UC's Bumpy Rhodes Record : Some at Berkeley Say Students Are Victims of Bias in Selection of Scholars

By WILLIAM TROMBLEY

March 18, 1986 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

BERKELEY —

When Adhiambo Odaga, a 23-year-old graduate student in city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, recently was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, it was a double victory. Not only was Odaga the first Kenyan student to win a Rhodes, she was also Berkeley’s first winner in 22 years.

In that same time, Harvard has produced 107 Rhodes scholars, Yale 67, Princeton 53 and Stanford, Berkeley’s archrival, 30.

Although Berkeley has more Nobel Prize winners on its faculty than any other American university and is considered one of the nation’s foremost research institutions, it has lost out consistently in the competition for these prized undergraduate scholarships, which pay between $15,000 and $22,000 for each of two years of study at Britain’s Oxford University.

“Clearly, something is amiss somewhere,” said Kenneth T. Jowitt, professor of political science and chairman of the Berkeley campus Rhodes committee.

Jowitt believes Rhodes selection committees were politically biased against Berkeley candidates from about 1965 to about 1975, when the campus was home to the Free Speech Movement and, later, to strong protests against the Vietnam War.

“I don’t have direct evidence,” he said, “but I would be overwhelmingly surprised if there was not a bias against Berkeley, because in most parts of the community there certainly was.”

Jowitt’s suspicions are shared by Sanford E. Elberg, a former dean of graduate studies who spent what he described as “17 years of agony, blind rage and resignation” attempting to find suitable Rhodes candidates. The campus’ prominence as a national symbol of protest against the Vietnam War, suggests Elberg, caused the selection committee to be “perhaps somewhat prejudiced against Berkeley.”

In recent years, Jowitt believes, political animosity toward Berkeley applicants has disappeared but has been replaced by a kind of cultural bias.

According to Jowitt and others who have observed the Rhodes selection process over a number of years, students from smaller, private institutions have a better chance of winning than those from large public universities.

They point out that schools such as Dartmouth, Brown, Reed and Williams have produced more Rhodes scholars than Berkeley or UCLA or the University of Michigan.

“I think relatively small private schools have a culture that is very different from a large public campus like this,” Jowitt said. “Berkeley is a lot like New York City and a lot of people just don’t like New York City.”

Some critics within the Berkeley community, however, lay much of the blame on the university itself. At Berkeley, professors are hired, promoted and honored much more for their research accomplishments than for their teaching skills, and undergraduate education tends to be slighted. Senior faculty members rarely know undergraduates well enough to write the kind of recommendations that weigh heavily with the Rhodes selection committees.

“To win a Rhodes Scholarship,” said Charles Muscatine, professor of English and a longtime leader in efforts to improve undergraduate instruction at Berkeley, “you need really strong letters of support from friends on the faculty--and Berkeley undergraduates, by and large, don’t have any friends on the faculty.”

But Jowitt and others are convinced that the biggest problem is that many of Berkeley’s best students do not fit the traditional Rhodes mold.

“It isn’t that (the selection committees) make up their minds that these radical students from Berkeley aren’t going to be Rhodes scholars,” said Neil J. Smelser, university professor of sociology at Berkeley and a Rhodes scholar himself in the early 1950s. “It’s not as simple as that. But some of the qualities the committees are looking for are not necessarily qualities our best students have.”

“They like thoughtful students who are not overly negative,” Smelser added. “They select clean-cut kids if possible. Then there is that long tradition of the ‘well-rounded’ individual, the ‘leader’ who displays ‘physical vigor’ and all that. Many of our best students just aren’t like that.”

Said Jowitt: “The Rhodes profile may be just so narrow that it can’t encompass this kind of culture and this kind of student,” he said. “If that’s true, we should get out of the competition.”

By the “Rhodes profile,” Jowitt referred to the qualities that Cecil J. Rhodes, the British empire-builder and mining magnate, was seeking when he established the Rhodes Scholarship Trust at the turn of the century.

Scholarship winners, chosen in the United States and 15 other countries, must be good students but not “merely bookworms,” Rhodes said. They were also to display leadership qualities, concern for the disadvantaged, “moral force of character” and “fondness of success in manly outdoor sports.”

In short, they must be “the best men for the world’s fight,” in Rhodes’ words. Ten years ago, the British Parliament decided to allow “the best women” to compete as well.

Berkeley Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman, who has chaired the California Rhodes selection committee for the last two years, said, “I have the feeling that some of the people who are on that committee take better to students who are graceful . . . while many of our best kids are tough and aggressive.”

But Frank Tatum, a San Francisco attorney and Stanford graduate who has served as secretary to the state selection committee for 30 years, denied that there has been either cultural or political bias against Berkeley applicants.

