Fifty Years of Excellence

By Ellie McGrath

Harvard's select Society of Fellows celebrates its founding in 1933

Economist Wassily Leontief likens the selection to being chosen for paradise. No one can apply. The elect must be recommended by leaders in their field as fledgling scholars of great promise. For three years they pursue knowledge, free of institutional bureaucracy and the responsibility of teaching. Life is intellectually strenuous but not spartan; besides meeting for their casual, animated lunches, the scholars gather once a week to share sherry around a large table once owned by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Distinguished alumni include Economist Paul Samuelson, Poet Richard Wilbur,

Linguist Noam Chomsky, Biologist James Watson, Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Sociobiologist E.O. Wilson and Psychologist B.F. Skinner. At a time when America is railing anew against its loss of educational vigor, Harvard's Society of Fellows last week quietly celebrated 50 years of high, uncompromising standards and remarkable accomplishment.

Gathering in the university's Fogg Museum, 160 past and present fellows toasted a tradition of pure scholarship with bottles of Chateau Haut-Brion '65, saved especially for the occasion. The society that they were commemorating is the creation of longtime (1909-33) Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, who endowed the society with $2 million of his own money ("It took nearly all I had") in the belief that the independent work of great scholars was the soul of a great university. He patterned the society after fellowships offered in England and France. Said Lowell: "Productive scholarship is the shyest of all flowers. American universities must do their utmost to cultivate it, by planting the best seed, letting the sun shine upon it."

What Lowell envisioned was assembling "a limited number of the most brilliant young men that can be found." These junior fellows would exchange ideas under the guidance of eminent scholars, called senior fellows, without the restrictions of graduate school or the formal dictates of a Ph.D. program. Among the eleven current senior fellows: Poet Helen Vendler, Harvard Dean Henry Rosovsky and Derek Bok, the university's president.

Harvard's junior fellows over the years have gone on to win 13 Nobel Prizes (four in 1981) and uncounted Pulitzers. Recalls M.I.T. Economist Carl Kaysen of his years as a fellow: "I was able to range more widely and do things I would not have done as a conventional graduate student." Sociologist George Homans, a fellow from 1934 to 1939, says of the society: "Its record is absolutely terrific. There have been imitations, but nobody's in a class with us."

Indeed, there is nothing quite like the society anywhere in the U.S. Much of the group's success is due to the careful selection process. Former fellows and distinguished scholars all over the world nominate their most talented students. Each candidate's dossier is examined by two senior fellows. The finalists are flown in for unnerving interviews during which senior fellows look for lively minds and the ability to communicate ideas. The easiest field to choose from, senior fellows agree, is physics, a discipline in which talent is evident early. The most difficult is the humanities.

Of the 124 scholars recommended this year, 40 were called to Harvard for interviews but, as usual, only eight were chosen. As it happens, just one of them is an American: Kevin Lehmann, a chemical physicist about to receive his Ph.D. from Harvard in spectroscopy. (Since 1975, 69% of the scholars have been U.S.-born.) Lehmann and the others will receive free room and board and a stipend of $14,000 annually for three years. The sum is modest, but it is the company they will keep that counts.

One current fellow is Psychologist Drazen Prelec, a Yugoslav who is developing a mathematical formulation for B.F. Skinner's reinforcement theories in behavioral psychology. Economist Barry Nalebuff, an M.I.T. graduate with a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, is applying games theory to problems of disarmament. Princeton Classicist Nita Krevans (women were first admitted in 1972) is exploring how the publication of manuscripts changed the way the authors thought about their compositions. Historian Mordechai Feingold is studying early modern intellectual history, including the work of Britain's John Rainolds, who in the early 17th century helped translate the King James version of the Bible from Greek and Hebrew.

The fellows, junior and senior, meet every Monday night to dine and share fine wine in their oak-paneled rooms in Harvard's Eliot House. Says Nalebuff: "I think there's less pretense here than any place I've been. Nobody's competing with anyone else. You don't have to prove yourself." The exchanges can be irreverent. When M.I.T. Economist and Senior Fellow Robert Solow, 58, advises Theoretical Physicist Paul Ginsparg, 27, that he will soon be "over the hill" for his profession, the junior fellow retorts, "Then I can become an economist."

Many of the fellows stay on at Harvard as faculty members. Some have even proved Lowell's thesis that a Ph.D. is not necessary for scholarship. Political Scientist McGeorge Bundy, who became Harvard's dean of arts and sciences, and Society of Fellows Chairman Burton Dreben, a former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, never took the degree. Excellence is the society's reason for being, and excellence is Harvard's reward. Says Dreben: "With all the compromises we make, there has to be true support of pure scholarship, the inquiry into knowledge for its own sake, faith in human reason and the human mind. That's what it's all about."

--By Elite McGrath. Reported by Ruth Mehrtens Calvin/Boston

With reporting by Ruth Mehrtens Calvin This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.