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Friday 5 December 2008

Legacy: Cecil Rhodes, The Rhodes Trust and Rhodes Scholarships

Linking Oxford with the world

Vernon Bogdanor reviews Philip Ziegler's account of Rhodes scholarships

Legacy is an ‘official’ history of the Rhodes scholarships, commissioned by Lord Fellowes, the then Chair of the Trust. It was a wise decision to entrust it to Philip Ziegler, an urbane and accomplished writer, and he has done a marvellous job, presenting the story with exemplary clarity and wit. This is a book of the highest quality, full of imaginative insight and a delight to read.

The danger of official history, of course, is that it records only successes in a world in which everything always turns out for the best. Ziegler has far too much scholarly integrity to fall into this trap, though he does have a tendency to treat utterances by obscure dons as if they were the pronouncements of some great statesman, and the characters in the story tend to appear in their best clothes and on their best behaviour. Still, he has written, not an encomium but a ‘warts and all’ history, though sometimes one has to read between the lines to appreciate it. He tactfully passes over the short Wardenship of John Rowett, which, despite the Rhodes-Mandela Trust, was not a success, one of the trustees later declaring that Rowett could not see a china shop without crossing the road to smash it. He also tends to pass over complaints by Rhodes scholars that recent Wardens have been too busy with higher matters to bother with student problems.

Ziegler also has his blind spots. It does not seem to strike him as odd that in a university which prides itself on its system of direct democracy through the dons parliament, Congregation, the Warden and the trustees are still chosen by a self-appointed oligarchy that appears to make its own rules. Currently, three of the ten trustees are Fellows of All Souls, the only college in Oxford which does not admit a single student. The chairman is Lord Waldegrave, the former Tory minister and prime begetter of the poll tax — an odd choice to look after the funds.

Nevertheless, Legacy casts a great deal of light not only on the Rhodes scholarships, but on Oxford. If, in the past, the university suffered from complacency, its main problem now is uncertainty of purpose. Can it succeed in being both a great teaching university and a great international research university; or in the attempt to remain both, will it succeed in being neither? Can Oxford become both Amherst and Harvard? Many Rhodes scholars seem to doubt it, treating their time at Oxford as a modern version of the Grand Tour, an interlude before the hard grind of an American graduate or law school. Oxford is no longer the cursus honorum that it was in Rhodes’s day.

Legacy is beautifully written by a master of his craft. It is also beautifully produced; and this prompts the question of why it is published by Yale and not Oxford. Perhaps it is not only our universities that need to get their act together when faced with competition from the United States.

Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government at Oxford University.

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