At the end of graduate school, I applied for Harvard’s Society of Fellows. It was basically a three-year period where one could do any research one wanted, and interact with all kinds of very smart people. I knew Chomsky had been a fellow nearly forty years earlier, and that this fellowship allowed him the intellectual room to write his master piece the Language Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT, of which his dissertation is a chapter). I would have loved following in his footsteps. My application was all about economy of derivation and trying to develop it in various ways. I applied for the position, and told Morris Halle, who said to me something like: “No, you will never get it.” I was hurt by that comment, but he was just being realistic. I did not get the fellowship.
Several MIT linguistics students subsequently went on to get the fellowship.
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