School of Letters

Wells obtained funding from the university and located the school under the administration of Dean John W. Ashton of the College of Arts and Sciences.

When Indiana University moved the school from Kenyon to Bloomington they maintained John Crowe Ransom, Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Austin Warren, and Allen Tate as senior fellows, all well-known literary scholars.

[1] The educational policy of the School turns on the belief that the usual college and university courses in English have not discharged their responsibility for the art which is in their keeping…They expend very nearly their entire energy upon disciplines which are philological, historical, biographical, and ideological…able students are not being trained, and perhaps not even being encouraged, to form literary judgments.

During each session of the School high-profile academics, poets, and critics were brought to Bloomington to teach seminars and deliver weekly forum lectures.

These instructors included Northrop Frye, William Empson, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Leslie Fiedler, and R. P.