Picking the World’s Future Leaders

3 elite fellowship programs struggle to transform the intellectual legacy of a British imperialist

Félix Tito Ancalle, a son of peasants from the remote Huancavelica region

of Peru, saw a poster for an international-fellowship program while attending a book fair in Lima. Mr. Tito is the youngest of 16 children -- eight living and eight dead -- in a family that speaks the Indian language Quechua, not Spanish. He had worked as a milkman to pay for high school and earned money for college by washing dishes.

Now, having won one of the Ford Foundation international fellowships he saw advertised, he is in his second year of a master’s-degree program in intercultural bilingual education at the University of San Simón, in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Although he could have studied in any country, he chose a Bolivian graduate school “because it was very important for me to know Latin America and not just Peru.”

Mr. Tito is the somewhat unlikely beneficiary of an idea formed 100 years ago by Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist who made his fortune in the diamond mines of South Africa and who proposed in his will what he called “Colonial Scholarships.” Rhodes believed that selecting a few young men from the British colonies who excelled academically, athletically, and morally, and bringing them to study at the University of Oxford would promote the unity of the British Empire. Americans were also offered the scholarships, to encourage Anglo-American cooperation, as were Germans, because the kaiser had made studying English compulsory in German schools.

Rhodes’s vision -- that a few years of extra education at a premier university would help shape an elite group of students into world leaders who could make it into a more peaceful, better place -- has become his most enduring legacy. The announcement last month of the latest round of Rhodes scholars was news around the world.

Since Rhodes’s death, the scholarship he founded has served as a model for many others, including the Marshall and Fulbright scholarships. Rhodes’s idea has evolved to take account of intellectual centers beyond the West, and has expanded the selection of potential leaders to include a wheelchair-bound woman from India as well as an all-American football player.

Today, the three wealthiest, most selective fellowship programs that also have a global reach are the Rhodes scholarships and two newcomers. The Ford Foundation International Fellowship Program was founded in 2000 and, with its plan to spend $280-million over 10 years, is the foundation’s largest program ever. The Gates Cambridge Scholarship program, which began in 2001, is using $210-million of Bill Gates’s Microsoft earnings to create an endowment to bring students from outside of Britain to the University of Cambridge.

Those prestigious scholarships, which have thousands of applicants, both reflect and shape larger educational trends as they change how future leaders are molded, and how academic excellence is defined at the highest levels.

The Rhodes Trust, which administers the scholarships, struggles to stay faithful to Cecil Rhodes’s will in choosing scholars, while adapting to changing times. Excelling in “manly outdoor sports,” for instance, is no longer a requirement, although “physical vigor” is. The Gates scholarship program, endowed by a college dropout, purports to create an international network of leaders defined by altruism as well as academic excellence. The Ford Foundation has decided to use a decentralized, global selection process focused on the most disadvantaged and to permit study anywhere in the world, yet it seeks to fashion a new elite of future leaders.

Making Choices

All of the major fellowship programs are becoming more self-conscious about how to do their jobs best. In November, in a 17th-century friary on the shores of Lake Como, in northern Italy, two dozen educators and fellowship administrators from the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia met for an off-the-record discussion of the nuts and bolts of the international-scholarship business. The Bellagio conference was, to the knowledge of participants, the first of its kind. A central theme was selection.

Stanley J. Heginbotham, a consultant to the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship Program for New Americans, which provides graduate scholarships to immigrants and children of immigrants, pointed out flaws in long-established techniques for promoting geographic and institutional diversity. In the selection process for American Rhodes scholars, for example, candidates must first win the endorsements of their academic institutions, then pass through successive state and regional screenings, competing either in their home states or in the states where their colleges are located.

Mr. Heginbotham said that technique gives a big edge to applicants from less-populous states. For instance, a Wyoming native who attends the University of California at Berkeley and decides to apply from Wyoming has a far better chance of winning a scholarship than do the vast majority of his fellow Berkeley undergraduates who are California residents. (A candidate cannot apply from two states.)

With respect to more-controversial types of diversity, Mr. Heginbotham outlined what he called an “alternative to affirmative action as conventionally defined.” Instead of considering race, gender, religion, or geographic origin as factors for selection, Mr. Heginbotham and his colleagues at the Soros program ask about each candidate’s family and cultural background to calculate the “trajectory or distance traveled” by a candidate and thus estimate his or her future promise.

