The University of Virginia Society of Fellows

The Society was established to “foster the love of learning” at the University of Virginia. It is composed of Senior Fellows, a continuing group of distinguished scientists and scholars who are active faculty, and an annually changing complement of Junior Fellows, students who are chosen for their attained distinction and future promise. The Society brings together faculty and students from various fields with the object of stimulating the exchange of ideas. We encourage the pursuit of questions beyond conventional boundaries, especially boundaries between departments and between disciplines. And we try to make the society a center not only of intellectual distinction, but of intellectual fellowship.

The dinners that we have together each year, and the talks that follow, are the formal occasions of intellectual fellowship. Speakers may be Senior Fellows, Junior Fellows, or guests. Our guests are sometimes from the university faculty, sometimes from outside the university, most frequently figures in various fields of science, learning, the arts, and public policy; they have all been kind enough to “sing for their supper” and enliven our meetings. All Fellows, Junior and Senior, are welcome to suggest university visitors or other visitors to the Charlottesville area as speakers for the dinners. 

Informal meetings of the Junior Fellows, arranged by the Junior Fellows, help speed the process of their getting acquainted. For the not-very-onerous organizational tasks that these get-togethers entail, a second-term Junior Fellow, elected by her or his peers, has taken on the duties of “Senior Junior Fellow.” (Sometimes a Senior Fellow is invited to attend and join the discussion, but socially the occasion belongs to the cohort of Junior Fellows.)

The Society was founded in 1968, and its history is necessarily based on oral tradition as well as archives. Its beginnings owe much to a principal benefactor, Langbourne Williams of the Virginia Class of 1924. This was not just a single beneficent act. His support of the Society was long-lasting, and after his death, his generous bequest assured the Society’s survival. Until his death in 1994, he often attended the dinner meetings; when he did not, it was our custom to toast him. Those who knew him thought this well-deserved, for they judged him an admirable and all too rare example of where an education in the liberal arts can lead.

Mr. Williams’s prominence in banking and then in industry led to his being called on for various civic and philanthropic tasks. He became head of the Industrial Section of the European Cooperation Administration. Translated from archival language, that means he was one of the chief administrators of the Marshall Plan whereby America played a crucial role in the economic reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War. He served on the boards of museums and other cultural institutions, not least of which was the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia. On the Board of Visitors, he spoke out vigorously against overemphasis on athletics and on popular image. Although he obviously failed to transform the prevailing spirit of our time, he never thought the cause was lost. With his friends on the faculty—Allan Gwathmey, John Mitchell, Robert Gooch, and Jesse Beams—he helped to found and generously underwrote the Honors Program which freed students from course requirements and encouraged them to shape their own studies towards the completion of a major honors essay; the success of the program was monitored by outside examiners who measured by the standards of America’s leading colleges and universities. Because of the large amount of individual instruction involved, the program was sadly outgrown by large departments as they became ever larger. And yet innovative programs constantly come on the scene that in various ways work towards the same end of individualized undergraduate education. 

Another effect of university growth nationwide has been the administrative separation of disciplines into departments, and the founding of the Society of Fellows was a response to that. Mr. Williams worked with his friends Robert Gooch of Government, Jesse Beams of Physics, and David Yalden-Thomson of Philosophy to create this institution, improvising freely on the model of the Harvard Society of Fellows and the High Table customs of the Oxbridge colleges. David Yalden-Thomson was Director of the Society from its beginning until 1990, when its current organization began. From the outset, he saw to every kind of detail. He wrote the by-laws, and he implemented them. When there were policy decisions to be made, he patiently managed, with innumerable calls and visits, to mediate the group to consensus. He presided at dinner meetings, and he not only chose speakers, but also chose menus. The energy and care he devoted to the Society is suggested by the fact that when he laid down the reins, his duties were divided among a Secretary, a President, and a Steward. This nomenclature may stem from idiosyncrasy or, as some of us American provincials wondered, may derive from naming practices of English or Scottish universities that we know not of. The Secretary heads the organization, keeps track of the budget, and, when the business of the Society requires, takes up the diplomatic task of getting us to a general meeting of minds. The President of the Society presides at our dinners. The challenging responsibility of presenting a varied and enlightening program of speakers each year is entrusted to a small group of Senior Fellows. The role of Steward was meant to select the menus of the dinners and the vins justes that are served with them, though in recent years we have trusted our nutrition and gustatory delight to a selection of excellent caterers.

