Harvard's crusty President (1909-33) Abbott Lawrence Lowell was a Ph.D. who developed an early aversion to the Ph.D. factory system. In a famed plea that scholars should be judged by deeds and not by degrees, he wrote: "We have developed into a mass production of mediocrity." A few years before retiring, Lowell began agitating for a more creative path into teaching ("to entice and fructify imagination"). It turned into Harvard's freewheeling Society of Fellows—a unique experiment in U.S. education.
Each year, at the society's first dinner, the chairman rises and solemnly intones: "Your...
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