How Rhodes Scholars Think

Carlisle Ford Runge
University of North Carolina, 1974, B.A., American Studies
Oxford University, 1977, M.A., Politics and Economics
University of Wisconsin, 1980, M.A., Agricultural Economics
University of Wisconsin, 1981, Ph.D., Agricultural Economics

Ford Runge grew up in Wisconsin with two younger sisters, a stepbrother, and a stepsister. He is currently a Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Applied Economics and Law and Director of the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota. He also regularly contributes public opinion pieces that appear in the Pioneer Press, the Star Tribune, and the Financial Times. He also writes longer pieces. His most recent contribution is an article in Foreign Affairs called “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor.” It is representative of the work he does, which is designed to get people’s attention.

Let’s start with where you were born and where you grew up.
I was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and grew up in Madison and west of Madison in a place called Middleton, Wisconsin.

What did your father do for a living?
He attended the University of Wisconsin then fought in the Third Army as a logistics officer for General Patton. He came back, went to law school, was a U.S. Attorney for a few years, and then joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin in the law school, where he spent most of his career. He was also Under Secretary of Defense for the Kennedy administration, so we lived in Washington, D.C. for a few years. My mother was born in Lake Mills, Wisconsin, and met my father when they were undergraduates in Madison. She was an early activist. They actually joined together in some of the earliest opposition to Senator Joe McCarthy. They were both members of the Progressive Party in Wisconsin which was founded by Robert M. LaFollette in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Then she was a fairly early pioneer in television commentary. She had a public affairs program in the early ‘50s in Madison. She developed multiple sclerosis at about age 40 right after my parents returned from Washington and died when she was 42.

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Scott Bear Don’t Walk
University of Montana, 1993, B.A., Philosophy
Oxford University, 1993-1994, Modern History
New York University, 2007, M.F.A., Creative Writing

Scott Bear Don’t Walk was born in Helena, Montana, but grew up mainly in Billings. He has one older brother and a younger sister. As the middle child, he describes himself as very diplomatic, careful, soft-spoken, wary, and pleasing. He is a member of the Crow tribe. His father, an attorney, has worked with various tribes throughout his career. His mother dedicates her time to work on American Indian health issues. He is the twenty-seventh Rhodes Scholar from the University of Montana. Recently, he completed a Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at NYU, where he had the opportunity to work with writers Sharon Olds, Breyten Breytenbach, and Kimiko Hahn. He currently works in the University of Montana’s communications department. He is a published poet and his long-term goal is being a writer.

What wisdom did your parents try to instill?
It’s never so much an overt lesson as watching what they were about. My father serves American Indians and my mother does, too. What I learned from them is the situation in Indian country is such that whatever you do, you need to come back, try to help, and do something for American Indians who are in pretty rough straits. This was true for my parents when they went to college during the Lyndon Johnson era and it’s true today for me.

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Jonathan Skinner
St. John’s College, 1991, B.A., Liberal Arts
Oxford University, 1993, B.A., English Language & Literature
University College London, 1996, M.A., Translation Studies
State University of New York at Buffalo, 2005, Ph.D., English

Jonathan Skinner was born and raised in a classic nuclear family in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has also lived in Mexico, England, Italy, and France. He is the author of a poetry collection called Political Cactus Poems and the editor of ecopoetics, a journal exploring creativity mainly in the written form and ecology. Currently, he is an environmental studies professor at Bates College in Maine. He teaches a freshman writing seminar that emphasizes experiential learning. His class included a climb of Mt. Adams in the Presidential Range in New Hampshire and a canoe float on the Androscoggin River. And when he’s at home, he has a view of a wild island populated with bald eagles.

Tell me about your parents.
My father was a tutor at St. John’s College in Santa Fe. He retired not too long ago. Now he’s an artist. He was at St. John’s from 1965, not long after the founding of that campus. My father was trained in classics and philosophy at the University of Colorado and Princeton. He met my mother at the University of Colorado when she was a history major. She went to Rutgers to do her degree in history. My dad got the job in Santa Fe and they moved. She was teaching history at the College of Santa Fe and moving towards a dissertation, when she had me. She’s been a writer off and on, but she took various jobs-managerial, office jobs. She worked for an architect and a doctor. Now, she’s a writer.

