Sheldon Fellows Working Abroad

The following is reprinted from the current number of the Graduates' Magazine:

In 1909 the University received from the estate of Mrs. Amey Richmond Sheldon about $350,000 to establish in memory of her husband, Frederick Sheldon '42, the Frederick Sheldon Fund. The income of this fund is "to be applied in the discretion of and under rules to be prescribed by the President and Fellows...to the further education of students of promise and standing in the University by providing them with facilities for further education by travel after graduation or by establishing travelling fellowships." By vote of the President and Fellows, the income of the Frederick Sheldon Fund is to be assigned, not in scholarships of fixed amounts, but "on recommendation to the Committee from the various Departments and Schools,...as the Committee shall deem most expedient for purposes of investigation or study either in this country--outside Harvard University--or abroad."

The Committee consists of the Deans of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School of Applied Science, the Graduate School of Business Administration, the Divinity School, the Law School, and the Medical School. This Committee, immediately on its formation, decided to adopt no principle of even distribution among Schools or Departments, but to choose, so far as it could, the very best available men who had received from the University a degree of any sort. The Committee intends that the award of a Sheldon Fellowship shall be as high a distinction as can be conferred on a student in the University. The annual income of the Sheldon Fund is about $17,000; the fellowships have varied in amount from $300 to $1500.

In 1910-11 the Sheldon Fellows were literally spread over the face of the earth: Mr. Philip, Greeley Clapp was studying Music in Germany; Mr. Oscar James Campbell, Comparative Literature in England; Mr. Edgar Davidson Congdon, Zoology in Europe; Mr. Melvin Thomas Copeland, the cotton industry in Europe; Mr. Summer Webster Cushing, Geography in India; Messrs. Arthur Johnson Eames and Edmund Ware Sinnott, Botany in Australia; Mr. Griffith Conrad Evans, Mathematics in Europe; Mr. Augustus Locke, Mining and Metallurgy in the United States and Mexico; Mr. Robert Grant Martin, English Dramatic Literature in England; Mr. Sheldon Osgood Martin, Economics in South America; Mr. Henry Maurice Sheffer, the Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics in Europe; Mr. William Edward Lunt, English Financial History in London; Mr. Langdon Warner, Buddhist Art in Japan and Korea; Mr. John Avery Lomax, American Ballads in various parts of the country; Dr. Simeon Burt Wolbach, Tropical Diseases in West Africa.

This year the Committee, in accordance with what it believes to be Mrs. Sheldon's general purpose, has picked out two or three men of unusual promise in the Senior class who would profit by a year abroad, without specific time or place of study, and the Corporation has awarded to them Sheldon Fellowships on the recommendation of the Committee.

It will be seen that Mrs. Sheldon's bequest is one of the most important and interesting that the University has received in recent years.