Rhodes Scholar Research Articles

ASECS at 50: Interview with Robert Darnton

ASECS at 50:Interview with Robert Darnton Elizabeth Andrews Bond (bio) and Robert Darnton Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, Emeritus and University Librarian, Emeritus at Harvard University. He earned his A.B. from Harvard University and his B.Phil. and D.Phil. at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. After graduate school, he worked as a reporter for The New York Times. Darnton joined the faculty of the Department of History at Princeton University in 1968, where he worked for forty years. He became Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University in 2007. He has served as president of the American Historical Association (1999) and the International Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (1987). Darnton is a member of the French Legion of Honor, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, and an awardee of the Institut de France's Del Duca World Prize in the Humanities. Darnton is well known as a leader in the field of cultural history. Cultural history as an approach emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s, as historians engaged with new theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches that equipped them to move beyond the study of elites. Darnton was among a group of historians who embraced critical theory and cultural anthropology to study the Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France. His books on cultural history include The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984), which has been translated into eighteen languages, and The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (1991). Robert Darnton has worked as a groundbreaking scholar in the history of the book. Over the course of his career, he has studied authors and readers, but also the numerous and fascinating middlemen who mediated the world of print: [End Page 21] the publishing houses, the printers and their apprentices, the agents, smugglers, peddlers and retailers, and the censors and police. His scholarship has enabled historians to understand the connections of such figures to one another, and to limn their engagement with broader intellectual currents, as well as state and market forces. He visualized this complex system of interaction within a "communications circuit," a model he first proposed in 1982 in his article, "What is the History of Books?" In addition to numerous articles, book chapters, and edited volumes, he has written more than a dozen books, which include: The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (1979), The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (1995), The Case for Books (2009), The Devil in the Holy Water or the Art of Slander in France from Louis XIV to Napoleon (2010), Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (2010), and A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution (2018). Darnton's work has profoundly shaped the way historians today understand the world of print and communication in the eighteenth century. Our conversation began with a discussion of Darnton's recollections of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the 1970s and 1980s and his perspective on the field of eighteenth-century studies today. The discussion then turned to his experiences and influence on the field of eighteenth-century studies through his research and his leadership in the digital projects, Gutenberg-e and the Digital Public Library of America. Elizabeth Andrews Bond: You have worked in a range of leadership positions over your career, including on the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Executive Board (1976–1980), and as President of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS), which held its Enlightenment Congress in Budapest in 1987. What are your recollections of ASECS from that period, and of the 1987 Congress in particular? Robert Darnton: As I recollect (but my memory is blurred and tinted around the edges with shop talk), ASECS was founded in the wake of a private steam ship, which took the participants of the first Enlightenment conference late at night in July 1963 from the château de Chillon on Lac Léman to Geneva. Theodore Besterman masterminded the affair. He had published the first of the 107 volumes of Voltaire's correspondence seven years earlier from...

Kenneth Arrow as teacher and adviser

My undergraduate years at Princeton ended in 1966 with a concentration in philosophy. I was fortunate to have a Canadian Rhodes Scholarship that took me to Magdalen College, Oxford. After some fumb...

