The Society of Fellows selection committee has identified the top 15 postdoctoral candidates from a pool of 1,740 applications. This program, first announced by College President Phil Hanlon in his inaugural address, is dedicated to bringing postdoctoral students to the College for research, teaching and mentorship and will commence in the fall, likely with five post-doctoral fellows.
Society of Fellows director Randall Balmer said that the selection committee, comprised of seven faculty members or mentors, have read through all the applications and began interviewing the 15 top candidates via Skype on Wednesday.
He said he is hoping to present Provost Carolyn Dever with a final ranked list of about 10 to 12 candidates by Feb. 16, allowing her to select the five final postdoctoral fellows.
Prospective host departments of the postdoctoral fellows are also reviewing the applications to gauge interest among potential faculty mentors within that department, engineering professor and faculty mentor William Lotko wrote in an email.
The interviews are the last step in due diligence to ensure that each Society of Fellows postdoc meets expectations in both scholarship and teaching, he wrote.
Balmer said that he thought that there would be difficultly finding office space for the postdoctoral fellows, but the provost’s office stepped in and said that space should not be a consideration in deliberation of the final candidates.
He said he is pleased with the range of diversity in the final candidates in terms of their interests and disciplines.
“We were sensitive to a kind of range of applications, and we wanted a diversity of people coming in to campus, and again as the final pool materialized it turned out that there was a good bit of diversityin terms of academic disciplines,” Balmer said.
The Society of Fellows program seeks out postdoctoral candidates with compelling scholarly projects, Balmer said, noting that not all of the final candidates come from elite institutions.
“Some of those people came from places as you might expect, Harvard [University] and Princeton [University], and some have come from places you might not expect like state schools and places you might not mention in the same breath as elite institutions and that for me is satisfying,” Balmer said. “That’s another form of diversity, I suppose.”
History professor and faculty mentor Pamela Crossley wrote in an email that, as in any major competitive fellowship, the members of the selection committee are all bringing their own priorities to the process.
She said she thinks that all the Society of Fellows committee members are eager to find the interface between the highest quality applicants and those who are the best fit for Dartmouth’s initiatives in research and teaching.
The Society of Fellows program has the potential to support intellectual life and scholarly productivity at the College, Balmer said. Since the College does not have many graduate students in the arts and humanities, he said it is easy for faculty members in those fields to lose their cutting edge.
“Doctoral studentshad the effect of kind of keeping me at the top of my game in terms of keeping up with the latest scholarship,” Balmer said. “Since coming here, I’ve had to work harder to keep on top of things, and the presence of Ph.D.s will aid that project.”
Scholarship and teaching are complementary, he said, and improved scholarship will aid professors in the classroom, which is an important aspect of this program.
He said that he hopes that the Society of Fellow post-doctoral members will have a positive effect on the entire community because they are “young, ambitious and energetic” and that undergraduate students will benefit from the overall increase in scholarly activity.
Crossley said that the College already has multiple postdoctoral programs, and the Society of Fellows will not only bring its own scholars to the table, but also act as an integration point for postdocs across campus.
“Fundamentally, a Society of Fellows program is a mark of maturity for an institution,” she said. “It means we are not limited to sending our faculty and students away to other research facilities.”
Fellowships are 34 months long, and those who are selected for the Society of Fellows program will receive a monthly stipend of $4,600, which totals to $55,200 per year, plus an annual $4,000 to cover research and travel expenses. Harvard and Princeton also have similar Society of Fellows programs. Harvard pays fellows an annual stipend of $70,000 while Princeton pays a salary of $80,000 plus $5,000 annually for research, according to the websites for the programs.
Balmer said he also hopes that the participants create a community for themselves at the College.
“I would love to have these people say, ‘I have formed some friendships here at Dartmouth with other members of the Society of Fellows and those friendships have been important to me throughout my career and I thank Dartmouth for giving me that opportunity,’” he said.
Society of Fellows program administrator Laura McDaniel said that in the next few months the committee will be debating how to best streamline the application process while still achieving the highest quality candidate pool.
Balmer said that no one was prepared for the “avalanche” of applications the College received in response to the Society of Fellows advertisement.
“What it tells me is that smart people want to be at Dartmouth and we as a school should capitalize on that and see this as a way of ramping up the intellectual and scholarly life of Dartmouth College,” he said.
Crossley said that the huge appeal of the program worldwide has made the process of starting it up more complicated and far more time-consuming than was originally anticipated. The current model for the Society of Fellows program guarantees that there will be 12 fellows on campus at any given time.
Applications for a new pool of candidates will be posted this summer with deadlines early in the fall.
