COLUMN ONE : Pampered but Not Pleased : The Getty Center offers scholars a year of lavish living, paying them to study, muse--or go to the beach. Some in this year’s group complain that such largess has created a think tank where no one thinks.

For nine sun-drenched months, Stanislaus von Moos, a leading architectural theorist from Switzerland, lived rent-free in a furnished apartment in Santa Monica. He enjoyed a cozy office with a world-class library and ocean view. On leave from his real job, he was surrounded by fascinating colleagues who, like him, spent their time thinking, reading, doing whatever they wanted--and getting paid for it.

Von Moos, a scholar-in-residence at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, was in paradise. And he was eager to get out.

“It’s unusual to be somewhere where you don’t have to do anything,” von Moos said of his recent stint as a Getty Scholar. “I could not stay another year.”

Built on the premise that there is no greater gift than time, the Getty Center’s Scholar Program has hosted nearly 100 brainy professors, writers and artists--up to 12 at a time--since 1985. “Camp Getty” is what some scholars call this little known but lavishly treated intellectual fraternity by the sea.

Maybe it’s the flawless weather that prompts the nickname, or the tea and cookies that are served, without fail, every weekday afternoon. Maybe it’s the field trips to Lake Arrowhead and Hearst Castle, the catered lunches with free-flowing wine--or the fact that Getty scholars are obligated to produce absolutely nothing.

The research institute’s material luxuries stand in stark contrast to what some describe as a deeper intellectual poverty. “It is a think tank,” said one former scholar, “where nobody’s thinking.”

This year, some scholars openly criticized their hosts. At a time of dwindling resources in the humanities, many believe the center could play a significant role in improving not only the work of individuals, but the quality of cultural life across the nation. Instead, said a January letter that the scholars sent to the president of the Getty Trust, the center is out of touch--both with Los Angeles and with the pressing scholastic issues of the day.

They are not the first to find fault. In 1990, George E. Marcus, an anthropologist at Rice University who had been a Getty Scholar during the 1988-89 school year, penned a biting article that appeared in the academic journal Cultural Anthropology. He said the program was intended not so much to support scholars as to acquire them, like so many decorative artifacts.

Being on salary at the center, which pays scholars whatever they would make at their real jobs, made Marcus feel like “a temporary Getty corporate employee/honored guest/collected item.” He wrote: “The mystique of the Getty, on which it depends despite disavowals, is spending to excess.”

Such complaints have struck some as churlish. “Getting a Getty (scholarship) is like winning the lottery,” said Luigi Ballerini, the chairman of UCLA’s Italian department, who spent 1989-90 at the center. “Anybody who complains about (it) should be shot.”

Inside the Santa Monica bank building where the center is housed, this year’s so-called Scholar Revolt has raised the hackles of center administrators.

“The opportunity that people have when they come here is so marvelous,” said Mel Edelstein, the center’s senior bibliographer. “They are treated like kings and queens, princes and princesses. The unfortunate thing is, sometimes they act that way.”

Lynn O’Leary-Archer, the center’s associate director, said scrutiny is welcomed. “We invite contentiousness,” she said, “because we know that ideas grow out of it.”

But there are limits. “Astonishing” is how O’Leary-Archer describes recent gripes about housing, for example. Scholars are provided with spacious, furnished apartments and twice-weekly maid service, whereas the Getty Fellows--a group of graduate students also funded by the center--are not. After this year’s scholars bemoaned this inequity, O’Leary-Archer said, the center suggested a remedy.

“We only have a certain amount of apartments, so we proposed that they double up and share,” she said. “You’ve never seen people back away from a proposal so fast in all your life. When it came to them putting their own comfort where their rhetoric was, they couldn’t do it.”

Whether recent negative appraisals of the center are on target or not, they do point to deeper questions about the changing nature of scholarship--and of scholars themselves. As the study of culture becomes increasingly politicized, as academia is riven by battles over gender, sexuality, race and class, few are surprised that the center, with its deep pockets and its clubby atmosphere, has come under fire.

The Getty Center is not affiliated with a university. It has neither faculty nor students. But in creating a think tank, it has thrust itself into the big leagues of academia--and thus into the fray.

“We used to think of culture as something outside the domain of politics. But culture has now become a site of very severe political contestation,” said Hayden White, a professor of the history of consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. “That means that any scholar who’s worth his or her salt is going to be very self-conscious about the political and social implications not only of the work they do but the conditions under which they do their work.”

As odd as it may seem, when those conditions are as plush as they are at the Getty Center, some people chafe.

“I got used to it--they served very good wine and they were catered by very good caterers. This didn’t bother me at all,” White said, recalling his time as a Getty Scholar in 1990. “But for some it turns into a feeling of unease--(being) amid all this wealth, being casually productive instead of being put to some socially ameliorative purpose. . . . You feel bought.”

The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities was created in the early ‘80s when the J. Paul Getty Trust received the bulk of the late billionaire oilman’s personal fortune, now valued at $4.1 billion. Harold Williams, the trust’s president, set out to expand its activities, which until then had been limited to the Getty Museum in Malibu. He founded six programs, including the center.