Wilder Graves Penfield

Neurosurgeon whose scientific contributions span epilepsy to cortical representation. A great sportsman and a pioneer of functional neurosurgery, he was born in Spokane, WA, USA, on Jan 26, 1891, and died in Montreal, Canada, on April 5, 1976, aged 85 years. When Wilder Graves Penfield was eight years old, his father, Charles Samuel Penfield, abandoned the family. His mother, Jean Jefferson, then moved with her children to Hudson, in Wisconsin, where she founded the Galahad School for Boys. Penfield received his secondary education in this school, and eventually attended Princeton University (NJ, USA). Although he first studied philosophy, Penfield ultimately decided to pursue medicine, the profession of both his grandfather and father, because that seemed to him the most direct way to “make the world a better place in which to live”. To pay for his medical education, he coached the Princeton freshman football team. At that time, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and was accepted to Merton College (University of Oxford, Oxford, UK) to study medicine. The College granted him special permission to defer his entrance until the end of the autumn of 1914, so that he could fulfill his agreement to coach the Princeton Varsity football team. Before moving to Oxford, he also managed the baseball team, excelled at wrestling, and worked his way up to first string tackle in the football team, all while maintaining outstanding academic qualifications. At the University of Oxford, Penfield met the two great physicians who most influenced his career path: Charles Scott Sherrington, a neurophysiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1932 for the study of reflexes and muscle innervation, and William Osler, a pathologist who is now considered one of the fathers of modern medicine. Subsequently, Penfield entered the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Baltimore, MD, USA), where he finished his degree in 1918. He then completed an internship in Boston (MA, USA) under the guidance of neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing. After returning to the UK to complete a research fellowship at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, in 1921 he accepted a post as Associate Professor in Surgery at Columbia University (New York City, NY, USA). However, after a few years in New York City, he felt that the best place to carry out his research ambitions was Canada, specifically at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), where he moved in 1928, and where the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) would open in 1934. At McGill and the MNI, Penfield mapped brain responses to electrical stimulation in the course of bringing therapeutic relief to conscious patients under local anesthesia, and catalogued a great quantity of information about brain physiology. He also recorded important observations on basic functions, such as language, sensitivity, and motility, and on their preservation. In collaboration with his colleague Herbert Jasper, Penfield also created what is now known as “the Montreal procedure”, by which patients with drug-resistant epilepsy were treated while conscious, so that the relevant brain areas could be targeted accurately during surgery, thus reducing side effects and complications. Through his work in mapping the cerebral cortex via stimulation, Penfield created the so-called homunculus. Even today, the homunculus is used in neurophysiology as a cortical representation of various parts of the human body. Penfield retired from the McGill medical faculty in 1954, and gave up his directorship of MNI six years later.

Affective politics and colonial heritage, Rhodes Must Fall at UCT and Oxford

ABSTRACTThe article analyses the spatial entanglement of colonial heritage struggles through a study of the Rhodes Must Fall student movement at the University of Cape Town and the University of Oxford. We aim to shed light over why statues still matter in analyzing colonial traces and legacies in urban spaces and how the decolonizing activism of the RMF movement mobilizes around the controversial heritage associated with Cecil Rhodes at both places – a heritage that encompasses statues, buildings, Rhodes scholarship and the Rhodes Trust funds. We include a comparative study of the Facebook use of RMF as it demonstrates significant differences between the two places in the development of the student movements as political activism. Investigating in more detail the heritage politics of RMF at UCT we fledge out what we call an affective politics using non-representational bodily strategies. We argue that in order for actual social movements to mobilize in current political controversies, they need to put affective tactics to use.

Congrats, Rhodes Scholars!

Women in Higher EducationVolume 27, Issue 3 p. 9-9 Congrats Congrats, Rhodes Scholars! First published: 26 February 2018 https://doi.org/10.1002/whe.20547Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume27, Issue3March 2018Pages 9-9 RelatedInformation

Ayub Khan Ommaya (1930-2008): Legacy and Contributions to Neurosurgery.

Ayub Khan Ommaya (1930-2008) was a pioneering neurosurgeon of Pakistani origin who is widely known for inventing the Ommaya reservoir, a ventricular catheter with a mushroom-shaped dome for administration of intraventricular therapies. As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Ommaya developed an early interest in studying traumatic brain injury. Over the course of his career, Ommaya employed subhuman primate models to better understand mechanisms underlying human cerebral concussion. His work on traumatic brain injury led to the creation of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, a center for injury prevention research at the Center for Disease Control. This historical paper visits Ommaya's life story and recounts his key contributions to neurosurgery.

Classics Equips a Civilized Person for Any Task: An Interview with Caroline Alexander

