How Cecil Rhodes fought the Nazis — the unpredictable impacts of study abroad programs
I moved to California in 1986 with a J1 visa and a one-year fellowship from the German government to be trained and do research in pharmacology. On my first day after arriving in San Francisco I bought a used car that broke down in the middle of the Santa Cruz Mountains on the second day. Luckily I had bought a AAA membership along with the car. On the ride back, the tow truck driver noted my accent and asked me what I was doing in the U.S. So I told him. I’ll never forget the incredulous look on his face and his response: “Your government pays you to live here and hang out in a lab in Palo Alto? Why are they doing that? I wish my government would do that for me!” I don’t remember how I defended my case but I do remember that we continued talking until I was back in Mountain View. One thing I know for sure: A study showing that graduate students publish an average of 0.6 more papers when they spend time abroad would not have convinced him of the merits of using government funds for international experiences.
So then, what is it that makes a study abroad experience worthwhile in the eyes of the public, taxpayers, legislators, or potential donors? In our efforts to assess and justify investments by using quantitative performance metrics, we often forget that not every kind of research leads to readily measurable outcomes such as publications or patents, especially but not only in the humanities and other non-STEM fields.
And sometimes the biggest impact of study or research abroad programs has nothing to do with academics at all. Just as unexpected research results are often the best, we need to be open to the notion that our pre- designed metrics of academic success or economic benefit for international student experiences will often fall short and not capture the complete picture.
When some years ago I had to prepare remarks for an event at the University of Minnesota, I came across one of those unexpected outcomes. The event was to honor two of our students who had received Rhodes Scholarships. Pretty much all I knew was that the Rhodes Scholarship is the world’s oldest and most prestigious international postgraduate fellowship. So I went online to get more information and to learn about the program’s impact. The Rhodes Trust makes it easy by providing a complete list of all students who received a Rhodes fellowship since 1903.
According to Cecil Rhodes’ will, the Rhodes Trust was established in 1902 and provided scholarships for students to pursue studies and research at the University of Oxford in England. Scholarship slots were only given to the British colonies, the United States and, until 1939, to Germany. “The object”, he wrote, “is that an understanding between these countries will render war impossible and that educational relations will make the greatest tie.” Obviously, global competence as a learning outcome is not an invention of our time.
Bill Clinton and Robert Reich came to my mind as more recent Rhodes Scholars from the United States who pursued subsequent careers in politics, but it was news to me that the founding document also included applicants from Germany. So I was wondering who might have been a German student and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, England, during the first four decades of the twentieth century, a time period not known for consistently friendly exchanges between the two countries. And as expected, the list of German fellows during that time was not very long, but their career pathways turned out to be very similar and quite revealing for my argument here.
Two names immediately stood out, Adam von Trott zu Solz and Albrecht von Bernstorff. After finishing their studies in a number of fields including law, politics, economics, and philosophy, they returned to Germany. Both went into foreign policy and both were ultimately part of the conspiracy against Adolf Hitler that resulted in the famous failed assassination attempt of July 1944, a plot which, if successful, might have saved untold lives. Trott and von Bernstorff were executed by the Nazis, along with many other conspirators.
At first glance this looks like a striking story, but perhaps only anecdotal, as stories tend to be. So I decided to do the math with the records of German Rhodes Scholars between 1930 and the outbreak of World War II in 1939. There were a total of 19 Rhodes Scholars from Germany; four were part of conspiracies and assassination attempts against Hitler and an additional eight ended up fighting in World War II with the United States and the Allies against the Nazis.
In today’s terms, the outcome for 63% of the fellows could be called an exceptional placement record, not necessarily in the job market, but in history. Exceptional because we know that resistance in the 3rd Reich was anything but a mass movement. Very few people in Germany recognized and rejected the criminal and murderous nature of this regime. These Rhodes Scholars however, during their two years at Oxford in a climate of academic and political freedom, went through a transformational experience that couldn’t be more dramatic and impactful both for themselves and their home country.
“Organized resistance to dictators” was never a measure for the Rhodes Scholarship when it was created, nor an intended outcome. Yet, these events and the fellows involved are commemorated in Balliol College at Oxford as a powerful testimony to what international educational relations can bring about. If you extrapolate these numbers you could even imagine that had there been more German Rhodes Scholars between the two world wars, maybe history would have taken a different course. And whatever you might think of Cecil Rhodes, at least he put a sizable chunk of his money to a good cause.
Henning Schroeder is a former vice provost and dean of graduate education at the University of Minnesota and currently teaches in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.
An earlier version of this article was published in GradEdge.
