Linking Oxford with the world

Cecil Rhodes hoped that the scholarships established through his will, would, by creating educational ties between the Empire and the Anglo-Saxon world, ‘render war impossible’. The scholars, he insisted, should not be weedy bookworms, but manly, robust types, Plato’s guardians, a society of the elect. The 20th century has not been kind to such ideals; yet the scholarships have proved of enormous value to Oxford, giving it that wider international perspective and connection with the world of public affairs which differentiate it so markedly from the Other Place.

In his will, Rhodes insisted that no candidate should be disqualified on account of race or religion. He almost certainly had in mind the Boers rather than the blacks, though he also called for ‘equal rights for every civilised man south of the Zambezi’. What Rhodes would have thought of the belated admission of female scholars in 1976 is, fortunately, not recorded.

Sadly, the trustees of the scholarships sometimes proved even more illiberal than the founder, and with less excuse. Sir Carleton Kemp Allen, a distinguished administrative lawyer, and Warden of Rhodes House between the wars, when faced with a Jamaican candidate, Levy, declared, ‘I do not know from the photograph whether Levy is black, white or coffee-coloured. As he is a Jew, I should imagine that he probably has no tar-brush about him’. Of Adolf Schlepengrell, a German scholar, one of whose grandmothers was Jewish, and therefore fell under Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, Allen commented in 1934 that he was

unmistakably a self-seeker and something of a self-advertiser, and — definitely — conceited. It may be that Hitler is not so very far out after all and that the qualities which slightly jar are contributed by ancestry.