#rhodes scholarship

[trolledu]

[immaculatasknight]

Establishing a New Dark Age

[meikuree]

previous reblog made me look up my compilation of quotes/passages that struck me when I read The God of Small Things, which I’d previously posted only on dreamwidth. below the cut, for enjoyment and curiosity (cn for mentions of gore and sexual harassment):

The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.      But by early June the southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn moss green. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways.

--

Yet Estha’s silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn’t an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season.

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory; dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue.

---

Other days he walked down the road. Past the new, freshly baked, iced, Gulf-money houses built by nurses, masons, wire-benders and bank clerks, who worked hard and unhappily in faraway places. Past the resentful older houses [...] Each a tottering fiefdom with an epic of its own.

---- It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol (the seeker of small wisdoms: Where do old birds go to die? Why don’t dead ones fall like stones from the sky? The harbinger of harsh reality: You’re both whole wogs and I’m a half one. The guru of gore: I’ve seen a man in an accident with his eyeball twinging on the end of a nerve, like a yo-yo) slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was always there. Like a fruit in season.

--- She waged war on the weather. She tried to grow edelweiss and Chinese guava.

--- Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house-the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture- must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for.

--- His cremation was attended by all the boxers in Bengal. A congregation of mourners with lantern jaws and broken noses.

----

Ammu loved her children (of course), but their wide-eyed vulnerability and their willingness to love people who didn’t really love them exasperated her and sometimes made her want to hurt them-just as an education, a protection.

---

When she looked at herself in her wedding photographs, Ammu felt the woman that looked back at her was someone else. A foolish jeweled bride. Her silk sunset-colored sari shot with gold. Rings on every finger. White dots of sandalwood paste over her arched eyebrows. Looking at herself like this, Ammu’s soft mouth would twist into a small, bitter smile at the memory-not of the wedding itself so much as the fact that she had permitted herself to be so painstakingly decorated before being led to the gallows. It seemed so absurd. So futile. 

other shorter lines I put in admittedly for much more superficial reasons like “hey! a pretty sentence!” (too short on time to put borders between different passages, sorry)

Pappachi’s Moth was held responsible for his black moods and sudden bouts of temper. Its pernicious ghost-gray, furry and with unusually dense dorsal tufts-haunted every house that he ever lived in. It tormented him and his children and his children’s children. They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps-because their footprints had been swept away. When he was in this sort of mood, Chacko used his Reading Aloud voice. His room had a church-feeling. He didn’t care whether anyone was listening to him or not. And if they were, he didn’t care whether or not they had understood what he was saying. Ammu called them his Oxford Moods. Ammu said it was all hogwash. Just a case of a spoiled princeling playing Comrade. Comrade! An Oxford avatar of the old zamindar mentality-a landlord forcing his attentions on women who depended on him for their livelihood. Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones-a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother’s marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered. She had wanted a smooth performance. A prize for her children in the Indo-British Behavior Competition. Shadows followed them. Silver jets in a blue church sky, like moths in a beam of light. They were presents for a seven-year-old; Rahel was nearly eleven. It was as though Ammu believed that if she refused to acknowledge the passage of time, if she willed it to stand still in the lives of her twins, it would. As though sheer willpower was enough to suspend her children’s childhoods until she could afford to have them living with her. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. In its absence it left an aura, a palpable shimmering that was as plain to see as the water in a river or the sun in the sky. As plain to feel as the heat on a hot day, or the rug of a fish on a taut line. So obvious that no one noticed. A pair of actors trapped in a recondite play with no hint of plot or narrative. Stumbling through their parts, nursing someone else’s sorrow. Grieving someone else’s grief. [...] inside, map-breath’d ancestors with tough toe-nails whispered to the lizards on the wall. That History used the back verandah to negotiate its terms and collect its dues. […] on the day History picked to square its books, Estha would keep the receipt for the dues that Velutha paid. The glint of Ammu’s needle. The color of a ribbon. The weave of the cross-stitch counterpane. A door slowly breaking. Isolated things that didn’t mean anything. As though the intelligence that decodes life’s hidden patterns-that connects reflections to images, glints to light, weaves to fabrics, needles to thread, walls to rooms, love to fear to anger to remorse-was suddenly lost. He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart. [...] Something to do with Death’s authority. Its terrible stillness. They were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly adult. They looked out at the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced different parts of the same machine.

