Rhodes scholarships and the descent into self-parody

By Anonymous Rhodes Scholar

In January 2022, Mackenzie Fierceton, a Rhodes Scholar who claimed she grew up poor and in foster care, lost her scholarship after officials learned she grew up in a middle-class family with an educated radiologist mother and attended a $30,000-a-year private school and enjoyed high-end hobbies like horseback riding.

In her application, Fierceton looked like she came from central casting, telling a story of adversity, being shuttled around foster care with only her clothes in garbage bags. In her application to the University of Pennsylvania, Mackenzie identified in her application as “queer” with hopes of adopting, “low income” and a “first generation student.”

In a way, Fierceton could hardly be blamed for embellishing her story. Her paint-by-numbers tale of poverty/abuse/non-heterosexuality has been catnip for Rhodes selection committees for years. She was feeding the committees what they were already looking for.

Years earlier Chesa Boudin won a Rhodes scholarship by highlighting the radical chic of his benighted childhood. Long before he became district attorney of San Francisco and freed repeat criminals and turned large parts of the city in a repository of feces and heroin needles, Boudin bemoaned growing up unfairly without his parents who were in jail. (They were part of the Weather Underground and were jailed for the killing of two police officers and a guard in 1981.)

Stories resonate, and the worse the story of overcoming societal oppression, the better.

For over a century, the Rhodes Trust picked candidates on merit, and the scholarship stood for individual excellence. Notable scholars include the likes of Nobel prize winners Sir John Eccles and Michael Spence, astronomer Edwin Hubble, political leaders President Bill Clinton, Senator William Fulbright, financiers like Sir John Templeton and jurists like Supreme Court Justices Byron White and David Souter, and film director Terrence Mallick.

Such high expectations weigh on scholars that they can only lead to disappointment. For years the quip was, “A Rhodes scholar is a young man with a bright future behind him.” (The more prosaic truth is that many are geniuses, and when you meet others, you can only scratch your head they were chosen. The joke used to be that every year someone was “the mistake.”)

Today, the Rhodes selection committees have gravitated towards focusing on stories of growing up in poverty, the gender, skin color and sexual orientation of candidates and their fight against oppression, real or imagined.

The Rhodes Trust explicitly states that "consideration of balance or diversity are not factors in selection." Yet it is hard to see how this is possible when the first and only thing that leads in the press releases is gender, sexuality and skin color.

From 2018 press release:

This year's American Rhodes Scholars – independently elected by 16 committees around the country meeting simultaneously – once again reflect the extraordinary diversity that characterizes the United States. Almost half of the winners are immigrants themselves or first generation Americans. One is an undocumented American whose immigration status is covered under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). This is the first year in which DACA recipients were eligible for the Scholarship. The class overall is majority minority, as it was last year, and the 21 women are the greatest number ever elected in an American Rhodes class.

From 2020:

“Twenty-one of the 32 are students of color; ten are Black, equal to the greatest number ever elected in one year in the United States. Fifteen are first-generation Americans or immigrants; and one is a Dreamer with active DACA status. Seventeen of the winners are women, 14 are men, and one is non-binary.”

From 2021:

“The class includes 22 women, the most ever elected in a year.” (In fact, over 2/3rds of the entire class were women in 2021.)

It would be too easy to mock the Rhodes scholarship as it is today. In Wes Anderson’s latest film “The French Dispatch”, he lovingly parodies The New Yorker. Every frame of the pastiche knowingly references its source material. The French Dispatch is based in France in the made-up town of Ennui-sur-Blasé and hosts the writers like the fictitious Herbsaint Sazerac.

Such a send up is unnecessary for the Rhodes scholarship. The venerable Rhodes Trust and the American selection committees have been busy in a parody of their own. Yet it is all real and completely, hilariously unintentional.

In the annual list of winners, the Trust highlights scholar bios, and almost all have a navel gazing focus on race and identity buzzwords with the obligatory reference to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion™. Here is but a sample from 2020 and 2021:

Sydni A. Scott … has done significant work on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues, including developing training for dozens of universities participating in The Women’s Network. Sydni also founded The Amendment Project, an organization mobilizing high school students around the issue of reparations, and worked to help secure passage of a local reparations resolution in Tulsa.

