Throughout the 20th century the Rhodes Scholarships were a boon to American higher education and civic life, sending intellectually and civically ambitious students to one of the world’s oldest universities for graduate study. Oxford University had remained a distinctive place to pursue truth and knowledge across the range of higher learning, even as American higher education in the 20th century was rising in stature. From the inception of the Rhodes Scholarships in 1903, the largest number each year were awarded to Americans.
The grand plan of Cecil Rhodes was to offer rising generations from a few countries spanning North America, Africa and Europe – generally in the Anglo-American orbit – the opportunity to be shaped by the kind of Oxford education he had enjoyed. But by the close of its first century, I was not the only Rhodes Scholar concerned the program had drifted, or steered away, from its original aims.
Rhodes carefully specified the moral and intellectual virtues the Scholars should embody, including “literary and scholastic attainments” and “qualities of truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak,” plus “moral force of character and of instincts to lead.” He had studied Aristotle’s ethics at Oxford, and this conception of higher education abided even as he made himself a political and economic colossus shaping southern Africa in the Victorian era.
Upon considering how he might use his vast fortune to benefit humankind, Rhodes invested in the traditional vision of higher education as developing a person’s commitment to ethics and truth-seeking. Such a program would benefit particular students, their countries, Oxford University and human civilization generally.
That original conception of the Rhodes Scholarships survives after 120 years, but almost despite the official guidance and messaging of the Rhodes Trust. This is why the new scholarship to Oxford for American students established in 2019 by the John and Daria Barry Foundation is a stroke of genius as well as of generosity.
In recent decades there has been discussion among Rhodes Scholars about the political turn of the scholarships toward rewarding political activism – and excluding, in effect, traditional views in the humanities and social sciences. I was a beneficiary of the scholarship over 30 years ago, elected from Middlebury College in Vermont. I studied at Oxford from 1989 to 1993 – earning, under the scholarship’s generosity, one master’s degree in philosophy and politics then another in Christian theology.
Across the next quarter-century, as I started my career as a political science professor, I was honored to serve the American Rhodes selection process whenever asked, ultimately sitting on 21 committees. I have remained in contact with American leaders of the scholarship selection process and Rhodes alumni, as well as successive Wardens of Rhodes House in Oxford. In recent years I have visited with current Scholars in Oxford, mostly Americans, hearing their experiences and perceptions.
There is a strong contrast between what the Rhodes Scholarships became in recent decades and the new Barry Scholarship to Oxford, which is renewing among the prestigious graduate scholarships for Americans a priority for truth-seeking and (in the larger sense Rhodes intended) character. This is a case study of American philanthropists, guided by distinguished scholars committed to academia’s fundamental purposes, taking action to renew and encourage higher aims.
The John and Daria Barry Foundation in the U.S. now generously funds a dozen American students each academic year. The scholarship itself is an initiative of an independent academic center in Oxford adjacent to the university, the Canterbury Institute. Given the shifted priorities in American higher education generally, mirrored in the Rhodes and other prestigious scholarships modeled on it, this new program greatly benefits not only the scholarship students but American higher education and life more generally.
I have been fortunate to witness first-hand the Barry Scholarship in its early years, and its extraordinary opportunity for higher learning and intellectual community offered to American students at Oxford. I was asked to serve as a nominator for the scholarship from its inception – and two students from my department at Arizona State University have been selected as “Barrys.”
What to Do About Elite Scholarships
A brief look at why an alternative scholarship was needed might inspire other bold American philanthropists toward similar efforts. There is a great need given the turn in the Rhodes and other prestigious scholarships, including the Marshall and Truman. A summary of this complex saga is that as American higher education went bipolar from the 1970s onward, the Rhodes Scholarships in America largely followed suit – as did, increasingly, the leadership in Oxford.
In the past 50 years the segment of American academia still grounded in reality has grown in prominence. This includes the natural sciences, engineering and other applications of modern technology, business schools, policy schools and the quantitative social sciences.
These disciplines mostly remain in contact with natural and civic realities, in both higher and pragmatic ways. The other part of American academia increasingly adopted post-modernist skepticism about any fixed realities beyond the human mind and will. The old and new disciplines of the humanities and soft social sciences largely descended into discourses about societal transformation and political activism.
This segment of academia long had been the custodian of liberal arts education, thus of the foundations of the university’s truth-seeking mission, along with its commitment to studying and developing the ethical virtues needed by individuals, civil society and politics. The post-modern, liberationist turn has repudiated that traditional liberal arts mission.
The reality-based disciplines in the natural sciences and quantitative social sciences, for their part, relied upon but could not replenish from their own wells the dwindling support for the intellectual and ethical virtues central to a university’s mission. The consequence for these prestigious scholarships is that the professors who nominated and recommended candidates, and the academics and professionals on the selection committees from the 1990s onward, steadily shifted toward post-modernist interpretations of the intellectual and moral criteria for these scholarships.
Sometime after I returned from Oxford in the early 1990s the Rhodes Trust began to turn away from the scholarships as selecting the most academically gifted students eager to pursue the highest studies at Oxford, while also committed to serving humanity and leading in their professions, communities or polities in some way. Instead, Rhodes Scholars were promoted as “Fighting the World’s Fight.”
To be fair, the phrase was partially rooted in a 1901 letter from Rhodes, stating the scholarships would seek “the best man for the world’s fight.” But the Rhodes Trust was using an altered version of Rhodes’s words, to advertise a purpose he did not intend. Now in 2024 the branding from Rhodes House is even less grounded in the founder’s intent: the scholarships mean “Standing Up For the World.”
