PBK Bicentennial Fellowships

To the Editors:

Your readers may be interested in the following.

PHI BETA KAPPA BICENTENNIAL FELLOWSHIPS

On December 5, 1976, Phi Beta Kappa will have participated for two hundred years in the intellectual life of the United States. In recognition of that occasion The Society’s United Chapters plan to sponsor a series of books, to appear before or during 1976, with the general title Man Thinking in America.

In order to find appropriate authors for these books—and to provide those authors free time for their research and writing—the Society will award a minimum of five Fellowships with stipends of $20,000 each. The competition for these Fellowships will close on October 15, 1971. Application forms and further information may be obtained from Richard Schlatter, Phi Beta Kappa Bicentennial Fellowships, Provost’s Office, Rutger’s University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903.

The Bicentennial Commission of Phi Beta Kappa is looking for books of broad scope dealing with the cultural crisis of our time, and in particular, with the responsibilities of the intellectual in that crisis. Our cultural institutions and our cultural values are in a state of revolutionary ferment. What are the basic elements of this ferment? What is the essential nature of this revolution? What perspectives will enable us to distinguish them and it most clearly, to separate the ephemeral from the probably enduring? What are the most promising directions, now and later?

The Commission hopes that the books will suggest the new attitudes, vocabularies, and methods needed to understand the present situation and to prescribe for the future. Ideally, each of the books will show, by treatment of some aspect of American institutions and culture, a path from the present disruption toward a rational future order.

Richard Schlatter

Rutgers University

New Brunswick, N.J.