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Steven Umin
Yale College, 1959, B.A., Modern Literature & Philosophy
Oxford Universty, 1961, Bachelor of Medicine
Yale Law School, 1964, J.D.

Steven Umin grew up in the Bronx during the 1940s and 1950s as the eldest son of a lower middle class family. He has only one younger sister. He did his undergraduate studies at Yale, where he was ranked first in his class. He planned on becoming a doctor before deciding to pursue law. After law school, he clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart. Over the years, he has been involved in a wide variety of cases in civil and criminal litigation. He is currently a senior member at Epstein, Becker & Green in Washington, D.C. And since 2000, he has been a mediator for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit. Besides making time for art, music, and friends, he also devotes himself to the fight against multiple sclerosis. He is a member of the board of the Multiple Sclerosis International Foundation in London, England, and the Sylvia Lawry Center in Munich, Germany.

I’m trying to find out about behaviors and attitudes in leading a more than just average life.
When you’re given a gift like the Rhodes Scholarship (two years in England to basically do what you want), you feel like you owe something. You have to pay back. One of the things you do is look at what the purpose of the gift is. Certainly, it was one of Cecil Rhodes’ purposes to produce leaders. It’s only modestly possible to make yourself a leader. A lot depends on chance, luck, and other things. I’ve always taken the position that I’m not just going to live for myself. I’m going to do other things. For example, I‘ve gotten heavily involved in the fight against multiple sclerosis, not because I’m a Rhodes Scholars, but being a Rhodes Scholar made you feel that’s the sort of thing you should be doing. I did it, because a girlfriend got the disease and in fact, died from it last year. My secretary had it. My wife’s mother-in-law has it. My dentist has it. It’s a scourge. So there’s that influence on you, which you feel at least unconsciously, maybe consciously.

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David Satter
University of Chicago, 1968, B.A., General Studies in the social sciences
Oxford University, 1975, B. Litt., Political Philosophy

David Satter grew up in Chicago as the oldest of five children. He has one brother and three sisters. He is a journalist/author and a well-known Russia scholar. After his time at Oxford on the Rhodes Scholarship, he worked as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune and in 1976 became the Moscow correspondent of the London Financial Times. He has written two books, Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union and Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State. His numerous articles and essays have been published in the Los Angeles Times, National Review, New Republic, and the Wall Street Journal. His first book, Age of Delirium, is also being made into a documentary film to be finished this year. In addition, he has made appearances on Russian television networks, CNN, C-Span, and the Charlie Rose Show. He is currently a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

What did your parents do for work?
My father was a lawyer. My mother was a housewife while I was growing up. In the later years after my father died, she taught music in a religious school.

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Jonathan Blake
Yale University, 1960, B.A., History
Oxford University, 1962, B.A./M.A., Jurisprudence
Yale Law School, 1964, LL.B.

Jonathan Blake grew up in a small seaside town in New Jersey called Rumson. He is the eldest of three sons. He attended the school where his father was the headmaster and spent his high school years at Deerfield Academy, a boarding school in Connecticut. He has been a communications lawyer at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. since 1964 when he started out as an associate. He remains physically active by playing in three to four tennis tournaments annually and since the first U.S. oil crisis in 1973, he’s been running to work. He has been described as one of the finest lawyers in America and “the most ethical person I can imagine in the law profession.”*

Tell me about your family background.
My father was a schoolteacher and headmaster of a school. My father was very strict, maybe feared, certainly respected and a highly valuable member of the community. My mother was the secretary, business manager and accountant to this school. She was maybe 12 or 13 years younger than he was. Being part of the headmaster’s family is both very insightful into the community in which you live and also a little isolating. It gives you early on a sense of greater responsibility than maybe kids feel comfortable with or is terribly natural for them. I have informally kept in mind how many revolutionaries are children of schoolteachers.

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Oluwabusayo Temitope Folarin
Morehouse College, 2004, B.A., Political Science
Oxford, 2006, M.Sc., African Studies & M.Sc.,Comparative Social Policy

Oluwabusayo Folarin, or “Tope” as he likes to be called, was born in Ogden, Utah. He has four younger siblings-three brothers and a sister. At the age of 14, his family moved from Utah to Texas. Although he completed his undergraduate degree at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, he spent a year at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine and a semester in South Africa studying at the University of Cape Town. He also worked for an NGO where he interviewed Parliament members about including anti-child prostitution laws within the South African constitution and aided in the development of HIV/AIDS training clinics for rural South Africans. During the summer of 2004, before heading to Oxford, he was a Galbraith Scholar dealing with issues of inequality and social policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He finished his studies at Oxford last summer and he now works for Google in London.

