nonprofit educational institution established at Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1959 and based in Los Angeles from 1988. The educator Robert M. Hutchins (Hutchins, Robert Maynard) (q.v.) organized the centre and headed it and its parent corporation, the Fund for the Republic (chartered in New York in 1952), for 25 years. The purpose of the centre—to clarify the basic issues confronting a democratic society—was served through discussion and criticism, publications, and public meetings. Scholars, public officials, and leaders of thought and action from many countries often met with a small resident staff to discuss and to try to understand the causes of contemporary problems. Topics included, among others, modern technology, ecological imperatives, responsibilities and control of the mass media, minority and constitutional rights, and world peace.

The centre had experienced financial difficulties off and on during its history, and in 1979 it was reorganized under a new parent organization—the University of California Santa Barbara Foundation—and became a “center of independent thought and criticism” on the university campus. In 1988 the centre was again reorganized when it moved to Los Angeles, where it absorbed the Institute for National Strategy and took over the publishing of New Perspectives Quarterly.