Attendees included a Booker Prize nominee, a leading British composer and author Joseph Heller.
Sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, the month-long, revolving door retreat sought to mix and stir the creative juices of scribes and scholars and, in so doing, inspire them to greater heights.
The experience proved a research opportunity unlike any other for MacCrimmon, who was studying theories of creativity in the Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration.
"I came back thinking this broad-based sharing of ideas was vital to any university and we needed mechanisms to foster it at UBC," he says.
Today, MacCrimmon is charged with setting up similar programs encompassing all academic disciplines across the university.
MacCrimmon's new job as the first director of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies is to make it recognized worldwide as the pre-eminent institute focused on basic research linking all fields of inquiry.
Fueling this ambitious project is a $15-million contribution from Vancouver financier Peter Wall, who hatched the idea with UBC President David Strangway in 1991.
"Peter realized that there was an opportunity to create a university-based institute for advanced research which doesn't exist anywhere else," says Strangway. "He made it clear from the outset that the money had to be used to generate new ideas and initiatives that wouldn't happen otherwise."
MacCrimmon claims that the Wall Institute fills an untapped academic niche.
Outstanding institutes for advanced research, such as the one in Princeton, focus primarily on the hard sciences with little presence in the social sciences and humanities. The Peter Wall Institute, he says, will encompass all departments and faculties on the UBC campus.
Two of the institute's key planks were already in place when MacCrimmon was appointed director in August of this year.
Nobel Laureate Michael Smith and Prof. Raphael Amit, director of UBC's W. Maurice Young Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Research Centre, had been named Peter Wall Distinguished Professors. Smith will chair an internal, 10-member advisory committee when he returns from sabbatical next year.
Secondly, an annual competition for thematic research projects had been launched under the guidance of John Grace, former dean of Graduate Studies. An endowment of $10 million, drawn from the President's Fund, was allocated for the three-year thematic projects which bring scholars together from different disciplines to work on specific problems.
In the 1995/96 competition, a team of nine UBC scholars prevailed over six other applications and was awarded the first $500,000 thematic grant. The team will look at the phenomenon known as "crisis points"--those junctures at which the character of a process changes abruptly.
"It may be the recurrence of a disease posing a major new threat, groundwater pollution reaching a level where it threatens our water supply, or the collapse of a currency or market," says mathematics professor and project co-ordinator Priscilla Greenwood.
Greenwood says the interdisciplinary group--which is searching for qualified graduate students and post doctoral fellows--will study both the question of how to develop crisis point models and how to apply them to particular problems in areas such as biology, earth sciences, economics, epidemiology and psychology.
A 17-member adjudication committee, hand-picked from UBC's best scholars, will review the next round of project proposals for which the deadline is March.
Meanwhile MacCrimmon has been busy laying several more planks in the institute's programming platform.
The first of these is a summer residential program which would bring a dozen or so of the most creative scholars, artists and professionals together at UBC for an informal gathering of four to six weeks.
MacCrimmon has been poring over lists of Nobel, Booker and other major prize winners in a search for distinguished summer visitors. The idea, he says, is to have them come to campus and interact with one another, as well as with the local community, with no set theme or agenda.
A second initiative, called the Research Encounter Program, will bring three world-class scholars together whose research interests overlap but who don't work in the same discipline. MacCrimmon says participants would have few formal responsibilities in terms of lectures and would be challenged to discuss ideas amongst themselves and see where discussions lead. At the end of their stay, students and faculty would be invited to an open forum where they would learn about the discussions and exchange ideas. A transcript of the forum would then be put on the institute's Web site (www.pwias.ubc.ca) and a global interactive discussion would follow.
MacCrimmon is asking UBC faculty to submit their own suggestions for a "dream team" triumvirate.
One of the first assignments MacCrimmon gave himself was to visit every dean and many department heads to ask what the institute could do for them and vice versa. An individual visiting artists and scholars program, varying between three weeks and six months in length, has been widely endorsed and constitutes another programming plank MacCrimmon is working towards.
In addition, he is working with Strangway to identify and appoint an External Advisory Board comprising some of the most distinguished artists and scholars in the world.
"In all these programs we're prepared to get a number of rejections at the start," he says. "But we're determined to attract only the very, very best." MacCrimmon is looking forward to the day when the institute has its own building to host and run its programs. The institute's present location is at Green College.
MacCrimmon, however, doesn't need to theorize much about what the Peter Wall Institute will do for UBC.
"It will bring together the best minds within UBC and around the world to generate new knowledge across the boundaries of standard disciplines," he says. "We want to build a new type of creative environment."