ClassicsEquips a Civilized Person for AnyTask: An Interview with Caroline Alexander PATRICK O’DONNELL Caroline Alexander is a classicist, a writer, an independent scholar and the author of nine books, including a notable translation of The Iliad. Born in Florida of English parents in 1956, Alexander spent her childhood in Tallahassee, where she attended Florida State University, after which she was in the first group of women chosen for Rhodes Scholarships, in 1977. She holds a PhD in Classics from Columbia University, where she was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. She has written for The New Yorker and for National Geographic magazine. At age twenty-six, Alexander founded a Classics department at the University of Malawi, her only academic appointment in a long and distinguished career of writing and scholarship . She was instrumental in opening the sport of modern pentathlon to women and has competed in three national championships. She has written definitive, best-selling books on the voyage of and mutiny on the Bounty and on Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition, two astounding tales of heroic leadership and survival. Alexander’s work is notable for the depth of its research and its independence from received ideas. She is resourceful in support of her work: in order to help finance her travels in Borneo, after participating in the North Borneo Expedition of 1981, she even sold the electric wok she had won in that nation’s annual footrace; she interviewed the somewhat-demented former dictator Hastings Kamuzu Banda, in Latin, when his other languages failed him, on the occasion of his trial for murder. In person, Alexander, still athletic, is a woman of relaxed, natural dignity, who laughs easily. She is an excellent mimic and a skilled storyteller. Alexander lives on Mt. Desert Island in Maine. The conversation below began on May 17th, 2017, in the Turtletown Athenaeum in Concord, New Hampshire, and continued thereafter. ❖ Patrick: Shall we start in the thick of things? When did you discover Homer? Caroline: I had the very good fortune, I believe, of going to arion 25.2 fall 2017 one of the worst high schools I could have gone to. We were taught very little. Essentially, I had lots of free time for reading, so I read The Iliad absolutely on my own terms at age fourteen. It became my book. P: Lattimore? C: Yes, I chose Lattimore because it’s what was in the Florida State University bookstore. I was highly interested in the classics in a very abstract sense, and I knew The Iliad was the Everest. In this weird high-school program at Florida High our English assignment was to read what we wanted and the teacher then gave points for what was read. I had the luxury of reading The Iliad without any instruction. P: What do you mean when you say, “it became my book”? C: You know, I never met anyone who felt about The Iliad as I did. I have never found people who thought it was theirs. They studied it, but to me The Iliad was like Wuthering Heights or War and Peace, just something utterly great that I entered and possessed. When you are young, you own what you read. You do not calibrate against what other people are reading or thinking. So a good book becomes “your” book. P: What do you remember about your first reading of The Iliad? C: Since I was given the opportunity to read it utterly on my own terms, I blipped over many of the names and frankly many of the fighting parts, which just seemed to me at that age not interesting, so I sped, quickly reading through those. The great speeches are what I remember most, and the great characterizations. P: And your mother encouraged your lifelong interest in The Iliad. Forty-five years after your first reading of the epic, you dedicated your translation to your mother, Elizclassics equips a civilized person for any task 136 abeth Ann Kirby, who, as you put it, “always knew I would do this.” C: Yes. She always knew I would do this. I almost want to say that she expected this translation. When I was young, she...

Ernest S. Griffith: A Renaissance Man, a Pioneering Public Administrator

Abstract In the 1940s and 1950s, Ernest Stacey Griffith was well known on Capitol Hill and frequently featured in major newspaper and magazine articles about the work of Congress. He was also recognized as an influential scholar. Today, few members of Congress and only a handful of the thousands employed by the legislative branch have ever heard of him. Even at the Congressional Research Service—Congress's think tank—which he headed for 18 years, Griffith is mostly an unfamiliar name. During his century‐long life, this Rhodes Scholar left an indelible legacy in several arenas. Griffith was not only a pioneering advisor to the nation's legislators and an astute observer of American democracy, he also achieved acclaim as a public administrator, an innovative teacher and educator, an early supporter of the conservation movement, a prominent community and religious leader, and a record‐setting mountain climber.

‘So Much to Do’: Oxford and the Wills of Cecil Rhodes

ABSTRACTCecil Rhodes (1853–1902) safeguarded his imperial vision with a series of wills. Sensing that his life would be relatively short, he left to his trustees the task of carrying out his wishes after his death. He also left a substantial fortune to make it possible. This article uses those wills to follow the development of Rhodes’ ‘big idea’, the creation of a secret society to promote imperial expansion, from its birth in Oxford to the final compromise of the Rhodes Scholarships. The article questions the existence of a much-quoted teenage will, examines the influences on Rhodes at Oxford that led to the famous ‘Confession of Faith’ will and identifies a link between the 1892 will and the Mandela Rhodes scholarships founded in 2003.