Thus, Mr. Heginbotham related, a woman who had spent five years in Thai refugee camps and who had two children as a teenager but earned a degree on her own at the University of California at Los Angeles would deserve a law-school scholarship. And a young man with a precocious record of medical research also would deserve assistance, despite the advantage of a strong start as the son of a Harvard-educated physician.

By emphasizing trajectory rather than diversity, Mr. Heginbotham said, selection panels can still award fellowships to an “astonishingly diverse” group.

Commenting later, one conference participant questioned a basic premise of elite fellowships. “In the American mind frame -- and this is true of the British to some extent -- there is this idea of a leader who will project the benefit that he or she gets from the scholarship,” said Bernd Wächter, president of the Academic Cooperation Association, in Brussels. “That has never been at the forefront of Continental European thinking. We have never had such high hopes.”

More characteristic of Europe are large-scale exchange programs, such as the German Academic Exchange Service, often known by the German acronym “DAAD,” which gave grants to more than 35,000 German and non-German students in 2000 and aims to spread German culture and attract top-rate researchers to the country, among other goals.

Mr. Wächter, a longtime observer of international fellowships, is skeptical that giving a society’s most promising young people a few more years of formal education can make more than a small contribution to solving large-scale social problems. “I don’t think we’re going to change the world using scholarship programs,” he said. “That is up in the clouds. That would be overestimating not only scholarship programs but academia.”

Not surprisingly, to those who run the Rhodes, Gates, and Ford programs, such views are not convincing.

Rhodes Goes Left?

Some of the strongest tension between Cecil Rhodes’s original goal of helping to unify “Anglo-Saxondom” and more-recent applications of his idea can be found within the Rhodes Trust itself. When Rhodes scholars from around the world meet this month in Cape Town to celebrate the scholarship’s centennial, their schedule will include visits to AIDS clinics and impoverished townships, talks on “sustainable development” and “black economic empowerment,” and a dinner in honor of Nelson Mandela.

The guiding philosophy of the Rhodes Trust has evolved from Cecil Rhodes’s imperialism into what one observer has called “high-minded liberalism.” J.S. Rowett, who runs Rhodes House, the trust’s headquarters and a base for the scholars at Oxford, interprets the founder’s requirement that scholars practice “protection of the weak” to mean that they should work for social justice. Community service, while not a requirement, is a typical feature of the successful candidate’s résumé.

Rhodes’s beneficiaries owe a special commitment to social justice in South Africa, Mr. Rowett says, because it was there that the founder made his fortune. Accordingly, the Rhodes Trust announced last year that it would give $15.8-million to establish the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, whose “programs will address the legacies of racial discrimination, profound inequality, poverty, and lack of educational opportunity” in South Africa. The new foundation will not send students to Oxford (there are nine Rhodes scholarships a year for South Africans) but will award local scholarships, promote eco-friendly tourism, and subsidize a South African research center on international law, among other projects.

Mr. Rowett spoke at the time of reconciliation and of “closing a circle of history” by uniting the name of the country’s liberator with that of one of its most infamous colonial masters. The news aroused little comment in South Africa, but the occasional dissenting voices have been passionate.

Antony Thomas, a Rhodes biographer who was banned from South Africa under the apartheid regime, denounced the gesture as “blasphemy.” The new program, he said, links “the architect of apartheid with the exponent of its destruction” and shows “terrible insensitivity.”

Simonne Horwitz, a native of Johannesburg and a Rhodes scholar now earning her doctorate in modern history at Oxford, says she approves of the new program as a way of “giving back money to South Africa.” But, she says, “I find the poster very difficult to look at, with Rhodes’s and Mandela’s faces juxtaposed. They stand for very different things. ... The fact that I am here as a woman Rhodes scholar, that there are nonwhite scholars, is totally against what Cecil Rhodes wanted.”

In fact, as the trust is keen to emphasize, Rhodes’s will expressly forbids discrimination on account of “race or religious opinions.” Mr. Rowett recalls the case of Alain LeRoy Locke, who in 1907 was the first black Rhodes scholar and who went on to become a philosopher and noted interpreter of the Harlem Renaissance. Although some American scholars protested, the trust stood by Locke. But the Rhodes committees in the United States did not select another black scholar until 1963.

Other stipulations of the will that have not aged as well have been changed. An act of Britain’s Parliament, made in 1974 at the trust’s request, opened the scholarship to women, and the inclusion of scholars from several African and Southeast Asian countries has reduced the proportion of Americans from one-half to one-third.