Some of the customs of the Society that prevailed up to recent memory should be mentioned. For one thing, the Society kept a low profile. It still does, but archival recognition may be a first step towards a greater, but still discreet, public presence. The membership of “active faculty” was long interpreted to mean that no administrative officer of the University except for the President, who is an ex officio member, can be a Senior Fellow. Robert Harris, Professor of Government, did not join the Society until he had completed his term as Dean of the Faculty; Robert Kellogg, Professor of English and a founding member of the Society, resigned when he became Dean of the College and was re-elected when his term in office ended. More recent practice is to welcome the continued participation of Senior Fellows who are called to high administrative duty at the University, and to make the Provost along with the President an ex officio member.  

The “High Table” aspects of the Society were most visible in the fact that our dinners were formal. This had its drawbacks. At the long table, beautifully decorated and beautifully served, you could really only talk to the person on your right or the person on your left and, if you switched, you were likely to be leaving your former conversation-partner in isolation. It took us years—and the accident that remodeling at Birdwood meant that on one night we could not dine in the usual dining room—to find out that conversation went much better if we dined at tables of six or five. The custom of a break between dinner and talk and thereafter not sitting next to whoever you had been next to, was carried over from the old regime. The custom of dressing for dinner lasted until after the turn of the century.

This last piece of lore fits in with matters more mundane and more practical. Among the responsibilities that David Yalden-Thomson undertook was raising money. Year after year he labored to expand our limited budget to include both a modest stipend and two or three summer awards. The stipend, originally one hundred dollars, was meant to enable graduate students to purchase their obligatory formal wear. When black tie dinners were limited to one per year, everyone was pleased that the stipend could be used as well for books and other intellectual amenities. The stipend never did increase as fast as the price of formal dress or, for that matter, of books. However, thanks to the Victorian thrift of the traditionalist Fellows and the cautious but insightful husbandry of the University’s financial managers, the endowment has grown to the point where a real-life stipend is possible.

Even at our poorest and most frugal, the Society—principally, again, David Yalden-Thomson—raised money for summer awards. These summer awards were originally for travel assistance and for the support of projects that go beyond the routine of work for the Ph.D. Thus one Junior Fellow was able to spend a summer working at the Argonne National Laboratory, another at the Armenian National Library, and yet another traveled to Paris to conduct one of the last interviews with the Nobel laureate dramatist Samuel Beckett. Our endowment has grown to the extent that we are able to sponsor every year the Society of Fellows Dissertation Completion Fellowship and the Summer Research Stipends for Junior Fellows to pursue research during the summer months. Since the death of David Yalden-Thomson in 1993, these summer awards have been named in his honor. On occasion, the Society has been able to help with travel funds for Junior Fellows to attend scholarly meetings where they are presenting their own research.

Notwithstanding the many and continuing minor changes that have taken place, the institution he did so much to shape remains essentially the same. 1968, the year when the Society came into being, was a year of turmoil and violence worldwide. The shocking murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy came just five years after the murder of a President. The Tet Offensive made it clear that despite the engagement of half a million troops and commensurate loss of life, America’s imperial adventure in Vietnam could not succeed. Student riots at the Sorbonne and Columbia and around the world were only less disturbing than widespread urban riots in such American cities as Washington and Los Angeles and at the Democratic political convention in Chicago. Men and women committed to science and learning, like other citizens, had the responsibility of thinking about war—and the equal responsibility of doing their work in relation to the larger world. In such a context, the Society of Fellows can have a modest but important place. We encourage professionalism and hope to spread suspicion of narrow professionalism. We encourage fellowship and spirited conversation because we think that, among other goods, they stimulate our thinking about the frontiers of knowledge and the basics of public policy. In doing so, we are aware that our brief history is part of the longer history that began when Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. We celebrate its accomplishments, but we also look forward to a future in which the Society can have a broader impact on graduate study, and the life of learning in general, at the University.

Jack Levenson, 2008
Edited for accuracy, August 2019, JFM; August 2023, CTM