The Rhodes Scholarships

...They have been sent there by boards of selection who did not understand that social adaptability is a prime essential in a man who is to absorb Oxford into himself...

...Her influence works in complex and subtle ways that defy analysis...

...A. L. Fisher, late vice-chancellor of Sheffield University, that the scholarships are to be written down a failure merely because no outstanding figure either in politics or scholarship, with the exception of President Aydelotte of Swarthmore, has as yet emerged from their ranks, the World points out that the average age of Rhodes graduates is as yet only forty, and that the time to talk about success or failure must be deferred at least for another decade...

...For Oxford is her social life...

...State after state in these past years has failed to offer a candidate to fill the quota in the scattered representation...

...It is unnecessary to point out to what extent Halle and Jena and Goettingen have influenced our education during thp past three or four generations, or how fundamentally that influence differs from what Oxford offers...

...Her training is in substance rather than in method...

...Vastly greater numbers of Americans have attended these universities than have yet gone to Oxford as Rhodes scholars...

...It is still too soon to expect much of this leaven in our national life as a result of the Rhodes scholarships...

...Our educators derived from their German training their preconception of what our young men would find at^ Oxford...

...And many of these men disabused their minds of their preconceived aims too late to profit by their ultimate orientation...

...she is, as Cardinal Newman puts it, "a self-perpetuating tradition, a genius loci, which imbues and forms, more or less as he surrenders himself to it, every individual who is brought under its shadow...

...It is through her so cial life that she endows her culture...

...It would be interesting at the outset to inquire into the distribution of Rhodes scholars among the phases of our civic life...

...Too many have gone with the notion learned in their home universities—that social life is waste of time...

...The scholarships lack much of having consummated either our tooenthusiastic hopes or those of the founder...

...false notions on our part as to what to expect from Oxford...

...Most of the Rhodes scholars thus elected, moreover, went to Oxford with aims preformulated by the traditions of German post-graduate work: which, be it never so valuable per se, is at least of another race of giants...

...Too many have possessed the idea that Oxford is an affair of books and lectures and examinations only, and have therefore missed utterly that which Oxford really is...

...journalism, 2 percent...

...ministry, 4 percent...

...her ideal is thought rather than research...

...Gradually the state boards of electors are coming to be composed of those very men who returned to us twenty years ago this June and in the succeeding years, men with a sure knowledge of what Oxford is, even if they failed to capture it for themselves...

...And so we may withhold our judgment that the Rhodes scholarship scheme has failed, and abide in hope...

...It has arisen chiefly within this twentyyear period...

...But it is not by them chiefly that she passes on the real Oxford...

...and in place of these ancient ills, we descry a promise of general acceptance of the tutorial system that fosters the development of the individual and of individual thought...

...medicine, 6 percent...

...Surely that is a distribution throughout the breadth and depth of our national life, wide enough to justify us in a predication of Catholicism of influence...

...and therefore made their choices on the basis of that preconception...

...Refusing to credit the conclusions, widely attributed to Mr...

...We find a growing inclination in American colleges, notably in Princeton, toward a tutorial system of higher education...

...What is the Oxford tradition...

...But it seems to me that the failure of the scheme—if failure it be—is not due to any fault inherent in the idea, but rather to mistakes in the execution of the working plan, and in some part to mistaken standards...

...That is the only wise and efficient system for any institution of learning above the grade of a correspondence school...

...administration and government service, 7 percent...

...Many of the leading Rhodes scholars in educational work have sponsored it and are working it out...

...It is the interchange of characteristic ideas that carries her intellectual values...

...A careless estimate would suggest that the Rhodes scheme is a failure...

...Oxford is a place of truth and of paradox, the most ancient of inspirational seats of learning, the most modern in its alert but tolerant challenge of intellectual authority...

...How much of this spread of allegiance to the tutorial system is due to Rhodes scholars, it is impossible to estimate...

...law, 22 percent...

...social work, 2 percent...

...Public interest in the scholarships has waned until they have become a commonplace...

...These men are qualified to choose as Rhodes scholars such students as are most likely to benefit to the full by residence at Oxford...

...It was something more concrete, more directly measurable and even sensible, than the subtler, more elusive culture that Oxford has to offer, which to a great extent is not measurable at all by our most revered standards...

...Latest statistics available reveal the percentages of such distribution to be as follows: Education, 29 percent...

...But gradually, throughout these twenty years, that order of things is changing...

...And I am inclined to agree with that estimate, though with an important reservation...

...I dare say that the German influence on our education was more emphatically felt within twenty years of its first entry into our life, than Oxford influence has so far been...

...That German influence, however, thus injected into our scheme of education, very naturally colored the selection of Rhodes scholars...

...In so far as it can be defined, it is still the tradition that the Dominicans and the Franciscans endowed it with'—a burning love of mankind, with all the tolerance, all the recognition of individuality, all the fervent quest for emancipation, which that quality connotes...

...The subtle tradition of Oxford is not to be absorbed immediately and immediately passed on...

...That I grant...

...In a recent editorial, the New York World briefly examined the justification, as time is making it apparent, for the monumental educational scheme of the founder of Rhodesia, and finds some significant words to say upon the subject...

...Our standards for the education of our youth in foreign universities have been derived mainly from the experience of our graduate students in the German universities...

...It may be admitted at once that there is no apparent sign of any tremendous upheaval in our civilization as a result of the return of the Rhodes scholars...

...Too many have lived their three years on the Isis imbued with the determination to maintain at all costs their national independence, little realizing that the armor of Americanism they have thrown up about themselves shuts out the very thing they had come to acquire...

...For many years the American Club, founded with honest intent by the pioneers under the Rhodes bequest, to enable them to maintain their Americanism in the midst of foreign influences, has been at last voted out of existence: and that, apparently, not so much as a matter of sagacious policy, as from sheer desuetude...

...But already there are signs of it...

...The mistaken notions that have robbed that influence of its maximum potentiality fall into three categories: inadequacy of the earlier boards of selection, in that they were often ignorant of what type of man was best fitted to absorb and to give out Oxford culture ; lack of understanding by the scholars chosen, of the means and ends of an Oxford course...

...In Oxford, too, there are healthy signs of a growing appreciation by Rhodes scholars of the fact that Oxford is, in actuality, its social life...

...As it needed unnumbered centuries to create itself, so will it take time to make itself felt as a leaven here...

...It is a good sign, an enheartening sign...

...business, 10 percent...

...True, she gives lectures and courses...

...We discover on the educational horizon a growing opposition to mass instruction, to impersonal and therefore meaningless standards of grading, to blind acceptance of authority or the unguided rebellion against it such as mass instruction must entail...

...Her inspiration comes, not from books and courses, but from the living human force of her educational ideals...

...She is more than a university, as we are wont to define the term...

...Too many Rhodes scholars have failed to surrender themselves...

...With inconsiderable exception, each of those twenty years has brought back to us a quota of forty men or so whom we had handpicked to absorb that peculiar culture which is Oxford's and to disseminate it amongst us...

...Her theory of culture is qualitative rather than quantitative...

...And I agree further that it is not even yet time to pass judgment, all the more because of those very mistakes...

...In no quarter, to sum up, have proper standards been applied...

...It would seem, therefore, that the leaven of Oxford is beginning to work where it must first be felt—in the education of our young men...

...Most of them returned to the teaching profession here, from which their influence was the more directly, the more deeply, stamped upon rising generations...

...Is this strange elusive culture that is Oxford, of real value to an American...

...Oxford is not to be evaluated by the sole standard of scholarship...