[mythosphere]

Full ride scholarships to prestigious universities should have an income ceiling to apply send tweet

[iliad24]

yeah the state polls blog is driving me kind of insane because for like. every state my main association is "i've been there" or "i know someone from there"

[identitty-dickruption]

god I hate that my heart is set on the idea of Cambridge but that realistically speaking it’s Oxford that has the better politics faculty but even more realistically speaking, they’re both elite institutions that probably won’t want to give someone like me a place and a scholarship

[6ebe]

I do wonder if my uni will ever change the name of our “sackler library” lmao

[sabakos]

Kinda funny how the Rhodes scholarship is named after the monstrous founder of "Rhodesia." if you were trying to write heavy-handed fiction about the legacy of colonialism I think "future leaders of anglophone nations distinguish themselves by vying for entry to a program established by one of the most infamous white supremacist colonizers" would be a little too on the nose.

[hangmanbradshaw]

he's written mine on my upper thigh only in my mind on ao3 (oneshot, 30k)

Jake is absolutely not going to spend his summer vacation at his family's beach house alone with his ex boyfriend and said ex's new boyfriend. Bradley needs a place to stay for the summer. Faking a relationship solves both their problems, until it creates a new problem when they start to fall for their own ruse. Unless it ends up not being a problem at all.

Or

Jake's a trust fund, tennis star at Vanderbilt. Bradley's an orphaned baseball star on scholarship. Their worlds are very different, but all they need is three months in Rhode Island to build a new one together.

[uwmspeccoll]

Wood Engraving Wednesday

LOYD HABERLY

American wood engraver, type designer, and letterpress printer Loyd Haberly (1896-1981), while educated in the U.S., learned the craft of fine press printing in England after receiving a Rhodes Scholarship to read law at Oxford. He founded his Seven Acres Press there and did a short stint as controller of the Gregynog Press in the early 1930s. He continued to work and print in England until the late 1930s, studying and excavating medieval English paving tiles and picking up a law degree at Oxford. He returned to the U.S. to pursue an academic career, eventually becoming Dean of Liberal Arts at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He continued his fine press activities in America from 1940 to 1976.

One the last books he produced while in England was this work based on his research on paving tiles, Medieval English Pavingtiles, printed in an edition of 425 copies with his original wood engravings at the Shakespeare Head Press and published for the press by Basil Blackwell in 1937.

View other posts with work by Loyd Haberly.

View more posts with wood engravings!

[youcouldmakealife]

Random question inspired by something in the Discord! Did Georgie play for the U17 and U18 USNTDP teams and billet in Michigan for two years? Or did he just do NTDP summer programs? And if the latter, where did he play in high school?

He was there for the summer programs (and come tournament time), but during the season he played for a school in Rhode Island that has one of the Top 20 U18 teams in the country (this school (ranked 11th!) does exist, and I'm sorry for never portraying Robbie giving Georgie endless shit for going to a school in a place called Woonsocket, because you know he'd be intolerable about it).

It's a private school but, as you can imagine, he was good enough to receive a full scholarship (of note that it's specifically a private Catholic school, same as Robbie's, though unlike Robbie's, it was co-ed.) It was also close enough for him to commute every day, so he could still live at home. Which was what he wanted, but also, he was fully aware, really the only way his family was going to be able to swing things.

There was a pretty tacit understanding if he was no longer skilled enough to be getting those 'we're going to find a way to get you on our team' offers (the scholarship and transportation, financial assistance from the USNTDP, a full ride to BU before he was even drafted) that he couldn't continue to play at that level.

But, obviously, a good enough player to be drafted 10th overall, even as a positional pick rather than best player available (there were forwards still available ranked higher, but Cleveland really needed D) -- people are happy to pull whatever strings needed if that means he's playing for their team.

(Dicky and Will both go to the same school, partly as a sort of favour, but they're both talented athletes in their own rights, and play for the school teams).

[selfhelpforstudents]

Study dump 💚

Days until first exam: 12 Days until Heinrich-Böll scholarship application: 36 Days until Rhodes Scholarship/Oxford application: 189

I‘m currently also working on sustainability tips for students…it‘s super interesting and has shown me that there is still much room for improvement!