Getty officials will not discuss how much is spent on each program, but operating costs for the trust as a whole total about $100 million annually.

Dedicated to fostering an interdisciplinary re-examination of art in cultures past and present, the center’s stated goal was “to cross the traditional boundaries imposed on academic institutions and, through its programs and resource collections, to provide a unique environment for scholarly research and debate.”

That’s where the visiting scholars came in. The first group, whose interests ranged from Roman architectural history to French Renaissance art to the history of American music, arrived in 1985. They had not asked to receive the honor. Then, as now, Getty scholars were tapped out of the blue--an experience one scholar describes as “the hand of God suddenly resting on your shoulder.”

If only it were that simple. Herbert H. Hymans, the center’s assistant director, said the process of choosing the scholars is lengthy and intense. First, Hymans and other center administrators choose a broad theme--the avant-garde, for example, or this year’s “Metropolis as Crucible.”

Researchers then put together a list of what’s been written on the subject. The center’s most senior staff, known as the Policy Group, examine that information, read articles, books and biographical information, and then make nominations--sometimes as many as 10 for every available spot.

After much haggling, the first few letters are sent, via express mail, to three or four “markers,” the scholars around whom the group will be built. Some send regrets. Joan Didion has been invited a few times but has never accepted. Others are tracked for years at a time, as the center awaits the right moment to issue an invitation.

“The richness of the potential interaction is in the diversity of scholars you bring forth,” said Thomas F. Reese, the center’s acting director. “You don’t want everyone who thinks exactly alike, who already know each other and have read all the same things. . . . You want diversity in every realm possible.”

From the program’s beginning, some questioned whether such interaction was productive. According to one oft-repeated story, an early critic asked Kurt W. Forster, the center’s founding director, what he would do if visiting scholars spent all their time at the beach. His reply: As far as he knew, people could think just as well at the beach as anywhere else.

But he cautioned observers not to expect immediate, tangible results. This was a long-term investment in brilliance, he said, not a formula for instant answers.

“It’s a little bit like baking bread,” Forster said in 1986. “What is in this loaf will be found when it is sliced.”

Exactly what the center is trying to cook up has sometimes mystified the very scholars who are among its most treasured ingredients. The center is enigmatic, some say--even “Kafkaesque.” A cloistered “meta-realm,” said one; “the land of Oz,” said another. One scholar likened the atmosphere to that of a British boys school. No, said another, it resembled an insurance company--more corporate than intellectual.

Still, this year’s scholars have managed to keep busy.

Von Moos, the Swiss architectural theorist, arrived in Santa Monica expecting to lock himself in the center’s 600,000-volume art history archives. Instead, he explored Joshua Tree National Monument, pondering the way architecture relates to landscape. He also found Disneyland so compelling that he plans to do an architectural “rereading” of his hometown--Lucerne he now says with confidence, is “a kind of theme park.”

George Lipsitz, a UC San Diego ethnic studies professor who focuses on rap music, graffiti and other forms of popular culture, also spent much of the year exploring. He got to know the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Marisela Norte, a bilingual poet and performer who often writes while commuting on the bus. He wandered around under the city’s overpasses, talking to graffiti taggers.

Marco de Michelis, an architectural historian from Italy, began researching a book about Frank Gehry. Margaret Nesbit, an art historian at Vassar College who is co-authoring a book on aerobics, frequented Santa Monica workout studios. Thomas Bender, a professor of urban history at New York University, holed up in the archives, working on a book comparing Budapest and the Big Apple.

“For me, being in Los Angeles was a great thing. . . . It is for the 21st Century what New York was for the 20th,” said Bender, who helped draft the letter that some Getty administrators found so galling. The city wasn’t a problem, Bender said--but the center was.

“ Dynamic ,” he said, “is not a word you would use.”

Even the center’s harshest critics say they admire its willingness to take risks. After all, said one scholar, welcoming a dozen professional nit-pickers into one’s home is “like inviting 12 microscopes attached to brains to sit for a year and examine you with a kind of intelligence that can be lethal.”

When the scholars arrive, “they have in mind what you would get from immersion in an ongoing intellectual venture,” said Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a professor of performance studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and a Getty Scholar in 1991-92.

Instead, she said, they find that “the center provides the containers and the scholars are supposed to provide the content. . . . (This) makes productive people very, very nervous. Can you produce enough to prove that you were worthy?”

“You’re coming face to face with your own inner being,” agreed Neil Harris, a historian of American culture at the University of Chicago who also spent 1991-92 at the center. “And you have no one to blame if you’re not getting anything done.”

Future scholars may enjoy less liberty. O’Leary-Archer said the center has long considered changing the format of the program. Some believe smaller groups would work better. Others say the themes should be more tightly focused. There has even been a proposal to alter the central tenet of the place. Perhaps, some say, it is time to make some specific demands on the scholars.

“We’re dealing with human psychology. We give them a lot and they automatically want more,” said O’Leary-Archer, sounding a bit weary. “We respond one year, and the next year the scholars want to redo it again.

“Go to any university and ask. What (scholars) fantasize about is being taken away for a year’s time, having all their material needs met, and having no obligations put on them,” she continued. “But we are debating changing that.”