The Harvard Society of Fellows is a group of scholars selected at the beginning of their careers by Harvard University for extraordinary scholarly potential, upon whom distinctive academic and intellectual opportunities are bestowed in order to foster their individual growth and intellectual collaboration. Membership in the society is for life.
Junior Fellows are selected by Senior Fellows based on their potential to advance academic wisdom, based upon previous academic accomplishments, and are generously supported financially for three years to do independent research at Harvard University in any discipline, without being required to meet formal degree requirements or, indeed, to be graded in any way. The only stipulation is that they remain in residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the duration of their financial support.
Before he stepped down as Harvard's president in 1933 and with Nazi rumblings overseas in Germany, Abbott Lawrence Lowell wished to break the stranglehold of the German Ph.D. degree on American academic life, believing it stifled creativity with its overlong list of formal requirements. Lowell designed the Society of Fellows as an alternative to the Ph.D. Its relative freedom encourages members to pursue lines of thinking that transcend traditional academic disciplinary boundaries and allow them to focus their attention on larger questions more fundamental to society.
The Society, which was originally headquartered in a two-room suite at Eliot House, one of the university's twelve residential colleges, has become known for the large number of scholars it has contributed to the Harvard faculty over the years and thus for the way it has influenced the tenor of discourse at the university. Among its best-known members have been historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Jf '43; behaviorist B. F. Skinner, Jf '36; linguist Noam Chomsky, Jf '55; biologist E. O. Wilson, Jf '56; double Nobel laureate John Bardeen, Jf '38; and philosopher W. V. Quine, Jf '36. Former dean of the Harvard faculty, economist Henry Rosovsky, Jf '57, is a member, as is physiologist author of Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond, Jf '65.
- List of Harvard Junior Fellows
Read more about Harvard Society Of Fellows: Source
Famous quotes containing the words harvard, society and/or fellows:
“And the Harvard students in the brick
hallowed houses studied Sappho in cement rooms.
And this Sappho danced on the grass
and danced and danced and danced.
It was a death dance.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“Religion is a great force: the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don’t understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)