Love, Sophia

PS: I am starting a live study-with-me on Discord at 12 am CET & if you want to tell me what you would like to see more on this blog, please fill in this survey. Always remember we are in this together <3

Follow my Instagram to fight procrastination.

[liesmyth]

Asking because I don’t know how to tag properly/don’t have enough tlt brainrot followers on my own blog: I had this revelation that New Rho Could be short for “New Rhodesia” which would say a LOT about the original colonists of the planet (the trillionaires(?))

ooh this is juicy! For context: "Rhodesia" was the name given to Zimbabwe and Zambia by the British, after Cecil Rhodes (you may know him from the Rhodes scholarship. also the imperialism)

I started replying to this and it went horribly long so I'm gonna put it under a cut. My tldr is that I don't think it's a direct reference, both because of naming patterns in TLT and because I don't think the trillionaires who escaped earth would be referencing Cecil Rhodes on purpose, but I also don't think it's a wild leap to make.

I'm throwing this in the tags and I'm 👀 to know what people think.

On the name

I always assumed that New Rho was a reference to the greek word / letter Rho (ρ). This would fit both the naming patterns of the Houses (which are partly inspired by classical mythology) AND what little we see of the naming patterns of BoE, who apparently like to name places after ancient or mythological locations on Earth — see also: Lemuria, Ctesiphon wing, Troia cell.

Note that we actually don't know for sure whether "New Rho" is the name given to the planet by the locals or by the Houses — the only person who actually uses that name is Ianthe during her speech, so it may very well be the case that the Empire renamed New Rho unilaterally, and the name doesn't reflect what its actual inhabitants call it. I don't believe that's the case (because, again, it fits with other naming patterns BoE seem to have + to a lesser extent, I think there would have been hints in the text if that had been the case, extra jeerings from the crowd or whatever if they felt strongly that their planet had another name) I'm just bringing this up here for completion's sake.

About the trillionaires:

I've given a lot of thought to the demographic of the TLT fleet. Although IDK how widespread of an opinion this is in the fandom but, personally, I feel pretty strongly that the bunch of ultra-rich people who would have fleed Earth leaving everyone to die would NOT have been the kind of demographic keen to reference British colonialism.

Like, I think it's important to note that the "first wave" of ships that launched from Earth didn't seem to include ANY major politician from a Western country that we know of — they managed until the last moment to keep up the pretence that it was "just" the first of many trips, and to me the lack of panic points to the fact that many public figures weren't on board. The world leader John puppeteers is heavily implied to be the US president, and even he wouldn't have been on board. John's flashback arc pits him very strongly against the global north, but more than that — imo, it's telling that the only sympathetic governments he could get to listen to him were the NZ government and parts of Oceania. It wasn't just John vs. the West, or John vs. OECD countries. It was John vs. the uber-wealthy, and those exist all over the world.

What I'm getting at is: that the trillionaires weren't overwhelmingly white. Many of them would have been USamerican or British or European, but so many people on board those ships would have been Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Russian, Thai etc. I'm thinking about 2024 data on List of countries by share of income of the richest one percent and List of cities by # of billionaires (keeping in mind also that in the NtN flashback arc, the stock market has crashed and the economy is in shambles. I would also assume that many Silicon Valley / tech fortunes have dramatically shrunk, and most "trillionaires" would be people who materially control access to resources.)

Basically what I'm getting at is that, TO ME, the TFL fleet was an escape pod put together by a group of people who had the means to decide they should save themselves and fuck everyone else, rather than a colonising project, and that most of them wouldn't be in a rush to identify themselves with the British empire. Many of them, maybe even a majority, wouldn't be white. They're the scifi equivalent of French noblemen fleeing the revolution. Uber-privileged people who became refugees.

Anyway. This is a book.

Everything I've written above explains why, TO ME, whoever on those ships made it out alive + successfully colonised a plane wouldn't be thinking about the British Empire in an especially positive light. However! TLT as a story doesn't exist in a vacuum, and Taz Muir (who exists in the world, and lives in Oxford) would 100% know who Cecil Rhodes is. I can absolutely believe that she settled on a Greek-mythology-inspired naming pattern and then, out of all the available options, decided to reference the colonialist whose statue got removed while she was writing the book.

