President's Report For 1929-30 Outlined Plan For Group Of Fellows--Value of Social Commingling of Men Stressed

The proposal of a Society of Fellows was outlined by President Lowell in his annual report for 1929-30 as follows:

"Closely connected with the training of thorough scholars for the doctorate is that of recruiting young men of rare capacity for contributing to thought and developing their power early in life. This is, of course, one of the aims of the Graduate School; but after training its best students, and giving them a chance by writing a thesis to learn the mysteries of research, it cannot enable them to carry the subject farther. It has been suggested that a group of fellowships for men not over twenty-five on appointment, who should be members of a society with scholars eminent in various fields, living where they are naturally much together and frequently meet for meals, would have a highly stimulating effect. This is what James Russell Lowell had in mind when in his oration at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary in 1886 he said:

"The friends of university training can do nothing that would forward it more than the founding of post-graduate fellowships and the building and endowing of a hall where the holders of them might be commensals, remembering that when Cardinal Wolsey built Christ Church at Oxford his first care was the kitchen. Nothing is so great a quickener of the faculties, or so likely to prevent their being narrowed to a single groove, as the frequent social commingling of men who are aiming at one goal by different paths.'

"The prize fellowships at some of the English colleges, especially at Trinity, Cambridge, are of this nature, and they have produced an extraordinary number of distinguished men, one-half of the British recipients of the Nobel prizes having been holders of Trinity fellowships.

"We hear much today about cooperation in research, and that is good in working out well defined problems which require great labor and often the collaboration of different specialists. But it is not all. It aids in solving difficult and intricate problems; yet it does not touch the greatest of all contributions to thought, that of discovering a wholly new problem to be solved. This, like a work of art or literature, is essentially the creation of a single brain. To select men capable of this, to set them at work in surroundings most adapted to entice and fructify imagination is certainly worth while if it can be done. The plan would be to have the prize-men selected in any subject by a body of older fellows eminent in different fields, upon evidence of remarkable promise; to provide them with ample stipends, and appoint them for three years with a reappointment for three more if their work in the first term justified the renewal. Mr. Alexander Agassiz once told the writer that he had such a plan in mind; and the new Houses seem to provide an excellent opportunity for an experiment of this kind. One of them will, in fact, contain a suite of dining, common and service rooms so planned as to be suitable for the purpose."