Charles Van Doren
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Charles Lincoln Van Doren (born February 12, 1926) is a noted American intellectual. In the late 1950s, Van Doren was involved in a scandal when he confessed that he had been given the right answers by the producers of a TV game show whose producers sought to attract more viewers.
The son of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren and novelist and writer Dorothy Van Doren, Charles Van Doren was a committed academic with an unusually broad range of interests. He earned a B.A. degree in Liberal Arts from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, and a master's degree in astrophysics and a doctorate in English, both at Columbia University.
In 1956, he applied to be a contestant on the game show Twenty-One. Seeking to bolster fading ratings, the producers of the show engineered a dramatic rise to prominence for the polite and presentable Van Doren, who was intended to replace the less telegenic Herb Stempel. In January 1957, he entered a winning streak that ultimately earned him more than $138,000. He became hugely famous, appearing on the cover of TIME magazine on February 11, 1957. His run ended on March 11, when he lost to Vivienne Nearing, a lawyer whose husband Van Doren had previously beaten. Shortly thereafter, he signed a three-year contract with NBC to appear as a guest on other television and radio shows.
When allegations of cheating were first circulated, Van Doren repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, saying "It's silly and distressing to think that people don't have more faith in quiz shows." Finally, on November 2, 1959, he admitted to the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, a United States Congress subcommittee, chaired by Arkansas Democrat Owen Harris, that he had been given questions and answers in advance of the show. "I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception...I have deceived my friends - and I had millions of them," Van Doren testified.
The story of his quiz show scandal, and Van Doren in particular, is depicted in the film Quiz Show (1994) (in that film, he was played by British actor Ralph Fiennes). Produced and directed by Robert Redford, the film was a box office success despite earning several critiques questioning its use of dramatic license, its accuracy, and even the motivation behind its making. The critics have included Joseph Stone, the New York prosecutor who began the investigations in the first place.
In the aftermath of the scandal, Van Doren was dropped from NBC and resigned from his post of assistant professor at Columbia University. He became an editor at Praeger Books and a pseudonymous (at first) writer, before becoming an editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica and the author of several books, of which A History of Knowledge is probably his most famous. He also co-authored How to Read a Book, with philosopher Mortimer J. Adler.
Van Doren still refuses interviews or public comment when the subject is the quiz show scandals. But in a 1985 interview on the Today Show (his only appearance on the program since his dismissal in 1959), when he was invited to plug his book The Joy Of Reading, he did answer a general question on how the scandal changed his life. He has revisited Columbia University only twice in the 40 years that followed his resignation in the heat of the quiz show scandals: in 1984, when his son graduated; and, in 1999, at a reunion of Columbia's Class of 1959, which entered the university when Van Doren first became a teacher there in 1955. During that appearance, Van Doren made one allusion to the quiz scandal without mentioning it by name:
Some of you read with me 40 years ago a portion of Aristotle's Ethics, a selection of passages that describe his idea of happiness. You may not remember too well. I remember better, because, despite the abrupt caesura in my academic career that occurred in 1959, I have gone on teaching the humanities almost continually to students of all kinds and ages. In case you don't remember, then, I remind you that according to Aristotle happiness is not a feeling or sensation but instead is the quality of a whole life. The emphasis is on "whole," a life from beginning to end. Especially the end. The last part, the part you're now approaching, was for Aristotle the most important for happiness. It makes sense, doesn't it?
