The Society of Fellows: II

While the Society of Fellows puts no restraints on a man's work, the members are charged when entering with a high order of scholarship. Most members take this quite seriously. One Junior Fellow, breaking his all-day routine at the biological labs, came home at eleven one morning to find a gathering of maids in his room. Five of them, sitting on his bed were having their daily tea party, confident that his devotion to biology would keep the coast clear.

This kind of intense scholarship has not produced any consistent line of work, but has made a vast number of single forays at the edges of knowledge. Papers, articles, and published books comprising 123 pages of bibliography in the Society's book have been the concrete fruit of the Junior Fellows' efforts. Articles range in topic from "The Condensation of Ethyl a-Acetylpropionate with Ethyl Chlorofumarate," and "Human Relations in the Restaurant Business," to the welcome information on "Dry Cleaning as an Attractant for the Kelpfly." Books have varied as widely, discussing everything from the Earl of Rochester's poetry to the financing of New York City.

Such diverse research is often carried on in collaboration with faculty members and the results passed on to College undergraduates in informal lectures by the older members. Almost every year a Junior Fellow gives a series of talks for the Lowell Institute. Last year, one lectured on mathematics to the philosophy club. And, of greater interest to the University, many go on to teach here. Of the first group of Fellows, three: Garrett Birkhoff, Willard Quinc, and B. F. Skinner, have become Professors at Harvard. Since then a steady stream of members has enriched the faculty. Presently, twenty-five--around one quarter of the total number of Fellows--teach here in one capacity or another. Among them are professors Bate, Howard, Homans, Ingalls, Kelleher, Levin, Loomis, McKay Pound and Schlesinger, Jr. Dean Bundy, now an ex-officio member of the Senior Fellows, was also a Junior Fellow and in 1948 published a book on Henry L. Stimson's war service.

In most cases, while Junior Fellows study in close connection with Professors in their field, they are under only the most general eye of the Senior Fellows. These form an unusual group in their own right: Howard Mumford Jones, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Kenneth B. Murdock, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Alfred North Whitchead have been past members. The present group of Senior Fellows is led by Crane Brinton and includes Frederick L. Hisaw, Harry T. Levin, Arthur Darby Nock, Renato Poggioli and Edward M. Purcell.

It is not surprising, considering this diverse backing, that the Society has spread itself widely over all scholarly fields. The war, which has spanned almost a third of the Society's life, cut into this diversity somewhat, but even under the pressures of war, the Society made a manifold contribution. Some carried on research in atomic energy or regular explosives. Others studied aircraft accidents, or delivered propaganda broadcasts in Europe.

When the war was over, the Society went back to more scholarly pursuits. In 1948, members were involved with problems of uniqueness and interpolation in mathematics, and the magnetic moments of nucleii in physics. A biologist was working on slime molds, an historian on a History of Bukhara translated from the Persian, and a sociologist on a study of modern radicalism. Today, the humanists are still holding strong despite the tendency of the scientists to swamp them. One is now informally attending the Law School to get background for medieval constitutional history. Another is trying to make some "connections between psychoanalytic theory, existentionalism, and currents in modern theological thought." An archeologist in the Near East, interested in Iranian archeology, is anxiously watching that country's political situation, while biologists are contemplating the morphology of ferns, or gathering ants for study in the methods of social and organic evolution. The ant biologist has already a remarkable number of specimens, but, unsatisfied, he is thinking of a trip to New Guinea to help round out the collection.

There is, perhaps, only one solemn dinner for a Junior Fellow, and this is his first appearance with the Society. At that time, President Lowell's statement of principles is read and subscribed to by all the incoming members. The statement rings with an aggressive affirmation of scholarly humility.

". . . You will not seek a near but a distant objective and you will not be satisfied with what you have done. All that you may achieve or discover you will regard as a fragment of a larger pattern which from his separate approach every true scholar is striving to descry.

"To these things, in joining the Society of Fellows, you dedicate yourself."