  Harvard attempted to bring him back to the United States, offering him several professorships beginning in 1917. As late as 1929, he was offered the Norton Chair in Poetry, one of Harvard’s most respected chairs. In 1931, he received an invitation from Brown University, and Harvard later asked him to accept the William James Lecturer in Philosophy, a newly established honorary post. But Santayana never returned to Harvard or to America. Believing that the academic life was not a place for him to cultivate intellectual achievement or scholarly work, Santayana also refused academic appointments both at Oxford University and Cambridge University.