Nieman Fellowships To Continue in 1942

Applications for Nieman Fellowships for 1941-42 are due May 1, the Nieman Foundation announced Saturday. These Fellowships will again give approximately 12 newspapermen an opportunity to spend a year here studying whatever interests them most, and to receive stipends equal to their present salaries while they are working.

Fellowships are open to men who have had five years or more of actual newspaper experience, and are supported by a bequest from Mrs. Agnes Wahl Nieman "to promote and elevate the standards of journalism in the United States and educate persons deemed especially qualified for journalism."

For the last three years, about 12 Nieman Follows have come here every September, browsed around the University until June, and then gone back to their work. There are 14 of them here this year, picked from a field of 250 applicants. Roughly half of them hold college degrees. They come from pretty much all over the country and they are browsing just about all over the University.

N. Y., S. Car., Tex. Newsmen

One man, George Chaplin of the Greenville (S.C.) Piedmont, is studying the race problem with respect to Negroes; another, Harry M. Davis, a feature writer for the New York Times, has been spending some of his time in the dissecting room of the Medical School, and some of it watching the atom smasher in action; R. Vance Johnson, of the Globe-News Publishing Company, Amarillo, Texas, has been investigating the workings of the oil industry and studying petroleum economics.

No Nieman Fellow may take a course for credit towards a degree of any sort. They therefore have no examinations to contend with, and from an undergraduate viewpoint, work in an unorthodox manner. A few lectures, considerable reading, dinners, and many conversations supply the bulk of their time. Lectures are not as popular as might be supposed; the men have not the time to follow a subject comprehensively through a series of lectures. They prefer instead to go off on their own and dig up the ideas in which they are particularly interested.

It has been said that Nieman Fellows bring many things to Harvard, fresh approaches to problems, and practical viewpoints. One professor went so far as to say that he didn't know whether Harvard was educating the Nieman Fellows, but that he was "damn sure the Nieman Fellows were educating Harvard.