The Rhodes Scholarship in the Current Era of Student Activism: What Do We Consider “Prestigious” and Who Benefits?

Contemporary student activism has revealed deep feelings of alienation on college campuses, prompting strong reactions to current and historical racial injustice, including the history of Cecil Rhodes. Can advisors promote restorative justice by encouraging reflection upon privileges afforded to Rhodes scholars and their responsibility to address society’s global problem?

A Tribute to William Jay Smith

A Tribute to William Jay Smith Suzanne Marrs The distinguished poet William Jay Smith, Eudora Welty’s good friend, died on August 18, 2015, at the age of ninety-seven. In addition to writing many volumes of poetry, Smith penned books of children’s verse, translations of poems by Jules Laforgue and Andrei Voznesensky, memoirs, and a collection of his own astute literary criticism. He took bachelor’s and master’s degrees in French literature at Washington University; served in the US Navy during World War II; was a Rhodes Scholar; taught at Hollins College, Columbia University, and Williams College; and from 1968 to 1970, served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (a post we now call Poet Laureate). The intersections of Smith’s life with Welty’s were numerous and important to them both. They met in 1950 in Italy, amid the glories of Florence, introduced to each other by John Robinson. They saw each other frequently in New York City. Welty spoke three consecutive years at the Suffield Writer–Reader Conference where Smith was on staff; Smith and his wife Sonja came to Jackson for Eudora Welty Day in 1973; Smith organized a celebration of Welty’s work at Hollins College in 1974; Welty invited Smith and his wife to join her at the White House in 1980 when President Jimmy Carter awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom; and Welty delivered a reading from Hawthorne’s “The Birth-mark” at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine when Smith was poet-in-residence there. Smith’s 1980 memoir Army Brat, a book about growing up within the confines of Jefferson Barracks Military Post near St. Louis, helped to convince Welty to deliver the Harvard lectures that became One Writer’s Beginnings. Yet even this impressive (and partial) list of their meetings in person and on the page does not do justice to the closeness of their friendship. A single fact does: Smith was one of the few friends with whom Welty discussed the two great loves of her life, John Robinson and Kenneth Millar, aka Ross Macdonald. The exchange of such confidences marks the true depth of their relationship. I count myself supremely fortunate to have called Bill Smith my friend. He and I met at Eudora Welty’s funeral in 2001 and felt an immediate affinity as we shared our grief. Later we discovered that relatives of his were neighbors of my parents in Norman, Oklahoma. And our Oklahoma [End Page 9] ties were intensified when he gave me a copy of his magnificent book The Cherokee Lottery, a series of poems about the Trail of Tears, which ended in the territory that would become my native state. When I spoke of my work on a Welty biography, Bill was quick to offer assistance; I spent a productive and delightful week near his home in Cummington, Massachusetts, talking with him daily about the confluence of his life with Eudora’s. Subsequently Bill twice agreed to give poetry readings at Millsaps College, where I taught. Both students and faculty found these readings engraved in their memories. Then in 2011, I was honored when Bill asked me to write the foreword to his book My Friend Tom, an account of his almost fifty-year friendship with Tennessee Williams, which was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2012. In this memoir, Smith wrote that Eudora Welty “became for me during my entire literary life the kind of mentor that Tom Williams had been at the beginning” (101). Like Welty, William Jay Smith possessed a genius for friendship in addition to genius as a writer. Blessed with a ready sense of humor, he was gracious and unassuming, brilliant and generous, a champion of social justice, traditional poetic forms, and love for family and friends. The world is a lesser place without him. Suzanne Marrs Eudora Welty Foundation Scholar-in-Residence Works Cited Marrs, Suzanne. Eudora Welty: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, 2005. Print. Google Scholar ——. “Foreword.” My Friend Tom. By William Jay Smith. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. xi-xxi. Print. Google Scholar Smith, William Jay. Army Brat: A Memoir. New York: Persea...