Even marriage no longer disqualifies candidates. Rhodes, a lifelong bachelor, once declared that the “consideration of babies and other domestic agenda generally destroys higher thought.”

The American selection committees, while not shunning Ivy League colleges or the military academies, appear to have strived in recent years to choose ever-less-traditional candidates. The latest class includes a Latin American dance champion of Polish and Ghanaian parentage, a blind skier and karate black belt, and the son of imprisoned Weathermen bombers.

But a memorandum to last year’s selection committees from Elliot F. Gerson, head of the American Rhodes alumni, emphasized that they must stay faithful to Cecil Rhodes’s will. In that regard, he wrote, academic standards must come first and candidates must be able to excel academically at Oxford, something he said had not always been the case. “If Oxford once tolerated, or even welcomed, American ‘academic tourists,’ it no longer does,” he wrote.

Search for the Marginalized

Like the Rhodes scholarship, the Ford Foundation international fellowship is aimed at educating leaders -- in this case, for the developing world. The program will pay for up to three years in graduate school for more than 3,000 students from Russia, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and it recently announced the 2003 selections: 407 fellows chosen from over 10,000 applicants.

One of the Ford program’s major premises is that those who have suffered the most from underdevelopment are especially motivated and well positioned to promote economic advancement. All Ford international fellows are therefore supposed to come from marginal and disadvantaged communities that lack systematic access to higher education.

The program’s director, Joan Dassin, explains how it attracts applications from people who are not on the usual scholarship circuits. Recruiters in Brazil, for example, concentrate on regions with relatively large black populations. Posters in Mexico state that the scholarships are for members of “indigenous groups.” Residents of China’s five largest cities are not even eligible. The program will do “whatever it takes to send a strong signal in a society that this fellowship is not pre-allotted,” Ms. Dassin says.

Another way the program draws nontraditional candidates is its lack of an age limit. Many Ford international fellows are in their 30s or 40s and have children of their own. That contrasts with Rhodes scholars, who must be under 25 when they go to Oxford.

Ford fellows also may study anywhere in the world, making the award feasible for those with obligations to their families and those unskilled in foreign languages. Although the program pays for supplementary language study and encourages fellows to learn at least one of the six official United Nations languages, knowledge of English or any other specific language is not required for eligibility.

Madezha Cepeda Bazán, a Peruvian with a Ford fellowship, chose to pursue her master’s degree in the “integration of the handicapped” at Spain’s University of Salamanca, in part because it would enable her to study in Spanish. Ms. Cepeda, who is blind, now regrets the decision. She complains that the university often fails to provide course texts in a form that she can read or listen to, and that the teaching is too focused on the needs of professionals in the field rather than the needs of people with disabilities. She found the Salamanca program on the Internet and says the fellowship administrators should provide fellows with better guidance in finding an appropriate graduate school.

“I think that’s a fair criticism,” says Alison R. Bernstein, the Ford Foundation’s vice president for education, media, arts, and culture and a member of the program’s Board of Directors. “Being able to give the best possible advice is one of the biggest challenges this program faces.”

One critic thinks the Ford Foundation should be sponsoring other kinds of study altogether. “It seems like an enormous waste of funds,” says Herbert I. London, a professor of humanities at New York University and president of the Hudson Institute, a conservative public-policy research center.

A large majority of the fellows are in the humanities and social sciences, he notes, while the developing world most urgently requires natural scientists and engineers. “What you really need,” he says, “are the technical skills to make the infrastructure function.” Mr. London also detects an ideological bias in the language with which the Ford program sets forth its goals. “Under the rubric of ‘peace and social justice,’” he says, “invariably this becomes an anti-American or hate-America outlook.”

Ms. Dassin insists that the program “is not in any way related to a partisan or political agenda” and “promotes cooperation and understanding throughout the world.” About one-fifth of the Ford fellows study in the United States, she adds. As for the relevance of their studies, she notes that “all theories of development recognize the importance” of nontechnical areas such as education, human rights, and the arts.

Whatever their field, fellows must pledge to “serve their communities and countries of origin,” which ordinarily means going back to them. Ms. Cepeda, for instance, hopes to start an “empowerment center” and job agency for people with disabilities in her hometown of Lima. Samuel Kotei Nikoi, a fellow from Ghana, talks of founding a “rural-development information bank” for philanthropic organizations in his country. Mr. Tito intends to teach people in his region of Peru how to read and write Quechua, a language he says is at risk of extinction, as part of his larger effort to promote the area’s indigenous culture.