[eretzyisrael]

Brown University students call for divestment from their pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus' Main Green in Providence, Rhode Island, April 24, 2024. (Anibal Martel/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brown University rejects pro-Palestinian protesters’ demand to divest from Israel

BY ANDREW LAPIN OCTOBER 9, 2024 5:16 PM

Brown University’s board of governors has rejected a closely scrutinized, student-led proposal to divest from companies with business in Israel.

The rejection allays concerns expressed by some pro-Israel groups that the divestment movement was gaining momentum after the pro-Palestinian student encampments at universities across the country last spring.

“Baruch Hashem,” Rabbi Josh Bolton, executive director of Brown/RISD Hillel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, using a Hebrew term akin to “Thank God.”

Bolton said the vote “is a definitive and powerful rejection of divestment on every level.” Coming so soon after the first anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel was also significant, he said: “After a year of insanity, antisemitic sloganeering, maligning of Jewish students, this is a day that we can be proud of our institutions.”

The vote was in the works and debated for months before taking place on Tuesday, months before it was expected, by secret ballot. The Brown Corporation agreed with an internal committee that had voted 8-2, with one abstention, to recommend rejecting divestment.

“The Corporation reaffirmed that Brown’s mission is to discover, communicate and preserve knowledge. It is not to adjudicate or resolve global conflicts,” the board wrote in a lengthy statement Wednesday explaining its vote. 

The Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode Island was among the first this past spring to agree to hold a vote on divestment in exchange for a peaceful end to its student encampment. The encampments often pushed for divestment, while Jewish students reported being antagonized by the pro-Palestinian activists. Protesters at Brown were motivated by, among other factors, a Palestinian student who was shot in Vermont in November in an apparent hate crime.

After dismantling their encampment, Brown student activist leaders were permitted to make their formal case for divestment to the board; similar deals were also struck at Northwestern University, the University of Minnesota and elsewhere. An internal committee then considered the case but kept its report private until Wednesday, after the formal vote was announced. Leading up to the vote, Brown would only confirm that it was scheduled for October but provided no other details on timing.

Among its chief rationales for rejecting divestment, the committee determined that Brown was not heavily nor directly invested in the 10 companies included in the proposal “and that any indirect exposure for Brown in these companies is so small that it could not be directly responsible for social harm.” Those 10 companies included Boeing, General Electric, Motorola, Volvo and Northrop Grumman, all of which the divestment proposal said “facilitate the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.”

The school’s leadership declared it was satisfied with the process and the results of the divestment vote.

“Brown’s mission doesn’t encompass influencing or adjudicating global conflict,” Christina Paxson, the school’s Jewish president, and chancellor Brian Moynihan said in a joint statement shared with the school, alumni and press. “Our greatest contribution to the cause of peace for which so many members of the community have advocated is to continue to educate future leaders and produce scholarship that informs and supports their work. A decision to divest would greatly jeopardize our ability to continue to make this contribution.” 

Paxson and Moynihan continued, “If the Corporation were to divest, it would signal to our students and scholars that there are ‘approved’ points of view to which members of the community are expected to conform. This would be wholly inconsistent with the principles of academic freedom and free inquiry, and would undermine our mission of serving the community, the nation and the world.”

Some Jews had been angry that the vote was happening at all. One Jewish member of the Brown Corporation resigned in protest over it, saying the school had capitulated to extremists. He was rebuked by Paxson, who has long argued that the vote was happening in accordance with Brown’s usual procedures for considering divestment-related proposals. 

At least 100 Brown faculty members publicly supported divestment, while the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish groups have ardently argued against college Israel divestments in general. Dozens of Republican state attorneys general had warned Brown that any move toward divestment could result in pushback from their states.

The Rhode Island chapter of the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, which had advocated for divestment alongside other pro-Palestinian groups, did not immediately return a request for comment. The Brown Divest Coalition, together with the national Students for Justice in Palestine movement, posted a profane message on Instagram directed at the Corporation and Paxson, concluding with “Free Palestine” and, in all caps, “All settler colonial institutions will fail.”

Paxson and Moynihan concluded their communication on the vote with a plea that the university community maintain civility even in disagreement.

“Whether you support, oppose or have no opinion on the decision of the Corporation, we hope you will do so with a commitment to sustaining, nurturing and strengthening the principles that have long been at the core of our teaching and learning community,” they said.

[hero-israel]

--------------------------------------------------

Amazing how uncritically modern leftists, who won't even say "Rhodes Scholar," will leap to defend 150-year-old white Englishmen if they seem to be good on Palestine for ten seconds.