Wilfried J.K. Zibell, Noorvik, is a senior at Harvard College where they major in Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Civilization. Wilfried comes from an Inuit (Nuurvik) subsistence village in the Alaskan arctic, and through education policymaking, language preservation and labor activism, has focused on the effects of colonialism. This past summer, he worked with his tribal association on its initial COVID-19 outbreak. His senior thesis compares comparative aspects of imperialism in Yiddish, in which he has done archival research, and Inupiat poetry.

Joshua A. Babu[‘s] … senior thesis set out to determine the longitudinal effects of gender-affirming hormone treatment on the psychological health and telomere homeostasis of trans youth. Active in policy and advocacy, Josh drafts proposals on how state representatives can rectify legislation that discriminates against LGBTQI people in healthcare.

Trisha N. Prabhu, Naperville, is a senior at Harvard College, where she majors in Government. Trisha is the founder and CEO of ReThink, Inc., an app that proactively detects offensive digital content and gives users a chance to reconsider posting it.

Tyrese D. Bender … has been instrumental in drafting the first-ever Diversity Strategy designed to establish a more inclusive environment at the [U.S. Military] Academy. He also established a character training protocol for 1300 cadets around issues including race, sexual harassment and assault, mental health, political activism and COVID-19.

Jamal T. Burns[‘s] research engages colonial influences on interpretations of the masculinity of Black boys in school settings. Jamal is a leading promoter of a new debate paradigm known as performance debate.

Not all bios are filled with buzzwords and hip causes. The general rule is the less trendy the bio, the more genuinely impressive the candidate.

The Rhodes Trust often highlights the achievements of recent young Rhodes Scholars through its Twitter feed. For example, it highlighted a Canadian Rhodes scholar:

Billy-Ray Belcourt (Prairies & @wadhamoxford 2016) is an Assistant Prof in the Creative Writing Program at @UBC. He aims a sociological eye on the nexus of race, gender, & sexuality to imagine forms of queer indigeneity that exist in the register of futurity #LGBTHistoryMonth

A Twitter commenter responded: “Is this real or woke parody? Apart from that what the hell does it mean and what language is it written in?” The truth is no one knows what it means, but it’s provocative.

The Tweet is not a gibberish paper submitted to social science journals. It is from an actual scholar promoted by The Rhodes Trust.

There is no parody like self-parody.

Today, most emails from Rhodes House start with race, equity, diversity and inclusion, and anything else is shunted away or airbrushed out.

Do I blame those running the Rhodes Trust for what is going on? The Rhodes scholarship is not a cause, but a symptom of the problem. The Rhodes is merely the end of the bullwhip where the flick of a wrist leads to a snap yards away.

The Rhodes application process is the last step at the end of many long trends. At first glance, the Rhodes Trust is statistically discriminating against men, given over 2/3rds of recent American scholars are women. Yet this is merely the result of the collapse of male enrollment in colleges. Women now make up 60% the undergraduate population in America. No one knows the cause of this decline, yet colleges themselves have arguably become unwelcoming to males who represent the patriarchy and oppression.

Colleges nominate scholars, professors recommend them and American colleges are overwhelmingly left-leaning and become more so every year. (Even decades ago, conservative applicants knew there was little chance they’d get nominated; keeping your political beliefs in the closet was required.) Every step of the nomination process weeds out anyone who thinks differently, who isn’t woke or doesn’t have some story of oppression to tell. And at the end of the academic gauntlet of recommendations and college committees, there are only stories of personal woe and hardship overcoming poverty and the hideous vortex of racism and sexism.

The Rhodes selection process is merely the end of the whip. Or to put it more colorfully, as The Revolver wrote, “Rhodes Scholarships are not impressive or praiseworthy; they demonstrate nothing but an ability to win a politicized ass-kissing contest.”

The older scholars don’t care enough to change things. But few of them – or indeed any notable scholars of yesteryear – would be chosen in today’s sex and race conscious process. The watering down of recent vintages devalues the taste. A Rhodes scholar will go from being a byword for genius and excellence to the butt of a joke. Maybe then they’ll care.

The academic and cultural decline of the Rhodes Trust is unfortunate. It is a great institution with an illustrious history, and it still chooses many fine, meritorious scholars. Yet as Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Every hero becomes a bore at last.” Likewise, every endowment eventually becomes a woke parody of itself.