This vague slogan about activism and transformation stems neither from the criteria in Rhodes’s will nor any other of his writings. In context, the 1901 letter means the scholarships should seek the right kind of character to serve the common good. A reliable guide for what Rhodes meant there is the final criterion listed in his will: the candidate should “esteem the performance of public duties as his highest aim.”
A century and more later, Rhodes House barely ever invokes this crucial phrase. It is nearly impossible to find on its website, and is not included in the scholarship information posted. This matters because the entirety of the will’s criteria reinforced the liberal arts mission of the university: Rhodes candidates must have high academic achievement along with a commitment to truth, ethical virtues and a dutiful sense of serving institutions and communities. This is not a call to activism and willful transformation of society and civilization (including the university).
There still are Rhodes Scholars selected who fit the scholarship’s terms, chosen not for activism and social transformation but their capacity to undertake higher studies at Oxford and to serve and lead in life. Regrettably, the leaders of the scholarship are neglecting the delicate balance of truth-seeking and leadership abilities sought by Rhodes; instead affirming the prevailing shift in American (and British) higher education to hollow out the liberal arts core of the university.
Further, as a recent study indicates, there are grounds for concern that Rhodes and Truman candidates with more traditional views about human and civic affairs fare poorly under the current ethos. These two scholarships, along with the Marshall, have an outsized influence on shaping future leaders in American academia and elite political and intellectual culture. We should turn the hip slogan of the current Rhodes leadership to ask: who will stand for the highest aims of truth-seeking in academia, and for the courage to defend unpopular principles and questions in academic discourse?
Transformation from a New Direction
The John and Daria Barry Foundation and the Canterbury Institute are restoring the high tradition of Oxford scholarships for America’s top students. A crucial means is the distinct nominating process for the Barry, to re-prioritize core liberal arts aims among promising candidates and restore intellectual and civic diversity as well.
The Canterbury Institute convenes an academic committee of distinguished British and American scholars, who in turn invite professors at American universities and colleges as nominators. The foremost criterion is academic excellence in any subject awarding a graduate degree at Oxford, including commitment to academia’s truth-seeking mission. This is where the Barry incorporates a traditional conception of character.
Given pressure even among the more quantitative, reality-based disciplines to accede to social justice imperatives from the post-modernist disciplines, most academics now are defensive about truth-seeking, rigorous discourse and commitment to the liberal arts and sciences concept of the academic calling. Barry nominators thus have the rare opportunity to commend excellent students holding any range of views about contentious issues in human and civic affairs, or undertaking unconventional research in quantitative studies, knowing they stand a fair chance.
The Canterbury Institute is a convening space for intellectual community and discourse, with programming as well as informal opportunities for Barrys and the Institute’s affiliate scholars to interact. I know this from having visited Oxford to meet with one of the ASU students I had nominated, just as he completed two years of master’s study. He was deeply grateful to the scholarship for allowing him to pursue serious academic discourse in his degree (history and politics) and also through the Canterbury community.
That Barry now is studying in a top American law school, and may pursue an academic career. He recently explained he had declined admission to a higher-ranked law school (per the most widely-cited ranking) because it had fewer faculty offering the rigorous truth-seeking he enjoyed in his Barry experience.
The second ASU nominee awarded a Barry has just completed his first year of studies in Oxford. He, too, was immensely grateful for the intellectual and personal experiences the scholarship provided. He will travel to archives this summer, on the Barry research allowance, for the thesis to be written in his second year.
Just five years of Barry Scholar cohorts have established this as a crucial alternative for top American students seeking Oxford’s highest studies and academia’s distinct vocation of fearless truth-seeking. The large stakes for American higher education and civic life involved with the older prestigious scholarships might persuade other donors to develop programs with a restorative mission.
A little research will identify the American Rhodes who have been or currently are influential in academia; in the media and other public-intellectual roles; in the Congress, executive branch and courts either as office holders or senior staff and in other elite dimensions of American life.
Given the reduced tolerance for intellectual and civic diversity in the Rhodes selection process, and in other prestigious scholarships, this is no longer a healthy picture for academia or our civic life. The bias arguably has been a source for the polarization besetting both academia and civic life, our simultaneous decline of higher discourse and civic trust – given diminished capacities for tolerance and civility across divergent views.
Indeed, the lowering and narrowing of the Rhodes Scholarship, in terms of how its leaders define its purpose, is both a reflection and a reinforcement of the decline in another of American academia’s crucial missions: to ensure future leading citizens undertake a serious civic education as undergraduates. Marvelous academic centers and institutes like the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University have renewed this higher civics in recent decades, supporting Princeton students and faculty as well as visiting scholars.
I was a visiting Madison Program fellow a dozen years ago, and know of its influence on other centers and programs around the country. I was asked to be founding director of a new ASU department on civic thought and leadership partly because of how my Madison Program experience had shaped my teaching and scholarship, and because the program’s very existence inspired confidence to build anew in order to meet the core academic and civic missions existing departments had abandoned.
The Rhodes Scholarships and similar programs long had reinforced a virtuous cycle of students and faculty in American academic and civic life, to pursue the path of truth-seeking and civil discourse in academia and beyond. The Barry Foundation and Canterbury Institute stepped into the breach after these high aims clearly had been neglected or derided.
The power to shape individual lives and careers, and the broader culture, through such a scholarship program is immense. More such restorative opportunities are needed for the best students. The academic and civic stakes are high. Yet this is not asking the impossible; courageous philanthropists and professors, and pioneering students, have shown it can be done.
Paul Carrese is a professor at Arizona State University and from 2016-2023 was founding director of its School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership. During 2024 he is a senior fellow of the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History.