The first part of our exchange was conducted via email. We then continued the conversation by phone.

Does your name (Oluwabusayo Temitope) have any meaning?
My first name means “to God be the Glory” (roughly translated).

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David Quammen
Yale University, 1970, B.A., Scholar of the House in English
Oxford University, 1973, B. Litt., English

David Quammen is an award-winning writer, perhaps best known for his nature column called “Natural Acts” in Outside magazine from 1981 to 1995. His first novel, To Walk the Line, was published when he was 22 years old. He has authored three other works of fiction and seven non-fiction books, including Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, The Song of the Dodo, and The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. He is also a regularly contributing writer for National Geographic.

Below is the transcribed record of a verbal conversation. Neither David Quammen nor I have tried to make it read like a polished, fully grammatic piece of writing. It is what it is: human talk.

Let’s begin by talking about your family background. How big was your family? Where did you grow up?
I was born and raised in Cincinnati. I was the middle of three children, with older and younger sisters. My father worked for Proctor & Gamble. It was sort of a middle-class, suburban “Leave It to Beaver” family. It was a very happy childhood; therefore, not very interesting, I suppose. I went to Catholic school for 12 years, including four years of Jesuit education. And I was probably headed toward a Jesuit university, when one of my Jesuit teachers–the man who was most important to me as a mentor–suggested to me, “Why don’t you also apply to Yale?” I remember saying, “Why would I apply to Yale? That’s a non-Catholic…” He said, “Well, yes, it is. It also happens to have a great English department.”

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Faith Salie
Harvard University, 1993, B.A., History and Literature
Oxford University, 1995, M. Phil., Modern English Literature

Faith Salie was born in Boston, but grew up mainly in Atlanta, Georgia, the youngest of three children. At an early age, she found a love for theater. She attended Northwestern University for a year before transferring to Harvard, where she won the Jonathan Levy Award for most promising actor at the university. She had a brief stint on “Sex in the City” involving a gold lamé outfit and portrayed a genetically enhanced mutant on a couple of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” episodes. She has also done years of stand-up comedy and improv, including two seasons in the BRAVO sitcom, “Significant Others.” You can now find her hosting a public radio satirical news and entertainment show called “Fair Game” from Public Radio International.

Let’s start with your childhood. At what age did you move from Boston to Georgia and why?
I was six and my father was finishing up a Ph.D. at Emory University and my mother’s three brothers and their families lived in Atlanta. They felt it was time to move, if only to neutralize my Boston accent with a Southern one.

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Katherine Eban
Brown University, 1989, BA; English Literature with a minor in Creative Writing
Oxford University, 1990, M. Phil., English Literature
University of East Anglia, 1991, M.A., Creative Writing

Katherine Eban grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She is the younger of two daughters. Her father practices and teaches law, but he is also a statistician. Her mother is a theater scholar and critic. Katherine is an investigative reporter focusing on public health and homeland security issues. Her work has appeared in the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, and Vogue. In her first book, Dangerous Doses, published in 2005, she unveiled the spread of counterfeit prescription drugs in the American supply chain. Her most current piece appears in the July issue of Vanity Fair. In the article called “Rorschach and Awe”, she exposes the role of CIA-contracted psychologists in military interrogations and torture.

Obviously, you’re intelligent, but what drove you to do more than the average teenager?
I don’t know if I did more than the average teenager. I was interested and I wanted to be involved. I had a lot of opportunities. And if we’re going to assume average teenagers do less, I think a lot of them don’t have the opportunities that I had.

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Leslie Epstein
Yale University, 1960, B.A., Scholar of the House in English
Oxford University, 1962, Dipl., Anthropology
University of California-Los Angeles, 1963, M.A., Theater Arts
Yale Drama School, 1967, D.F.A., Playwriting

Leslie Epstein spent his childhood in the 1940s and 1950s in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, California. He was part of a Hollywood screenwriting family. His father and uncle, Philip and Julius, wrote classics like Arsenic and Old Lace and won an Academy Award for Casablanca. He is the author of seven novels and three short story collections. His most controversial work was the novel, King of the Jews, in which he examines European Jews who betrayed their own people to the Nazis. He also wrote an autobiographical novel called San Remo Drive in 2003. For over 20 years, he has been the director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University.

