Boat Rocker

WILBUR H. (PING) FERRY '32 in his 25th reunion biography wrote: "A rising standard of living seems meaningless when placed against what I regard as declining standards of morality."

In his post as Vice President of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, in Santa Barbara, Calif., and staff director of the Center's study of the economic order, Ferry for the past eleven years has devoted himself to shaking up the nation's complacent thinking about its institutions and values. To this role he brings a sharp mind and a sharp tongue. He pulls no punches and consequently is often in the middle of a storm of outraged reaction to his attacks on the existing order and to his freewheeling ideas for making democracy work better.

In an article about him in the July Atlantic, entitled "Ping Ferry, the Happy Heretic," author Victor Navasky described him as "letter writer, satirist, polemicist, clichebuster, preacher, publicist, intellectual, popularizer, idealist, generalist, boat-rocker, advocatus diaboli."

The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, where Ping Ferry has his headquarters as thinker, writer and traveling speaker, is the ideal spot for a man with his non-conformist, intellectual bent. Critical examination, soaring now and then into the wild blue yonder, is the normal order of things. The Center, headed by Robert M. Hutchins as president, describes itself as "an intellectual community dedicated to trying to clarify basic issues in the practical order."

The Center is not an action group, being content to stimulate discussion that will "put the issues clearly before the people." It is Ping Ferry's method of ripping into things and providing no answers - "I leave that up to the technicians" - that infuriates a great many of his readers and listeners. But being a provoker of fresh thinking is where his job ends, according to Ping.

One of Ferry's most provocative pieces of work was as a prime mover of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution (cybernation, weaponry, and human rights) which sent its report to President Johnson in March 1964 and made front-page news. The Committee's conclusions, urging (in part) massive government programs and denying the established connection between jobs and incomes in favor of an adequate annual income for every individual and family as a matter of right, drew down a barrage of denunciation across the country.

One charge that cannot be made to stick against Ferry is that he is an idealist without practical experience. He was a partner in the noted public relations firm of Earl Newsom Associates, working primarily with the Ford Motor Company. Earlier he was a newspaper reporter, publicity director for Eastern Airlines, chief press officer for the International Labor Organization, and publicity director for the CIO-PAC. In public relations he is an expert. Typically, his scorn of intercollegiate football is accompanied by the fact that he won his letter as center on the 1929 varsity team at Dartmouth.

Although the College is often the target of his critical six-shooters, Ping has adopted the Vox part of its motto. The place in which his voice is crying is certainly no deserto, for his cherubic, bow-tied presence is increasingly part of the national intellectual scene. And as Victor Navasky concluded, "One suspects that the country would be the poorer if he contracted laryngitis."