“There’s just not the remotest evidence of discrimination,” Tatum said in an interview in his office in San Francisco.

“This is not to say that we haven’t had to struggle a bit to get across the emotional gaps” between applicants and selectors, he added. “We’ve had to struggle to be sure we were being objective, especially in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, but I think we’ve done a pretty good job.”

As evidence, Tatum noted that a scholarship was awarded to actor-singer Kris Kristofferson, a 1958 graduate of Pomona College, even though he appeared for his Rhodes interview wearing hiking boots.

“On the contrary, all of us are conscious of Berkeley and would be more than cheered to have an electable candidate,” Tatum said. “I approach the dossiers every year, hoping to find a good candidate from Berkeley.”

Surprise at Rejection

But several Berkeley faculty members and administrators involved in the selection process said the campus has put forward excellent candidates in recent years and expressed surprise that they had been rejected.

Besides whatever political or cultural bias may exist, Berkeley candidates, like all those from public institutions in California, suffer from the fact that they come from a big state with a very large pool of applicants.

(Each state selection committee picks two winners. From this pool, each of eight regional selection committees chooses four students, for a total of 32 U.S. Rhodes scholars each year.)

A student may apply from his college or university or from his home state. This rule works to the advantage of universities--such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford--that draw students from all over the country. Many winners at these schools actually apply from their homes in small-population states, where the competition at the state level is not as stiff as in California.

Berkeley, by contrast, draws more than 90% of its undergraduates from California. “We really are at a distinct disadvantage on the numbers,” Heyman said.

Not Many Selected

Since the Rhodes competition began in 1904, there have been 18 winners from Berkeley, according to the office of the American Secretary of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust, which is located at Pomona College. This ties Berkeley with the University of Nevada, the University of Oregon, the University of Utah and Duke University.

The only other UC campus with any winners is UCLA, with seven, the most recent in 1973.

California State University officials said they knew of no Rhodes scholars from any of the 19 campuses in that system.

USC has had two winners--one of them former football quarterback Pat Haden, who won in 1975.

Haden was something of an exception because the pressure of big-time college sports usually deprives athletes of the opportunity to achieve the grades needed to qualify for a Rhodes. In recent years, the “physical vigor” requirement of the Rhodes competition has been met more often by bicyclists, mountain climbers or tennis players than by members of big-time varsity teams.

Harvard Is ‘Aggressive’

Many private schools put much more effort into finding and encouraging potential Rhodes candidates than does Berkeley.

For example, said Tatum, “Harvard has an aggressive system to find suitable applicants, almost with the intensity that some football powers show in recruiting football players.”

At Stanford, an active faculty committee searches out undergraduates in their junior year who have a 3.5 grade-point average or better and encourages them to apply for a Rhodes or for other prestigious international scholarships.

Committee members, many of them former Rhodes scholars themselves, make certain that applicants fill out all the required forms, paying special attention to the 1,000-word “personal essay,” in which the student explains why he or she wants to study at Oxford.

“These personal statements are absolutely crucial,” said Stephen Ferrullo, assistant professor of history and chairman of the committee. “But many students tend to write not personal statements but merely lists of accomplishments. We try to help them with that.”

Success at Stanford

Committee members later meet with candidates before their statewide or regional interviews, “mostly to try to relieve their anxieties,” Ferrullo said.

This approach seems to be working. Stanford has had 11 winners in the last five years, including three this year.

Last year, Berkeley began to strengthen its efforts to identify and encourage Rhodes candidates. Jowitt’s committee beats the undergraduate bushes for applicants and tries to make sure they follow through with all the necessary paper work. Heyman’s position as chairman of the state selection committee presumably has been helpful.

But, said Jowitt, “I remain frustrated and more than a bit disappointed that we haven’t had a winner.”

(Adhiambo Odaga entered the competition from Kenya, not from Berkeley, and so cannot officially be considered a Berkeley winner, according to the Rhodes Scholarship Trust’s American office.)

When all of the apparent reasons for Berkeley’s poor showing in the Rhodes competition have been cited, the talk among faculty members and administrators returns to “cultural differences” between the typical good Berkeley undergraduate student and the typical Rhodes recipient.

“It’s not a question of supply,” Smelser said. “We have a lot of good students but it’s just not in the culture here. Elite, private institutions have a whole machinery set up to identify and encourage applicants. For them, it’s a big deal. Not so here.”

RHODES COMPETITION

Students from 268 American colleges have been awarded Rhodes Scholarships since 1904. These schools have had the most winners. (Totals include U.S. citizens, not foreign students.)

Harvard 227

Yale 166

Princeton 158

West Point 60

Dartmouth 52

Stanford 52

University of Virginia 39

Brown 32

University of Washington 31

Reed College 29

Annapolis 28

Univ. of North Carolina 27