Below is an hour-long talk we had while he ate lunch and cleared the dishwasher at his home in Brookline, Massachusets.

Let’s talk a little about your childhood. Your father died when you were thirteen, so was he was more of a memory than an influence?
That’s correct, except that memory has been superimposed by the image of my uncle, who was my father’s identical twin. We were dear to each other until he died some years ago.
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Ben Cannon
Washington University, 1999, B.A., History
Oxford, 2003, B.A., Philosophy, Politics, and Economics & M.Sc., Comparative and International Education

Ben Cannon grew up primarily around Portland, Oregon, but attended college in St. Louis, Missouri. At Washington University, he started as a delivery boy for the student newspaper and became its editor-in-chief his senior year. He also moved the paper on-line and created a new journalism program for freshmen. After studying in Oxford for three years, he returned to his home state where he enjoys his favorite activities like hiking, camping, and running. He currently teaches American history and civics to sixth to eighth graders at Arbor School of Art and Sciences in Tualatin, just outside of Portland. Inspired by talks with his wife, a public school teacher, and others about educational issues, he decided to run for office. In 2006, he was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives. He is currently the youngest member in the legislature. His focus is on educational, health care, energy, and environmental issues.

Let’s begin by talking about your home environment while growing up.
I grew up in a very stable home, where all our primary needs were met. I experienced a degree of security about my environment that was a real advantage, in terms of being able to feel I could take on academic projects, independent exploration, or just be curious about the world.

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Bonnie St. John
Harvard University, 1986, B.A., International Political Economy
Oxford University, 1990, M. Litt., Economics

Bonnie St. John grew up in San Diego, California, the youngest of three children of a single working mother. At the age of five, her leg was amputated, because of a birth defect. But 10 years later, after a friend invited her to go skiing, she decided to pursue competitive skiing. While in college, she participated in the 1984 Paralympics in Innsbruck, Austria. Despite falling after hitting an icy patch during one of her races, she went on to win two bronze medals in the slalom and giant slalom. She also received a silver medal for her overall ranking as the second-fastest female amputee skier in the world. Before becoming a motivational speaker and coach, she had a successful career in sales for IBM and was on the National Economic Council under the Clinton administration. She is also the author of three books: Succeeding Sane: Making Room for Joy in a Crazy World, Getting Ahead at Work Without Leaving Your Family Behind, and Money: Fall Down? Get Up! In November 2007, she has a fourth book coming out entitled How Strong Women Pray, featuring interviews with Maya Angelou, Barbara Bush, Edie Falco, and others.

What drove you to do more than an average teenager?
My brother once said it was because I had so many obstacles. I’m missing a leg. I’m black. I’m a woman in a society where you don’t see the leaders being black. You don’t see the leaders being women. You don’t see the leaders having one leg. You’re born representing something that looks like you’re not going to go far, or you’re behind the starting line and everybody else is starting five yards ahead of you. He said the energy and skills I had to learn to catch up to other people propelled me. In a sense, when you start off with a bunch of burdens, either you sit down and give up, or you work 10 times as hard as everyone else. I chose the second option. Read the rest of this entry »

Matthew Polly
Princeton University, 1995, B.A., Religion and East Asian Studies
Oxford University, 1998, M.A., Politics and Philosophy

Matthew Polly, the eldest of two children of a doctor and a homemaker, grew up in Topeka, Kansas. After his junior year at Princeton, he dropped out to study kung fu with the famous Shaolin monks in rural China for two years. He has documented his experience in his recently released book called American Shaolin. He has also written articles for Esquire, The Nation, Playboy, Publisher’s Weekly, and Slate. He’s currently looking for suggestions on a career that doesn’t involve any work.

The following interview was conducted by email.

Obviously, you’re intelligent, but what drove you to do more, or excel when you were a teenager?
This is an emotionally difficult question to answer. To be honest, I grew up in a small town in Kansas and it was made very clear to me from an early age that I didn’t really fit in. Doing well academically was my ticket out. I wanted to find a place where I’d be accepted. I think it is the reason a lot of young people leave small towns for the big cities.

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