years, to influence the direction of her life. An advance team set off for Bangkok, Rangoon, Saigon, Calcutta, Dhaka, Kathmandu, Karachi, Colombo, and points beyond, touring twenty countries that might be encouraged to send students. I. M. Pei, the Chinese-born American architect, agreed to design a complex of five buildings on twenty-one acres at the eastern end of the University of Hawai‘i campus. The center’s emphasis would be the exchange of ideas, information, and beliefs through cooperative study, training, and research. Theory and practice would be combined, preparing leaders, current and future, to confront real-life problems. Grant recipients, chosen jointly by the center and the participating countries, would receive a full scholarship, covering tuition, housing, textbooks, travel, and field study. In the fall of 1960, the first two students arrived—a professor-poet from Pakistan and a graduate student in soil science from Ceylon. The center’s first American student, a graduate student in philosophy, set off in the fall of 1961 on a three-month trip to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Burma, East Pakistan, Ceylon, India, and Hong Kong to research a thesis comparing Buddhism and Western thought. By September 1962, there were 250 grant recipients enrolled at the university. The center’s international advisers included Ralph J. Bunche, undersecretary of the United Nations; the vice chancellor of Punjab University; and an undersecretary of state for agriculture in Thailand. At the groundbreaking in the spring of 1961, Johnson, newly elected as vice president of the United States, arrived in a white convertible. “The purpose of this East-West Center is not for West to teach East or East to study the West,” he said at the dedication. “The purpose here is to bring together two proud and honorable cultures, and to fuse a new strength—a new strength for freedom that will last through eternity.”
    Even for students not directly involved, the center quickly became one of the most interesting and exciting things on campus during Ann’s undergraduate years. It more than tripled the