Ms. Dassin says that fellows could help their native countries without returning to them by, for example, working for an international human-rights group. But, she says, she is realistic about how to stem brain drain: “We work with moral suasion and incentives rather than legal strictures and punitive actions.”

The Gates Network

When the University of Cambridge announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would be financing an elite fellowship for foreign students at Oxford’s ancient rival, many assumed it was an attempt to compete with the Rhodes.

Those responsible for the Gates Cambridge Scholarships program responded that while the Rhodes is limited to students from the United States, Germany, and former British colonies, the Gates is open to citizens of every nation except Britain. Forty percent of Gates scholarships, however, are reserved for American students, a fact that has prompted cries of exploitation in Britain. In a newspaper column titled “How Bill Gates Bought Cambridge,” published in The Guardian soon after the scholarship was announced, John Sutherland, a professor of English at University College London, decried the use of British tax dollars and underpaid British professors to educate “squads of Americans.”

“What are we?” Mr. Sutherland wrote. “Foreign dancing masters? A Swiss finishing school?” Gordon Johnson, provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust and president of Cambridge’s Wolfson College, responds: “That’s good polemic, but of course it’s absolute rubbish.”

“If universities are to thrive,” he adds, “they have to find the best talent at the time from wherever it comes. It’s not a sort of national system. Bright students are only going to keep out dim students.”

Unlike the Ford international and other fellowships, the Gates makes no systematic effort to recruit candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds or lesser-known institutions. “Right now we tend to draw people from the usual suspects of Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford,” Mr. Johnson says, “but I take comfort from the knowledge that prominent universities have very aggressive policies on access.” The result, he says, is that many Gates scholars from elite colleges are “not actually from elite socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Candidates for a Gates must gain admission to a program at Cambridge before the scholarship committee will consider them -- the opposite of the Rhodes procedure, and a sign that sheer academic talent is a high priority for the Gates. Although scholastic excellence is in both cases a sine qua non, the Rhodes has more-explicit extracurricular criteria, which the founder himself decreed should count for 70 percent in scholar selection.

Apart from intellectual distinction, Gates candidates are supposed to show “leadership capacity and desire to use their knowledge to contribute to society.” Mr. Johnson says the definition is intentionally broad. “We wish to be as inclusive as possible,” he says. “There’s a temptation to focus too sharply or too narrowly on [scholars interested in] nonprofit or charitable fields. There is an opportunity for people in all walks of life.” Conservatives might conclude that the Gates program observes a less-restrictive definition of social responsibility than the Rhodes or Ford programs, while liberals might argue that the Gates does not do enough to make sure that its scholars serve others.

Sean Bennett, a Gates scholar from Illinois who performed Rachmaninoff’s demanding Third Piano Concerto at age 14 and studied neuroscience as an undergraduate at Harvard, demonstrates one form of social responsibility that the Gates program found worthy. For his Cambridge Ph.D. in musicology he is investigating “why certain songs get stuck in people’s heads.” He plans to apply what he learns in “composing songs to use for socially responsible aims,” such as public-service announcements, although he acknowledges its potential value to dictators and advertisers.

The Gates trust does not expect all its scholars to change the world, yet Mr. Johnson hopes that their time in Cambridge will “raise levels of consciousness that higher education brings responsibilities,” and so turn them into a “network of activists.”

A network was Cecil Rhodes’s hope too. In the codicil to his will adding scholarships for Germans, he wrote: “The object is that an understanding between the three great powers will render war impossible, and educational relations make the strongest tie.” Germans were excluded from the scholarships during both World Wars and were not readmitted until a quarter-century after the second one. The country that once bore Cecil Rhodes’s name, Rhodesia, is now Zimbabwe, and the unity of the British Empire is no longer an ambition of the Rhodes Trust. But the core of his idea lives on, touching people as different as Bill Gates and Félix Tito Ancalle.

“They opened the door for me,” says Mr. Tito, of the Ford committee that picked him. “Some people fly in through the windows. ... I went in through the front door. They have done me justice.”

A RING OF FELLOWSHIPS

In recent years, the prestigious Rhodes scholarships have been joined by two other rich, elite international-fellowship programs. Here’s how they stack up.

http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 49, Issue 18, Page A34