The Big Crunch Looms Early for a University in the Mountains

Deep in the Santa Monica Mountains, where Mulholland Drive crosses Las Virgenes Road, lies a valley that, in spite of its placid isolation, has gone through almost as many metamorphoses as Byzantium.

This enchanted spot of eucalyptus- and deodar-lined lanes was once the estate of King Gillette, the razor blade mogul, who built a lagoon beside his Spanish mansion. Then, sold to MGM executive Clarence Brown, it was, local lore has it, the backdrop for scenes from “Gone With the Wind� and “National Velvet.�

The Claretian Fathers, acquiring it by bequest in the early 1950s and adding a rectory and Romanesque-style sanctuary, trained novices there for 20 years. Next, it was Thomas Aquinas College. And then, the charismatic Elizabeth Clare Prophet led her Church Universal and Triumphant there, redecorating the Claretians’ sanctuary in purple.

When Prophet moved her flock to Montana, where--happily far from the Santa Monica Mountains--she began to build huge underground bomb shelters, the property was quietly purchased by its current owner, a Japanese institution of higher education called Soka University.

Drawing on financial support from the Japanese government, Japanese business and a religious sect known as Soka Gakkai, Soka has enlarged the original 216 acres to nearly 600 and plans to make the campus a meeting ground for bright young minds from around the world, teaching the culture of the Pacific Rim with an emphasis on world peace.

As a nascent university still lacking such elaborate amenities as an Oviatt Library, a Royce Hall or a Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Soka can’t quite claim to be a crossroad of peoples and ideas. But it’s trying.

One way is with its lecture series on human rights.

If you had dropped by last Thursday, you could have heard Nobel laureate Leon Lederman discourse on “An Ethical Model for Scientific Pursuit in the 21st Century.�

Lederman, who heads the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, won the Nobel Prize for work he did in the early 1960s with an infinitesimal, ghostlike particle called the neutrino.

Quite in contrast to his stated subject, Lederman himself was neither difficult nor weighty. Striding to a projector, he invited those whose view was blocked to “move up closer, or you can just nap.�

Briefly, he reviewed the history of science, illustrated by his own drawings: Thales of Miletus in 650 BC hypothesizing that a simple principle guides all the universe, Newton being bopped by an apple and finally fellow Nobel laureate Robert Gelles-Mann with a light bulb over his head.

At one point, he put up a chart cataloguing the amount of energy needed to break various subatomic particles, from .2 electron volts to smash a molecule to hundreds of billions for a nucleus.

“If you want to disturb Carl Sagan, you need billions and billions, “ Lederman said, mocking the famous television scientist’s effusive delivery.

Next, he summarized the story of the universe. It was illustrated on a graph, with the Big Bang 15 billion years ago on the left and the present toward the right, with some notations about the future.

“Of course, you notice that world peace follows now by a few thousand years,� Lederman said, “and then someday the Cubs will win the World Series.�

Then comes the Big Crunch--the whole universe shrinking back down to a pinpoint, some believe--when everyone’s quarks will be reduced to a submicroscopic point--�everyone, Israelis and Arabs, Democrats and Republicans!�

Lederman concluded with a rather simple prescription on ethics. He acknowledged that science--and its social expression, technology--could wipe out the world before the Big Crunch. The way to keep it aimed toward its beneficial potential, he said, is through education--building a citizenry that knows enough about science to conduct a reasonable debate.

Afterward, a few science buffs pressed around Lederman like neutrinos around a nucleus, posing esoteric questions.

Elsewhere in the auditorium, small groups of young Japanese women, all wearing business suits, circled around guests from the community, making warm conversation. They were students from a Soka women’s junior college in Japan, visiting the United States to improve their English.

It is doubtful that many of them got the point of Lederman’s intricately sophisticated quips, not to mention grasping his continuum from the interior of the atom to the end of the cosmos. No matter.

Surely, their giggling and spirited attempts to connect with the strangers in the audience were at least as significant as Lederman’s insights. For at Soka University, nothing occurs in an academic vacuum.

Today, the tides of change are again battering at its walls. The National Park Service has a hankering for the former Gillette estate as the headquarters of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. It is trying to seize the property through eminent domain.

Meanwhile, Soka’s plan to expand to 3,400 students has aroused wrath in the community around it. The expansion would have to be approved by the L. A. County Regional Planning Commission. So the university is fighting a two-front battle, in court and in the hearts and minds of its neighbors.

It can’t offer the Coliseum yet, but it’s doing everything it can to be appealing.

The next human rights lecture is Nov. 10. Former CBS correspondent Richard Hottelet will tackle “The Role of the Media in Exposing Human Rights Abuses.�

Go early. Take a stroll around the rehabilitated lake. Converse with students. Take a cushy seat in the redecorated sanctuary--now a stately auditorium in pastel hues. Contemplate the Soka mottoes, the first of which is:

“Be a treasure house of capable people who will shoulder the establishment of world peace.�

Then decide: university or park headquarters. Which should it be?