The Society of Fellows is a young institution at the University of Virginia, just 40 years old, but with the gradual changes of faculty and the rapid changes of student body, it needs constantly to renew the historical sense of who we collectively are. The Society was founded in 1968 for the express purpose of bringing together faculty and students from different fields to meet and talk, to exchange ideas and in particular to pursue questions that cut across disciplines. The six dinners which are held every year are the occasions for such meeting and fellowship and interchange; and the talks at these dinners bring the various conversations to a single focus of discussion. The speakers are often but not necessarily Senior Fellows, reporting on their own research and its more general implications, but we also welcome talks by present and former Junior Fellows, by other faculty, and by distinguished guests from the learned professions and from the councils of national policy, both in the United States and elsewhere.
The ideal which runs through all this is the lively exchange of ideas based on intensive research and broad reflection. We are unashamed of professionalism and unabashed in our suspicion of narrow professionalism. We believe that when knowledge is growing, you know that it alive and well, and that fellowship and spirited conversation are part of what a university provides as the ambience for getting to frontiers of knowledge and central issues of public responsibility. With all my mention of founders and shapers of the Society, it seems appropriate to note also that this is just what the earliest founder, Thomas Jefferson, thought a university ought to be.
The ideal which runs through all this is the lively exchange of ideas based on intensive research and broad reflection. We are unashamed of professionalism and unabashed in our suspicion of narrow professionalism. We believe that when knowledge is growing, you know that it alive and well, and that fellowship and spirited conversation are part of what a university provides as the ambience for getting to frontiers of knowledge and central issues of public responsibility. With all my mention of founders and shapers of the Society, it seems appropriate to note also that this is just what the earliest founder, Thomas Jefferson, thought a university ought to be.