One-on-one with Morris Foster

Aug. 27—The School for Advanced Research has been called a school for 117 years. But nobody actually teaches on campus.

That's how Morris Foster, new president of the institution, explained it.

Foster started as the president of the School for Advanced Research in July, a school originally created as a postgraduate institution in anthropology in the early 1900s. The school now hosts graduate students from other universities writing dissertations and faculty who are on sabbaticals writing books, Foster said.

The institute, known as SAR, also has a unique art collection in its Indian Arts Research Center, a division that holds southwestern Native American art collections.

"We have a very active intellectual community and our creative community here, but we ourselves do not teach courses and don't have students," Foster said.

Up until just a couple of weeks ago, Foster had been living on campus in the fellow apartments at the nonprofit educational institution he's now the head of in Santa Fe. He said it was nice to get a sense of the school until he could move into his house.

"It's very quiet at night," he said, laughing.

How did you hear about the job, and what drew you to it?

"Being in anthropology, I have always known about SAR from graduate student days on. So I've known about this place for 40-plus years. There's no other place like this in anthropology.

And so when the position came open, I saw it advertised in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I applied because, really, there's no other job quite like this in anthropology."

How did you feel about moving to New Mexico?

"When we lived in Oklahoma, we often came out to Santa Fe; it's a day's drive. And so we were familiar with Santa Fe from many visits in the past.

It's a nice change from being on the coast and the east.

And who doesn't like Santa Fe?"

What does your role as president entail?

"I've discovered that probably much of my role is fundraising because this is a nonprofit that depends upon donors and grants and that. And so one of my main responsibilities is keeping the place running financially.

But also working with the scholar fellows who come here, the artists and residents, working with the staff and maintaining the collection, growing the collection. Those are all really interesting things."

It's very fresh. You just started in July. How's it going? What have you done so far?

"So we are looking forward to a project to expand the Indian Arts Research Center. So that's going to be a big undertaking over the next five years.

We want to refresh the scholar programs with the visiting fellows, see if we can expand that.

The organization is very financially sound, and that gives us the opportunity to grow. And so it's a question of how can we grow SAR? We want to expand our public programming. We do a lot of lectures, documentary film series. We have some short courses in the summer. We take members on field trips to various sites around the area, usually just day trips. But we really want to expand our public programming."

What's been your favorite part of the job?

"This campus. This campus is incredible. It's something that everyone coming to Santa Fe should visit. We hope they will. We have regular tours. It's 15 acres of just beautiful scenery and historic buildings, hummingbirds."

Can you speak to the history of the campus?

"This was originally the home of the White sisters, and they built it in the 1920s. I think of the 15 buildings, nine are historic to their period.

I mean, this was their home — the administrative building here. This was the dining room. And that they had that." Foster pointed to an ornate piece of artwork above the fireplace. "They brought that from Guatemala.

"They were very active in Santa Fe really from the 1920s up to 1972. Amelia Elizabeth passed in 1972 and bequeathed, left the estate to SAR."

How does it feel to be doing this kind of work in a piece of history?

"Who can't enjoy this kind of an office or this kind of a park-like setting? You do something that maybe requires a great deal of concentration and focus, and then you look up and refresh yourself just looking out at the trees and the flowers and the bushes."

What do you like to do in your free time?

"Well, we just are sending off our two youngest kids to college, so that's something that my wife and I will be able to discover more here in Santa Fe than in Norfolk, (Virginia,) where we had two high school students that we were moving around and helping them do things.

So we're really looking forward to going to restaurants and hiking and taking advantage of the cultural activities here."

Any spots in New Mexico you want to hit?

"I hear there's a bat cave where you can watch the bats fly out at night. That's something that I saw a video online of that I want to go see.

But this gives us a good chance to drive up to Taos or to a number of different national parks and national historic sites."

Any pet peeves?

"I don't think so. I mean, you know, every place has its quirks, and actually, that's part of the joy of living somewhere — you discover all the different quirks and figure out how to make them part of your daily life.

Much less traffic here than in Virginia," he said, laughing.

Any other goals for SAR?

"We really want to make SAR both a state asset — it's important, I think, to the cultural life in Santa Fe — then also it's a nationally known organization. We're in our second century, and we want to enhance that national reputation as well.

We're very well known in anthropology, fairly known in history and obviously in Native American art. We're a national repository of some of the best of Southwest art."

How do you think SAR is unique compared to other similar institutions?

"So it's the only non-university, nonprofit that has an explicit focus on the arts, the humanities and the social sciences, and how those intersect.

And not being a university means that we don't have a lot of the distractions that universities have. We don't, for instance, have a football team. We don't have a lot of students and the whole undergraduate education enterprise. We don't have that.

We're just very focused on that intellectual and creative intersection of the arts, the humanities and the social sciences. And there's not another nonprofit in the U.S. at least that has that singular focus."

Can you tell me about your book, "Being Comanche: The Social History of an American Indian Community"?

"Sure. So it's a social history of the Comanche community from the early 1700s up to 1992 — when it was published. And it really looks at how Comanches maintained a community through many changes.

So they originally lived in the basin area, came out onto the plains because the Europeans brought horses here, and that was an attraction. So they changed from being a foraging, hunting and gathering group to becoming engaged more in the economy that came about with the arrival of horses and the Huntington bison and all of that.

They ended up on a reservation in Oklahoma in the 1870s, but they continued to be Comanche, even though they were no longer hunting bison or raiding or doing some of the things they had done before.

And then throughout the 20th century, they have continued, and into the 21st century now, they continue to be a community. Even though all sorts of changes have happened around them, they're still a group of people who share not only an identity but interactional patterns and practices — things that make them a shared community of people."

And you wrote that when you were more focused on the research side of things. How are you finding the administrative side of things?

"Yes, that was my dissertation then it became my first book.

You can use your skills as an ethnographer, as an anthropologist, to do administration.

The whole thing about anthropology is that you are a participant observer, so you embed yourself in a community, and you learn how people have developed in that community a set of formal and informal practices to get business done. And that helps you understand how an organization like SAR works. It also helps you to understand how you might make some changes to make it a more effective organization."