Education: Rhodes Scholars

Swarthmore’s smart President Frank Aydelotte has the special and delicate job of looking after 96 of the best young brains in the U. S.—the Rhodes Scholars. After war was declared last month, Dr. Aydelotte (U. S. secretary for the scholarships) lost no time in calling his precious charges home from Oxford (TIME, Sept. 18). Last week not only Dr. Aydelotte but a solicitous nation demonstrated how much it prized Rhodes scholarship.

As the scholars debarked in Manhattan (having had traveling expenses paid by the Rhodes fund), a Swarthmore reception committee met them at the pier, whisked them off to Swarthmore’s campus, where they were fed, bedded in dormitories. The Association of American Rhodes Scholars (Rhodes alumni) promptly began to raise money to help them continue their education in the U. S. (Rhodes scholarships are good only at Oxford). Meanwhile Dr. Aydelotte asked U. S. universities whether they cared to give scholarships to his disappointed scholars.

>Yale’s Law School grabbed the most famed Rhodes Scholar, Colorado’s All-America halfback Byron (“Whizzer”) White.

> University of Chicago’s President Robert Maynard Hutchins offered full tuition scholarships for study anywhere in the university to the whole 96. Four accepted at once, several others planned to.

By last week 46 had been placed in U. S. graduate and professional schools, ten others had jobs. Nineteen, with permission from their parents and the U. S. State Department, kept their Rhodes scholarships, stayed on at Oxford. There they cut more lectures than ever, carried stretchers and sandbagged buildings, saw dons doff their black robes for titles such as “staff member of the Ministry of Economic Warfare.” Two scholars, H. K. Smith and J. F. Golay, soon went up to London to take temporary jobs with the United Press.