THE SOCIETY OF FELLOWS

Two years have passed since President Lowell first uttered publicly his desire for a Society of Fellows and presented a tentative plan for its organization. Yet the news that the hope has become a fact will startle even those who have felt closest to the idea. A good share of the surprise is obviously due to the suddenness and unexpectedness of such a gift in depression times. But the startling quality is in a deeper sense mute witness to the epochal importance of the alterations which such a Society promises to make in the foundations of American University education.

The atmosphere of the Society of Fellows will form a strange and welcome contrast to that now prevalent in American Graduate Schools. The founders are mindful that the scholastic drudgery necessitated by the Ph.D. is harmful to brilliant minds, not only in dulling their appreciation for originality, but in delaying the action of that originality until three or four of their most significant mental years have been wasted in fruitless research. Against that influence, the Fellows will be guarded by a restriction which denies them any course credit; their work is to emphasize productive originality, and they are to be stimulated thereto by contact with each other and with the University's most brilliant minds.

The effect of such an atmosphere not only upon the Fellows themselves but upon the attitude toward scholarship of the University member graduate and undergraduate can scarcely be prophesied. Carelessly conducted the Society might conceivably tend to draw its men almost exclusively from Harvard, or favored sections of the country; it might develop into a group, characterized by intellectual snobbishness and unduly impressed with its own importance. Properly conceived, it can have two important results. For the brilliant man, it should be a priceless goal, a sharp spur to original thought. To the average student, it should give answer to oft repeated condemnations of advanced study as useless research, and should inspire a new respect for great scholarship.

There are difficult problems of selection, examination and administration yet to be solved. But there is small chance of failure. The spirit which should imbue the Society is only too well understood by those who have dreamed of it for years, and who will be responsible for its organization and conduct. President Lowell has often asserted that it matters little how much factual knowledge a man absorbs in College provided that he graduate with the right attitude toward scholarship. The Society of Fellows is stirring reiteration of confidence in that belief, and a means to proving its value. The foundation of the Society is probably the most significant forward step in American education since President Eliot's liberalization of the college curriculum.