Evidence‐based medicine among the dreaming spires of Oxford: the Pfizer Pharmacy Grant 2014

In November 2014, I attended a short course at Oxford University, Teaching Evidence-Based Practice, with assistance from an SHPA grant. The course was run by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) and the University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education. The CEBM is a recognised world leader in evidence-based practice. This was an intensive course for those who already have skills in evidence-based medicine, and focused on the teaching of critical appraisal and evidence-based practice. The NSW Medicines Information Centre (MIC) runs courses for pharmacists in Medicines Information. Critical appraisal is an integral part of both the introductory and advanced courses offered by the MIC. I wanted to attend the course to improve my teaching skills in an area that many people find dry and overly technical. The course is part of Oxford's Master in Science (MSc) in Evidence-Based Health Care or Postgraduate Diploma in Health Research, but is also available as a stand-alone professional development course. The CEBM courses attract participants from around the world with attendees from Europe, America, Canada, Scandinavia, Southeast Asia and Australia. They were from primary and secondary care, academia, medical and non-medical backgrounds, and junior and senior positions; one was a current Rhodes Scholar. Most were involved in teaching of some kind ranging from formal university and clinical teaching to responsibility for peer programs and courses. This wide variety of backgrounds and experience allowed for stimulating cross-pollination of ideas. The course was designed to equip attendees to teach evidence-based practice and to develop effective and relevant educational curricula in evidence-based health care. Individual guidance was given to extend critical appraisal and teaching skills. The course was divided into formal plenary sessions, and small group work. Plenaries covered searching methods, teaching critical appraisal, learning styles, statistics, curriculum development and evaluation. Most plenary sessions combined a teaching demonstration with commentary on the methods used and alternatives. Emphasis was placed on engaging participants and demystifying the process of appraisal. Particular attention was given to the teaching of statistics, which many people find daunting. Each attendee gave at least two presentations to his or her tutorial group, one of which was on statistics. Preparation time for the statistics presentation was deliberately limited. Criticism of presentations was focused on improvement and identifying strengths, making the process educational rather than threatening. The topics were varied, reflecting the difference in backgrounds of the participants. This diversity was a real bonus. One doctor commented at the end of the course that she had initially been disappointed at being the only clinician in the group, but that she had learnt enormously from seeing other professional viewpoints. The course was both stimulating and practical. It has given me more confidence to teach evidence-based practice. I plan to use the skills learnt to develop a short course for pharmacists and a set of online tutorials. I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Society of Hospital Pharmacists of Australia and Pfizer Australia Pty Ltd. Without this support, I would not have been able to attend the course. Leone M. Snowden, B. Pharm NSW Medicines Information Centre, St Vincent's Hospital Sydney, Sydney, Australia E-mail: Leone.Snowden@svha.org.au

Salim Yusuf: global leader in cardiovascular disease research

Salim Yusuf: global leader in cardiovascular disease research

Kenneth Alfred Kingsley North

Kenneth Alfred Kingsley North (“Ken”), a keen sportsman at Otago University and president of the students’ union, worked with Sir John Eccles, Nobel laureate, to obtain his BMedSc. Three years...

Wanted: Personal Assistant

When I was an undergrad at Harvard, the English department produced fancy brochures about the opportunities available to its majors: teacher, editor, Rhodes scholar. Personal assistant was not listed. I hadn’t even heard of such positions until senior year, when older friends, artistically inclined friends, started snagging them. It’s the position I think I’ve heard most about now.

In memoriam: William Feindel, O.C., G.O.Q., MDCM, D. Phil; July 12, 1918-January 12, 2014.

