Veterans Deserve a Chance to be Rhodes Scholars
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Mitchell B. Reiss
October 9, 2011
Autumn is the season when colleges and universities encourage their most talented seniors to compete for prestigious postgraduate scholarships and fellowships. No award is more celebrated than the Rhodes Scholarship, which has been sending Americans to the University of Oxford for more than a century. The ranks of past recipients have included hundreds of leaders in public service and academe, including governors, ambassadors, Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, and a U.S. president.
Yet, as the October 5 deadline for Rhodes Scholarships approached, some of the nation's best and brightest undergraduates knew not to bother with the application -- they were ineligible for this golden ticket. Their fatal flaw? They chose to serve our country as members of the armed forces.
Each year more than 200,000 veterans -- most of them well over the average age of college freshmen -- enter college under the Post-9/11 GI Bill and similar programs. One of the top students at Washington College, where I serve as president, made me aware of the discrimination in the Rhodes Scholarship criteria, which require that applicants from the United States be under the age of 24.
Each of the 14 nominating countries or geographic entities sets its own restrictions, subject to approval by the Rhodes Trust, and the cutoff ages range from 24 to 27 around the globe. It appears that Jim would have been eligible had he been a citizen of Zambia.
As with many members of his generation, Jim's patriotism was forged by the events of September 11, 2001. He joined the Marine Corps Reserve shortly after high school, and served as a gunner on a patrol boat hunting insurgents along the banks of the Euphrates River in Iraq. After completing his tour of duty, he enrolled at Washington College, taking advantage of a special scholarship the college offers for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
After his sophomore year, Jim's unit was called back into service, and he was deployed to Afghanistan, where he saw combat in Helmand Province and received a medal for superior performance during combat operations. His firsthand experience of rural Afghans' poverty and lack of educational opportunities redoubled his commitment to eventually use his own education to help those in need, whether overseas or closer to home.
Last year he returned to college to continue his studies. Today he is a senior with a perfect grade-point average of 4.0. He is double majoring in humanities and philosophy, and has taught himself Latin and ancient Greek. He has further demonstrated his commitment to public service by creating a remarkable program, called "Partners in Philosophy," for prisoners at a Maryland state penitentiary. Students and faculty share with inmates (many of them serving life sentences) the works of great thinkers such as Plato, Aquinas, and Kierkegaard, and lead critical conversations on ethics, morals, and social justice.
Jim is poised to become a leader in his generation of young Americans and plans to apply for some of the leading postgraduate scholarships and fellowships. But he cannot even consider seeking a Rhodes Scholarship because he is 26 years old, two years older than the cutoff age. In other words, Jim's selflessness and service to his country have disqualified him under guidelines imposed by the Rhodes Trust, which has in the past declined to allow changes in the age requirement for American applicants. Undoubtedly, there are many other outstanding young veterans like Jim attending colleges and universities across the country.
This penalty is particularly surprising given the characteristics that Cecil Rhodes specified in his will for his trust's beneficiaries. In addition to academic accomplishment, Rhodes scholars must demonstrate "truth, courage, devotion to duty, sympathy for and protection of the weak, kindliness, unselfishness and fellowship," and "moral force of character and instincts to lead, and to take an interest in one's fellow beings." Yet many who epitomize those virtues are barred from applying.
Over the years, the Rhodes Trust has eliminated virtually every other form of discrimination from its operations and selection processes. In the 1970s, the trust even sought a special act of Parliament to overturn a clause restricting the scholarships to men only. Today the trust does not discriminate with regard to gender, marital status, sexual orientation, race, ethnic origin, color, religion, social background, caste, or disability.
There remains one more step the Rhodes Trust should take: removing discrimination on the basis of age. An entire generation of young men and women are returning from military service in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to take their rightful places in the academy. It is an injustice to them as individuals, to the larger community of Rhodes scholars, and to the intentions of Cecil Rhodes to deny them the opportunity to apply for a place among the world's most accomplished scholars at Oxford.
Source: http://chronicle.com/article/Veterans-Deserve-a-Chance-to/129318/?sid=cr&utm