THE SENIOR FELLOWS

Today's announcement of the new Committee of Senior Fellows represents an auspicious beginning for the Society of Fellows, particularly in view of the fact that all four men were active in planning the organization.

It is obvious that on these Senior Fellows depends the whole success of the rather ephemeral Society, for on them rests the burden of selecting the first members and of adjusting all the innumerable details of organization and administration. Naturally they will be bombarded by recommendations from all over the country, and it will be a truly Gargantuan task to choose five or six Junior Fellows out of the mass of material available. The Committee will have to place some reliance on course grades and college records in attempting to pare down the number at the outset, but the greatest care must be taken to avoid too much reliance on such a system of selection. Oral contacts are obviously the most satisfactory method to employ, but no one method can truly judge the intellectual capabilities of any man. In the ultimate, it will be on the recommendations of competent men that the greatest stress will have to be laid, and Harvard students should not be favored merely because of the availability of data.

The greatest care must be taken to prevent the new Junior Fellows from becoming a group of intellectual snobs impregnated with too elevated an opinion of their own importance. These men are to be brought here for "their promise of notable contribution to knowledge and thought," and in order to "create and atmosphere that will carry intellectual contagion beyond anything now in this country." They are intended to lay a new path to the future, not to be satisfied with the present.

There will naturally be difficult problems in selection and administration, but under the guidance of men who have been so deeply interested in the project for years past, the Society should not fall short of the high hopes which its introduction has raised.