Dr Feindel's many contributions to medical science were recognized in 2003, when he was among the earliest inductees into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. The induction was one of numerous honours accorded to him, including honorary degrees and membership in the Order of Canada, the Ordre national du Quebec (Grand Officier), the Academie des Grand Montrealais, and the Royal Society of Canada. Dr Feindel was an accomplished neurosurgeon, technological innovator, visionary administrator, inspiring teacher, and possessed talents beyond the realm of medicine. His accomplishments live on at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, which he helped to bring to world prominence, and in the many medical fellows whom he mentored throughout his long career. William Howard Feindel was born on 12 July 1918 in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. He earned his undergraduate degree at Acadia University, where many years later he would serve as a Chancellor. After graduation, he attended Merton College, Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar, earning a D. Phil. in neuroanatomy. In Montreal during the Second World War, Dr Feindel worked to develop treatments for war injuries along with The Neuro's founder and first director, Dr Wilder Penfield. After earning his medical degree at McGill University and further studies in neurosurgery at Oxford, Dr Feindel became the first professor of neurosurgery at the medical college in Saskatoon in 1955. Seeing the potential of brain scanning equipment, he developed the first automatic isotope scanner. Dr Feindel returned to 'The Neuro' in 1959 as the first William Cone. Professor of Neurosurgery. Three years later, he was appointed as The Neuro's neurosurgeon-in-chief. A researcher who contributed to more than 500 scientific papers, Dr Feindel had special interest in determining the causes of focal epilepsy, as well as in finding methods for the early detection of brain tumours and strokes. He helped to develop what came to be known as the Montreal Procedure for temporal lobe epilepsy, which involved the surgical resection of the antero-mesial temporal lobe. The procedure was subsequently adopted throughout the world, leading to cures for thousands of epilepsy patients. Dr Feindel was the main catalyst for the founding of the International Society of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism and subsequently the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism. He was also the President of the 13th International Symposium on Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, Montreal, June 1987. During his tenure as The Neuro's director from 1972 to 1984, Dr Feindel largely introduced revolutionary brain scanning tools to Canada, acquiring the country's first CAT, MR, and PET units. McGill inaugurated the William Feindel Chair in Neuro-Oncology in 2001 with the support of the Clive Baxter Memorial Fund. Along with his scientific research papers, Dr Feindel also wrote extensively on topics of medical history, especially about the work of Thomas Willis, the seventeenth-century British pioneer in brain research who coined the term, ‘neurology'. In 1964, Dr Feindel published a facsimile in English of Willis's treatise of 1664, ‘Cerebri Anatome' (Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves). The Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University elected Dr Feindel as Honorary Osler Librarian in 1984. Dr Feindel also published a collection of his historical observations about life and work at The Neuro in 2013 as Images of the Neuro. He was also an avid amateur pianist and violinist, performing along with his colleagues at 'The Neuro's' annual variety show. Dr Feindel was married to Faith (nee Lyman), with whom he had three sons Christopher (Mary Ann), Michael (Karen), and Alexander (1985, Ling), and three daughters, Patricia, Janet (Robert), and Anna, two grandsons Michael (Laura) and Andrew (Tina) and a great grandson Finn.

Seventeen Months in the President’s Chair: Morris Abram, Black-Jewish Relations and the Anatomy of a Failed Presidency

Seventeen Months in the President’s Chair: Morris Abram, Black-Jewish Relations and the Anatomy of a Failed Presidency Jonathan Krasner (bio) By virtually all accounts, Morris Berthold Abram was an inspired choice to lead Brandeis University when its founding president, Abram L. Sachar, announced his retirement in 1967. A Rhodes Scholar and civil rights lawyer, Abram served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as the first general counsel to the Peace Corps, and the United States representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. What is more, he had stature in the Jewish community as the youngest national president of the American Jewish Committee. Abram’s selection was lauded by faculty members, donors, and Jewish community leaders alike, and his inauguration, in October 1968, was celebrated with great fanfare. A mere seventeen months later, however, Abram abruptly resigned, leaving the university adrift during one of the most tumultuous periods in its history. Abram’s tenure coincided with a season of student unrest at American universities, much of it propelled by a radicalized civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War. At Brandeis, the new president had barely established himself when he was confronted by a black student takeover of a central administration and communications complex. The eleven day occupation of Ford and Sydeman Halls, which caught Abram and most of the campus by surprise, threatened to paralyze his young administration and tear the community apart. Even after the immediate crisis was resolved, student-administration relations remained tense and threatened to explode in a broad-based show of student defiance. When Abram announced his departure, in February 1970, the conventional wisdom was that he was fleeing a damaged presidency of an unruly campus. Abram insisted that his resignation was occasioned by his decision to jump into the contest for the Democratic nomination in that year’s New York State Senate race. But even before his short-lived campaign fizzled, his explanation failed to satisfy many. Abram was certainly looking for an escape hatch. But the impetus for his departure was more complicated than it first appeared. In fact, Abram emerged from the Ford Hall incident relatively unscathed. He managed to defuse the crisis while keeping his various constituencies [End Page 27] united. Abram’s refusal to call in the local police to forcibly remove the demonstrators distinguished him from other university presidents in similar predicaments, and was widely hailed at the time. Yet, in spite of the plaudits, the occupation left Abram feeling embittered and even betrayed. This civil rights activist who fought successfully to overturn the State of Georgia’s discriminatory electoral system was hardly a racist “cracker”1 as the protesters alleged. Nonetheless, he was incapable of finding common ground with the African American occupiers and their white sympathizers. Abram’s palpable frustration and imperious demeanor poisoned his subsequent relationship with students and faculty. The Ford Hall crisis is worthy of attention because it sheds light on the political metamorphosis of a prominent American Jewish leader from a Southern liberal voting rights activist to a neo-conservative opponent of affirmative action. Abram’s transformation is fascinating in part because it seems to capture a more general Jewish disillusionment with the direction and tenor of the civil rights movement in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. An exploration of Abram’s failed presidency also contributes to our understanding of late-1960s campus radicalism, the deterioration of black-Jewish relations, and the early history of Brandeis University, which was only twenty years old when Abram took the reins. “I Was Wholly at Odds with the Life Around Me.” “Growing up” in the rural south, Morris Abram admitted, “I was wholly at odds with the life around me.” Born in Fitzgerald, Georgia, on June 19, 1918, the second of four children, Abram was raised in a family of limited financial means but an almost religious belief in the value of secular education, especially for boys. Abram fulfilled these expectations, not only by earning top grades at the University of Georgia, but also by attending Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and earning a law degree from the University of Chicago. Abram’s father, Sam, a...

