[1] Lee attended Fargo College from 1920 to 1922 and then the University of Minnesota, where he graduated with B.A.
[1][2] For the academic year 1940–1941, he was appointed a Guggenheim Fellow for the writing of a book on the nature of philosophical inquiry.
At Harvard he was influenced by the pragmatism of C. I. Lewis and the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead.
For the academic year 1933–1934 Lee went with his wife Dorothy to study neo-Hegelian philosophy with Richard Kroner.
[2] He was an editor and contributor for the 1936 book Philosophical Essays for Alfred North Whitehead; this is a collection of nine essays written for Whitehead by nine of his former students,[4] who were (besides Lee): F. S. C. Northrop, Raphael Demos, Scott Buchanan, Willard Van Orman Quine, Henry Siggins Leonard (1905–1967),[5] Paul Weiss, S. Kerby-Miller,[6] and Charles Hartshorne.