Fucking ARNOLD TOYNBEE. Really!

Toynbee uses the term "Judaic" to describe episodes of "extreme brutality," even where Jews themselves were not involved, as in the Gothic persecution of the Christians.  More generally, throughout the first eight volumes of his civilization series, Toynbee often refers to the Jewish people as a "fossil remnant," implying that Judaism was defined by its "fanaticism," its "provincialism," and its "exclusivity," whose value derived solely from its role as a seedbed for the superior civilization and moral code of Christianity.

By characterizing Judaism as a morally primitive belief-system based on the idea of Jews as a "master race," and then asserting that Jews' claim to Israel is based on this premise, Toynbee figures Zionism as "kindred to Nazism." On the other hand, Toynbee argues that by failing to accept their fate as a diaspora community and trying instead to replace the "traditional Jewish hope of an eventual Restoration of Israel to Palestine on God's initiative through the agency of a divinely inspired Messiah," Zionist Jews have the same "impious" relationship to their religion as Communists do to Christianity. Having thus equated Zionism with both Nazism and Communism, Toynbee asserts:

On the Day of Judgement, the gravest crime standing to the German National Socialists' account might be, not that they had exterminated a majority of the Western Jews, but that they had caused the surviving remnant of Jewry to stumble.

What was delightful was that an actual Jew made this colonizing motherfucker eat his words!

Toynbee explained that he did not intend to statistically equate the actions of the Nazis with those of Israel’s founders, but rather simply to draw a moral comparison: that individual massacres committed by Israeli forces in 1948 were no different than those perpetrated by the Germans against the Jews. “If I murder one man, that makes me a murderer,” he observed. “I don’t have to reach the thousand mark or the million mark to be a murderer.”

Herzog pounced on this point, turning Toynbee’s own scholarship against him. “Now, Professor, in volume four, page 128F, of your Study of History you say, ‘In the history of man’s attempt at civilization hitherto, there has never been any society whose progress and civilization has gone so far that in times of revolution or war, its members could be relied upon not to commit atrocities,’ ” Herzog recited. He then listed all the nations Toynbee himself implicated in this charge: the Germans in Belgium in 1914, the British in Ireland in 1920, the French in Syria, and many others throughout history—including, of course, the Nazis.

Herzog then added one group that Toynbee had omitted: “Do you agree that there were also Arab massacres of Jewish civilians?” Herzog made reference to such cases, asking, “Were these also in the category of Nazi atrocities? And if so, why don’t you say that both sides did things in such a category? Why do you choose us? Why do you single us out? Why don’t you write of Britain and of almost every country in the world according to your own definition?”

After several minutes of such questioning, Toynbee conceded the point. “I agree that most societies have committed atrocities, but I do not think that condones atrocities,” he said. “I agree with you on that,” Herzog quickly responded. “But do you agree that this comparison can be applied on the universal level to any country which in war its soldiers have committed atrocities against civilians?” Toynbee had to concur: “Yes, atrocities are atrocities and murder is murder, whoever commits it.” Herzog asked if Toynbee would similarly stigmatize “Arab atrocities against Jewish civilian populations,” and those committed by the United States. “Of course,” the professor replied.

With that admission, Herzog essentially disarmed the historian. After all, if every nation had behaved like the Nazis, then the charge was divested of moral meaning. “In other words,” Herzog concluded, “the Nazi pall lies across the world, before the Nazis came … and after they have gone.” Jews, then, were no more prone to immoral conduct than any other people, and Israel no more and no less guilty than any other modern state.

@laast-in-tranz-lay-shn

[synderesis08]

Lara Parker was born Mary Lamar Rickey in Knoxville, Tennessee, and grew up in Memphis. She attended Central High School in Memphis, and won a scholarship to Vassar College. At Vassar, Lara began a major in philosophy, which she completed at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College), receiving her BA. She attended graduate school at the University of Iowa and completed all course work on a Masters in speech and drama. During the summer when Lara was supposed to write her thesis, she acted at the Millbrook Playhouse, in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, playing 5 leading roles in 6 weeks. Rather than returning to Iowa, she decided to try her luck in New York. During only her second week in the city, she was cast as Angelique, the witch, in the daytime horror serial, Dark Shadows (1966)