The SVM's path away from a more conservative basis can be traced in its relations with the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a student Christian movement established in the United States in 1940. The Volunteer Movement was initially very sympathetic to the aims of the Fellowship. In February 1944 SVM General Secretary Winburn Thomas wrote to a Yale Divinity School student: "I feel very keenly that we of the SVM have much to learn from the Inter-Varsity Fellowship, and I would therefore like to see represented on our Board of Directors the intensity of feeling and dynamic purpose which characterizes many of you in that movement."(SVM Archives, Series V, with Board of Directors records, February 1944) When the IVCF was discussed at a Movement meeting in October 1944 it was noted that the IVCF tended to attract "doctrinaire and controversial fundamentalists but "it was not yet clear that the Fellowship would be dominated by these types."