New West Coast College, Born of the Far East

July 25, 2001, Wednesday
NATIONAL DESK

By TODD S. PURDUM (NYT) 1357 words

ALISO VIEJO, Calif., July 20 -- On a lavender-covered hilltop halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, in the midst of miles of look-alike red-roofed tract houses, an architectural and educational marvel reaches skyward above the Pacific, waiting to spring to life next month as the first new private liberal arts college to be built in California in 25 years.

Soka University of America has a grand dream: to join the ranks of venerable institutions like Pomona, Haverford, Hamilton and other small but respected colleges. And it is starting out with a grandeur that older, more established institutions would envy: a $220 million campus in the style of a Tuscan hill town, designed by the architectural firm that restored Radio City Music Hall and rebuilt the Los Angeles Central Library.

The college has enrolled 125 students from 17 states and 19 foreign countries. Some students turned down admission to the likes of Bryn Mawr and Brown to be pioneers in a Buddhist-inspired experiment where everyone from the president to a janitor has the same-size office. Here in the newest incorporated city in Orange County, a place once better known as home of the John Birch Society and John Wayne, humanistic, egalitarian values are to be put to work in the cause of world peace.

Soka is financed by Soka Gakkai International, a Japanese sect that is one of the world's largest lay Buddhist organizations, with tens of billions in assets. Founded more than 70 years ago by Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, a pacifist and education reformer who died in prison in 1944 for his opposition to Japan's militarism, the sect has sparked controversy for its influence over Japanese politics.

The Soka sect founded the Komeito reform political party in the 1960's, and some former members have compared it to a cult, an accusation the organization dismisses.

Many of the university's administrators and some faculty members are also Soka members. But the appeal is broader for others, like Anne M. Houtman, who gave up a position in the six-member biology department at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., to become the sole initial member of Soka's biology faculty.

''I was the first-generation college student in my family,'' said Professor Houtman, the daughter of a blue-collar airline worker in Hawaii, ''and Pomona College literally changed my life; I've seen the difference it can make.''

Professor Houtman, drawn to Soka by a national recruiting advertisement, said: ''You don't get to start up new liberal arts colleges. It just isn't done. The idea of being able to start from scratch and say, 'What is it that a global citizen should know about science?' was just incredible.''

For Norman Pfeiffer, the architect who, with Jean Gath of Hardy Holtzman Pfeiffer Associates, drafted the campus master plan and designed 14 of the first 18 buildings, it was also a once-in-a-lifetime chance.

Working with Dick Law of SWA Landscape Architects in nearby Laguna Beach, Mr. Pfeiffer carved a campus out of nothing, scouting the same Italian quarry that provided the rough-hewn travertine stone that clads the Getty Center in Los Angeles to anchor the buildings here.

''This was a brown, bare piece of earth, 103 acres of nothing,'' Mr. Pfeiffer said as he escorted a visitor through the vaulting library and dormitory rooms that feature solid cherry doors and windows fitted with sensors that shut off the air-conditioning when they are opened to take advantage of the breezes from the ocean two miles away. Mr. Pfeiffer has designed projects for Stanford and is just starting work on the renovation of the Griffith Observatory near the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. But when asked if he had ever had a commission like Soka, he answered with a belly laugh, ''Nobody gets a commission like this.''

There is an Olympic-size swimming pool, a gym with the latest equipment, a library built to house 225,000 volumes, a student center and classroom and dormitory buildings all in a pale tan shade of high-tech stucco topped with red-tile roofs and copper downspouts that echo California's long tradition of Mission-style architecture. Four other buildings, including a grand reception hall, were designed by Shinji Ishibashi and Steve Davis of Summit Architects in Santa Monica, Calif., a Soka-affiliated firm that also managed the entire construction project.

Phillip E. Hammond, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara and co-author of ''Soka Gakkai in America: Accommodation and Conversion'' (Oxford, 1999), said that Soka, first brought to the United States by Japanese war brides in the 1940's, ''is not nearly as well known in the United States as Zen or Tibetan Buddhism, but it has more members than any Buddhist sect in Japan'' and claims 300,000 members in this country, though Professor Hammond said his surveys suggested the number was closer to 45,000.

''I don't think they would like this characterization but I think this campus is a step toward respectability, dignity,'' Professor Hammond said. ''The fact is they are a very engaged kind of Buddhism. They are not trying to escape from the world, they're trying to change the world.''

The word soka means to create value, and members meet regularly to chant their principal mantra, ''Adore the lotus of the wonderful law.'' The group has a network of primary and secondary schools in Japan and a university founded by its longtime leader and now honorary chairman, Daisaku Ikeda. The first American university outpost was started in 1987 in Calbasas, a Los Angeles suburb, to teach English to Japanese graduate students. There was no room to expand, so the group chose the Orange County site.

Alfred Balitzer, who gave up tenure and a 30-year career as a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College to become dean of Soka's 20-member faculty, said that as a Jew long active in his own faith he felt not the slightest pressure to proselytize on behalf of Soka.

''Obviously, we have a sectarian tinge,'' he said. ''We're going to be teaching religion but not the way you teach doctrine at Notre Dame. There's no chapel, no mandatory religious services.''

In the beginning, Soka will offer a bachelor's degree in liberal arts with three concentrations: humanities, international studies and social and behavioral sciences, adding more as the enrollment expands to the planned level of 1,200. All students will study one of three foreign languages oriented toward the Pacific Rim -- Japanese, Chinese or Spanish -- and spend half of their junior year studying or working abroad. As it matures, the university intends to offer master's and doctoral degrees, and it will field intercollegiate teams in 10 sports. Its mascot is the lion.

First-year tuition, room and board costs $24,000, the midrange for comparable California colleges, and like most major universities, Soka does not consider a student's ability to pay in making admissions decisions.

Students must live on campus, where smoking, drugs and alcohol are banned and fiber-optic cables and outdoor ports for laptop computers abound.

For Carmen Vali, the new mayor of Aliso Viejo, which was incorporated only this month with a population of about 45,000, Soka is a boon in a fledgling community whose town center amounts to a single shopping mall. She acknowledged that ''one of the biggest stumbling blocks for them was that they've been accused or suspected of being a cult. But they did a very good job of informing people what they wanted to do and they have been just the nicest people to work with.''

''We thought, 'What a fabulous improvement,' '' she added. ''This brings a high-level work force, with very attractive demographics, to come live here, and having gone to Stanford and looking at how Palo Alto has developed around the university, this just provides a really nice blend of services. People accuse Orange County of being devoid of culture, and this is something that is definitely going to fly in the face of that concept.''

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