Growing to One World: The Life of J. King Gordon, by Eileen R. Janzen

"Growing to One World: The Life of J. King Gordon, by Eileen R. Janzen." Canadian Journal of History, 49(3), pp. 531–532

Obituary for Stuart Hall

There have been many obituaries for Stuart Hall—the great cultural theorist and public intellectual, who died in February—all remarking on the wider significance of his work and life, especially his unrelenting commitment to social justice and his wonderful humanity. He was successful not only in extending the borders of social science, and cultural studies in particular, but in doing so in such brilliant and accessible ways as to make him possibly the leading public intellectual of the left for some decades. I had the great good fortune to work with him after he joined the Open University in 1979 and to become aware at first hand of the nature and wider significance of his work and life, and of the breadth of his impact. Stuart was in many ways both an iconic and an exemplary figure in social science, especially—but far from exclusively—in the UK, where he worked all his adult life, having arrived as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford from Jamaica in the early 1950s. His contribution stretched over 50 years and he was still going strong until shortly before his death, with the publication of ‘After Neoliberalism: the Kilburn manifesto’, which he wrote with Doreen Massey and Mike Rustin and published last April (available online at www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/manifesto.html); typically, this was a stringent and original analysis combined with possibilities of alternatives. It is interesting that this work emerged in the aftermath of a massive and qualitative shift in the nature of capitalism that outstrips the boundaries of current theorizing in fundamental respects, for in some ways it mirrors the political earthquakes that emerged at the beginning of his stay in England, brought about by the quasi-simultaneous eruptions of the Suez crisis and the Hungarian revolution—the one with its dramatic signalling of the end of the imperial world and the other with the devastation of the only realistic alternative to capitalism. They changed not just the focus of politics, but that of existing ways of thinking about politics. These crises forced redefinitions of both the foci and nature of left politics in Britain, and it was in this context that new forms and organs of left theorizing quickly emerged—in particular, perhaps, in the form of the New Left Review, whose first 10 issues Stuart edited (often after days of supply teaching). The whole political landscape was transformed, not just with the search for new understandings of politics, but new practices, for instance in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, of which Stuart was a prominent member, and increasingly of feminist movements. There was a pervasive but unarticulated sense that programmes based on the idea of ‘redistribution’ were no longer sufficient in what were seen—and

Penicillin: World War II infections and Howard Florey

Howard Florey was born in South Australia in 1898. After studying medicine at the University of Adelaide he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to work in Oxford under Sir Charles Sherrington. After subsequently undertaking a PhD at Cambridge and a brief period as Professor of Physiology at The University of Sheffield, he was appointed to a chair in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford, where he remained until his retirement.